Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff. From how stuff Works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Whether it's Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses
Speaker 1: or Maya Angelou's Caged Bird, there's something about reading or
Speaker 1: hearing a great poem that stimulates our minds, moving us
Speaker 1: to ponder the world from new angles and from a
Speaker 1: neuroscientific point of view. That's no accident. In recent years,
Speaker 1: researchers have used fMRI I that's functional magnetic resonance imaging
Speaker 1: and other sophisticated tools to study how the human brain
Speaker 1: reacts to poetry. They've discovered, among other things, that the
Speaker 1: brain seems to be wired to recognize the rhymes and
Speaker 1: rhythms that poets use and to differentiate them from ordinary
Speaker 1: speech or prose. They've also found that contemplating poetic imagery
Speaker 1: and the multiple layers of meanings and poems activates specific
Speaker 1: areas of the brain, some of the same areas that
Speaker 1: help us to interpret our everyday reality. So I mentioned
Speaker 1: that our brains seem wired to recognize poetry. Let's unpack that.
Speaker 1: In a study pub lished in the journal Frontiers of Psychology,
Speaker 1: researchers at the UK's Banger University read an assortment of
Speaker 1: sentences to a group of Welsh speaking subjects. Some of
Speaker 1: the sentences conformed to the intricate poetic construction rules of konkand,
Speaker 1: a traditional form of Welsh poetry, while others did not
Speaker 1: follow those rules. Although the subjects knew as little about
Speaker 1: Koncanada as I know about pronouncing Welsh, they nevertheless categorized
Speaker 1: as good the sentences that followed the rules as compared
Speaker 1: to other sentences. The researchers also hooked up the subjects
Speaker 1: to E e G devices and observed a distinctive burst
Speaker 1: of electrical activity in the subject's brains that occurred in
Speaker 1: the fraction of a second after hearing the last word
Speaker 1: of a poetic line. We spoke with bang Or psychology
Speaker 1: professor Gyum Cheery via email. They said, I believe that
Speaker 1: our results argue for a profoundly intuitive origin of poetry.
Speaker 1: Poetry appears to be built in. It's like a profound intuition.
Speaker 1: Every human being is an unconscious poet. Poetry also seems
Speaker 1: to affect specific areas of the brain, depending upon the
Speaker 1: gree of emotion and the complexity of the language and ideas.
Speaker 1: In a study published in in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Speaker 1: Researchers at the UK's University of Exeter had participants lay
Speaker 1: inside an f m R I scanner while they read
Speaker 1: various texts on a screen. The selections ranged from deliberately
Speaker 1: dull prose such as a section from a heating equipment
Speaker 1: installation manual, to passages from novels to samples from various poems,
Speaker 1: a few of which the subjects had identified as their favorites.
Speaker 1: The subjects had to rate the texts on qualities such
Speaker 1: as how much emotion they aroused and how literary or
Speaker 1: difficult to contemplate they were. The researchers found that the
Speaker 1: higher the degree of emotiveness that the subjects assigned to
Speaker 1: a sample, the more activation the scans showed. In areas
Speaker 1: on the right side of the brain, many of the
Speaker 1: same ones identified in a two thousand one study as
Speaker 1: being activated by music that moved listeners to feel chills
Speaker 1: or shivers down their spines. The examples rated as more literary.
Speaker 1: In contrast, lit up areas mostly on the left side
Speaker 1: of the brain, including the basil ganglia, which are involved
Speaker 1: both in regulating movement and processing challenging sentences. The subject's
Speaker 1: favorite poems weakly activated a network in the brain associated
Speaker 1: with reading, but strongly activated the inferior parietal lobes, an
Speaker 1: area associated with recognition. Yet another recent experiment, detailed in
Speaker 1: a article in the neuroscience journal Cortex, University of Liverpool
Speaker 1: researchers used an fMRI I to scan the brains of
Speaker 1: subjects while they read various passages of poetry and prose
Speaker 1: in an effort to find what parts of the brain
Speaker 1: were involved in literary awareness, the capacity to think about
Speaker 1: and find meaning in a complex text. In half of
Speaker 1: the examples, the final line was an unexpected twist that
Speaker 1: Philip Davis, a professor and director of the school's Institute
Speaker 1: of Psychology, Health and Society, refers to as an AHA moment.
Speaker 1: One example William Wordsworth's poem She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,
Speaker 1: about a recluse who died in seclusion, in which the
Speaker 1: narrator drops a hint that he may have been her
Speaker 1: requited lover. The subjects rated the passages on how poetic
Speaker 1: they seemed and whether or not the last lines led
Speaker 1: them to reappraise the meaning a measure of literary awareness,
Speaker 1: David said in an email. We believe that this is
Speaker 1: the first f m R I that examines the unfolding
Speaker 1: effects of moving from line to line and the consequences
Speaker 1: in terms of what we call literary awareness as compared
Speaker 1: to more automatic and literal minded processing of meaning. The
Speaker 1: poetic work triggered different parts of the brain related to
Speaker 1: non automatic processing of meaning, leading to increased lively activation
Speaker 1: of mind and a simultaneous sense of psychological reward. But
Speaker 1: the research also suggests that reading or listening to poetry
Speaker 1: is useful for something besides just rousing our emotions and
Speaker 1: stimulating our brains. I mean, coffee does that. It seems
Speaker 1: that the same mental skills that we exercise and struggling
Speaker 1: to understand t s. Eliott's The Love Song of j
Speaker 1: Alfred proof Rock i e. Flexible thinking, and the ability
Speaker 1: to ponder multiple meanings also help us to navigate unpredictable
Speaker 1: events and make choices in our everyday lives. Davis said
Speaker 1: the calling into activation of literary awareness may have a
Speaker 1: significant effect in challenging our default mindset. He thinks, in
Speaker 1: other words, that if more people read poetry and god
Speaker 1: accustomed to pondering meaning quote, it would make a difference
Speaker 1: to their capacity to think with more alertness to excite,
Speaker 1: surprise and change. Sounds like a good excuse to revisit
Speaker 1: some of your favorite authors or try a few new
Speaker 1: ones now. Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other topics that will excite, surprise and change,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet has stuff works dot com.