BrainStuff Classics: Is the Human Brain Hardwired for Poetry?

the poem. We know this because of researchers who asked the question of the day, is the human brain hardwired for poetry? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Baum. Here, whether it's Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses or Maya Angelou's Caged Bird, there's something about reading or hearing a great poem that stimulates our minds, moving us to ponder the world from new angles and from a neuroscientific point of view. That's

no accident. In recent years, researchers have used fMRI I that's functional magnetic resonance imaging and other sophisticated tools to study how the human brain reacts to poetry. They've discovered, among other things, that the brain seems to be wired to recognize the rhymes and rhythms that poets use and

to differentiate them from ordinary speech or prose. They've also found that contemplating poetic imagery and the multiple layers of meanings and poems activates specific areas of the brain, some of the same areas that help us to interpret our everyday reality. So I mentioned that our brains seem wired to recognize poetry. Let's unpack that. In a study published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology, researchers at the UK's Banger University read an assortment of sentences to a group

of Welsh speaking subjects. Some of the sentences conformed to the intricate poetic construction rules of konkand, a traditional form of Welsh poetry, while others did not follow those rules. Although the subjects knew as little about Koncanada as I know about pronouncing Welsh, they nevertheless categorized as good these sentences that followed the rules as compared to other sentences.

The researchers also hooked up the subje X to E e G devices and observed a distinctive burst of electrical activity in the subject's brains that occurred in the fraction of a second after hearing the last word of a poetic line. We spoke with bang Or psychology professor Gyum Cheery via email. They said, I believe that our results argue for a profoundly intuitive origin of poetry. Poetry appears to be built in. It's like a profound intuition. Every

human being is an unconscious poet. Poetry also seems to affect specific areas of the brain, depending upon the degree of emotion and the complexity of the language and ideas. In a study published in in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, researchers at the UK's University of Exeter had participants lay inside an f M R I scanner while they read

various texts on a screen. The selections ranged from deliberately dull prose such as a section from a heating equipment installation manual, to passages from novels to samples from various poems, a few of which the subjects had identified as their favorites. The subjects had to rate the texts on qualities such as how much emotion they aroused and how literary or difficult to contemplate they were. The researchers found that the higher the degree of emotiveness that the subjects assigned to

a sample. The more activation the scans showed in areas on the right side of the brain, many of the same ones identified in a two thousand one study as being activated by music that moved listeners to feel chills or shivers down their spines. The examples rated as more literary. In contrast, lit up areas mostly on the left side of the brain, including the basal ganglia, which are involved

both in regulating movement and processing challenging sentences. The subject's favorite poems weakly activated a network in the brain associated with reading, but strongly activated the inferior parietal lobes, an

area associated with recognition. Yet another recent experiment, detailed in a article in the neuroscience journal Cortex, University of Liverpool researchers used an fMRI I to scan the brains of subjects while they read various passages of poetry and prose, in an effort to mind what parts of the brain were involved in literary awareness, the capacity to think about and find meaning in a complex text. In half of

the examples. The final line was an unexpected twist that Philip Davis, a professor and director of the School's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society refers to as an AHA moment. One example, William Wordsworth's poem She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, about a recluse who died in seclusion, in which the narrator drops a hint that he may have been her

unrequited lover. The subjects rated the passages on how poetic they seemed and whether or not the last lines led them to reappraise the meaning a measure of literary awareness. Davis said in an email. We believe that this is the first f m R I that examines the unfolding effects of moving from line to line and the consequences in terms of what we call literary awareness as compared

to more automatic and literal minded processing of meaning. The poetic work triggered different parts of the brain related to non automatic process thing of meaning, leading to increased lively activation of mind and a simultaneous sense of psychological reward. But the research also suggests that reading or listening to poetry is useful for something besides just rousing our emotions

and stimulating our brains. I mean, coffee does that. It seems that the same mental skills that we exercise and struggling to understand t s. Eliott's The Love Song of j Alfred proof Rock i e. Flexible thinking and the ability to ponder multiple meanings also help us to navigate unpredictable events and make choices in our everyday lives. Davis said the calling into activation of literary awareness may have

a significant effect in challenging our default mindset. He thinks, in other words, that if more people read poetry and god accustomed to pondering meaning quote, it would make a difference to their capacity to think with more alertness to excite, surprise and change. Sounds like a good excuse to revisit some of your favorite authors or try a few new ones now. Today's episode is based on the article the human brain is Hardwired for Poetry on how Stuffworks dot com,

written by Patrick J. Kaiger. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio because at the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.