They have always said the reading was good for you, and now they have the magnetic resonance scans to prove it. Researchers at Liverpool University claim to have demonstrated that reading Shakespeare produces bursts of activity in otherwise dormant parts of the reader's brain. You don't any longer need to learn German or do cryptic crosswords in order to fend off Alzheimer's, conning Othello is quite sufficient. Neuroscientists co-operating with English professors found that reading Shakespeare made the subjects' brains "light up". (Apparently it works with Chaucer too.)

Professor Philip Davis of Liverpool's English department believes that it is to do with such writers' surprising vocabulary. We are so used to the jog-trot (or is it route march?) of predictable sentences in our usual reading matter, that our synapses gratefully fizz into new life when we come across unusual language. But if it were just this, then Finnegans Wake would be the best brain tonic imaginable (rather than the least readable book ever written by a great writer). Perhaps it is more that Chaucer and Shakespeare are close to recognisable English without ever becoming such. Take Macbeth, pondering murder. He would act, "If the assassination could trammel up the consequence/ And catch with his surcease, success". You think you know what he is saying, but you're baffled too.

As a professor of English literature myself, of course I think all this is true and wonderful. Professor Davis is a great scholar and on the side of the angels. And yet, and yet...is there not something inevitable about the findings of these diligent researchers? Might a professor of music, teamed up with the same keen neuroscientists, not have discovered that Mozart produced more bright areas on the magnetic resonance image than the Sugarbabes? A professor of geology that the examination of some beautiful mineral samples stimulated the cerebellum more than stones from the garden? A professor of art history that a close encounter with a Rembrandt self-portrait did more for the brain than a reproduction of a Jack Vettriano picture?

I can imagine that many academics are now considering bringing in the scanners and sitting subjects down in front of their favourite objects of scholarly devotion. I could finally prove that Tristram Shandy brings mental health! It is the first law of academic research: make sure your results validate your own professional activity.