How are actors able to absorb a TV or film script, hundreds of verses of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, or the bitchy, street-smart, exquisitely calibrated machine-gun dialogue of a contemporary playwright like David Mamet without blowing it when the eyes of an audience are upon them?

For more than two decades, a pair of husband-and-wife researchers in Indiana — psychologist Helga Noice and actor/director/cognitive-researcher Tony Noice — tried to answer that question.  Steve Silberman has the story on PLoS Blogs.