Reading poetry develops the brain

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Poems not only ennoble us spiritually, but also develop our brains. Scientists have observed neuronal activity in the gray matter of volunteers who read the masterpieces of classical poetry. They made the brain areas responsible for memories of past experiences to be activated. It turns out that reading "Eugene Onegin", we can rethink our own past?

Classical poetry is not only a delight for the soul, but also a neurophysiological training for the brain. Researchers from the University of Liverpool (UK) asked a curious question: if music affects our brain in an amazing way, making both hemispheres work, improving memory and mental abilities, then perhaps poetry has the same properties?

They were not wrong. Observing people who read the works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Thomas Stearns, Eliot and other luminaries of English poetry, the experimenters analyzed how their brain works at this time. To compare how the subjects' central nervous system would react to the same stories told in ordinary language, the works of the classics were rewritten in prose and given to the same volunteers for reading.

It turned out that when reading poetry, neurons react to literally every word. The brain reacts especially sharply to unusual poetic turns. For example, when Shakespeare's epithet "insane" to the wind was replaced by the simpler word "furious" in this context, the brain took this adjective for granted. But it was the unusual epithet "insane" that made the nervous system mobilize, as if the brain was trying to realize what the word was doing here.

High poetry, scientists have found, causes excess arousal in the brain. Moreover, this effect persists for some time: after processing an unusual word or turnover, the brain does not return to its previous state, but retains some additional impulse, which pushes to continue reading. We can say that good poetry has a narcotic effect on people!

Reading poetry, according to scientists, also activated the right hemisphere of the brain, or rather, its area responsible for autobiographical memories. The reader seemed to be turning to his personal experience in the light of the impressions he had just received. It turns out that by reading Hamlet and Wordsworth, we can rethink our own past. I wonder if psychologists will adopt this technique. For example, people in crisis might be encouraged to read classical poetry every night.

Researchers promise to test this guess, and at the same time, whether there will be a similar effect from reading prose (Liverpool scientists are going to check this on the example of Dickens and their other compatriots - luminaries). In the meantime, we can conclude that art is not just the addition of rhymed words, notes, or the disorderly chaos of strokes on the canvas. And now it is scientifically confirmed. Past research has shown that both music and painting wonderfully develop and "structure" the brain.

Music, seemingly unrelated to other school disciplines, helps students to learn better. After extensive research, it was found that music develops verbal memory (that is, the ability to memorize words and text). An experiment confirming this was carried out in Hong Kong. The Chinese scholars recruited 90 boys, half of whom played in the school orchestra and the other half never took up music. Moreover, all the boys studied at the same school, that is, the quality of education they received was the same. But the guys who played any instrument remembered words and phrases much better than their non-musical peers.

A year later, the experimenters asked the same boys to be tested again. Of the 45 members of the orchestra, only 33 people continued their classes. And 17 more schoolchildren came to music lessons after learning about the results of the first study. The group of beginners showed poorer verbal memory than those who studied for a long time. That is, the longer you practice music, the better your memory. For those 12 students who dropped out of class, their memorization abilities remained at the same level - they did not improve, but did not deteriorate either. It can be assumed that a person who has been studying music at school age for at least several years will retain a good memory for many years.

Experiments with painting have shown that paintings by famous artists respond to a kind of inexplicable sense of harmony that most people have. An employee of Boston College (USA) Angelina Hawley-Dolan decided to check whether it is true that contemporary art is a daub, like children's scribbles or drawings that animals create. After all, there are many supporters of this point of view. Participants in her experiment looked at pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous abstract artists, or the scribbles of amateurs, children, chimpanzees and elephants - and determined which picture they liked more, seemed more "artistic".

Agree, few people in the street recognize the paintings of abstractionists "in person", so the general recognition of the paintings was hardly possible. And to further confuse the participants in the experiment, only two-thirds of the works had signatures - and some of the tablets also reported false information. For example, the signature said that the audience was looking at the "creations" of chimpanzees, while in reality they saw the paintings of a famous artist in front of them.

But they failed to deceive the volunteers. People felt the works created by artists, and, in spite of the incorrectly placed signatures, they chose them as "real" paintings. They could not explain the reason for their decision. It turns out that artists, even those working in the genre of abstract art, follow a certain sense of visual harmony, which is perceived by almost all viewers.

But aren't they deceiving themselves, believing this or that combination of shapes and colors is perfect? For example, in one of Mondrian's canvases, a large red square is balanced by a small blue on the opposite side. Is there any special harmony in this? The experimenters, using computer graphics, reversed the squares, and the picture ceased to arouse genuine interest in the audience.

Mondrian's most recognizable paintings are blocks of color separated by vertical and horizontal lines. The eyes of the participants in the experiment focused on certain parts of the pictures that seemed most expressive to our brains. But when the inverted versions were offered to the volunteers, they indifferently glanced over the canvas. The volunteers subsequently rated the impression of such paintings much lower than the emotional response from the original paintings. Note that the volunteers were not art critics who were able to distinguish the "inverted" painting from the original, and in assessing its expressiveness they relied solely on subjective impressions.

A similar experiment was conducted by Oshin Vartanyan from the University of Toronto (Canada). He rearranged elements of a wide variety of paintings, from still lifes by Vincent van Gogh to abstractions by Joan Miró. But the participants have always liked the originals better. In the paintings of the great masters, other patterns were found that "like" the brain. Alex Forsyth of the University of Liverpool (UK), using computer image compression technology, found that many artists - from Manet to Pollock - used a certain level of detail that was not boring, but also did not overload the viewer's brain.

In addition, many works of famous painters have features of fractal patterns - motifs that are repeated many times at different scales. Fractals are common in nature: they can be seen in the jagged tops of mountains, in fern leaves, in the outline of the northern fjords.