Is the Human Brain Hardwired for Poetry?

Poems activate different parts of the human brain than other types of literature do, and our brains seem hardwired to enjoy the patterns in poetry. Learn why this may be in today's episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff. From how stuff Works, Hey, brain stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb 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,

(00:24):
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

(00:45):
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 pub lished in the journal Frontiers of Psychology,
researchers at the UK's Banger University read an assortment of

(01:05):
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 the sentences that followed the rules as compared

(01:26):
to other sentences. The researchers also hooked up the subjects
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.

(01:49):
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
gree 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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
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.

(02:56):
In contrast, lit up areas mostly on the left side
of the brain, including the basil 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

(03:18):
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 find 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

(03:38):
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

(04:00):
requited 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,
David 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

(04:22):
to more automatic and literal minded processing of meaning. The
poetic work triggered different parts of the brain related to
non automatic processing 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

(04:44):
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

(05:05):
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

(05:25):
ones now. Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger
and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and
lots of other topics that will excite, surprise and change,
visit our home planet has stuff works dot com.