Pen, Paper, & Poetry

“..poetry’s tricky that way. On the one hand, it demands analysis — pleasure is often expected to come from rereading, thinking about, discussing, and ultimately “understanding” the poem better. On the other hand, the starkest and most primal of poetic pleasures comes not from lengthy analyses, but from the immediacy of reading or listening — the connection of metaphor, the turn of rhythm, the way the words first strike the ear.” -Cody Delistraty, “This Is What Happens To Your Brain When You Read Poetry”

po·et·ry

/ˈpōətrē/

noun

1. literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

Poetry is a form of literature that allows the writer to express their emotions and thoughts, while the reader is able to interpret it however they please. Whether one person’s interpretations match another one or not, the reader still gets a certain sentiment out of the poem. Poems are interesting in the sense that they’re not bound to any particular rules. By definition, they’re literary works that express different feelings or ideas through the distinctive styles and rhythms used by the author.

Not long ago there was a study conducted by Eugen Wassiliwizky and a small group of scholars to actually see how forms of poetry affected different parts of the brain for a group of 20 volunteers. Some of these subjects were regular poetry readers, while others were novices in the field of art. Wassiliwizky and the scholars chose many different pieces of poetry to be read aloud to the subjects, including works from Shakespeare to Poe to Schiller, and anywhere in between. Some of these were also chosen by the participants themselves, as they were allowed to select a few pieces they knew and liked. As the pieces were read, the researchers took note of the subjects’ facial expressions and skin/arm hair movements. Whenever the subjects felt an internal chill, they would press and hold a button for as long as it lasted to monitor when in the poem it began and how long the chills lasted internally before possibly becoming an external chill. About 40 percent of the participants showed visible goose bumps, lining up with a percentage of responses most people have when listening to music and film soundtracks or watching emotional scenes in movies. The rest of the responses, however, were fairly unique to poetry. While listening, many participants’ brains had active parts that weren’t usually active when watching movies or listening to music. Through this experiment, the researchers were able to gather evidence to conclude that unlike most leisure activities, reading or listening to poetry is a slow-building experience, allowing the reader or listener to anticipate the incoming emotion from what is being experienced. They referred to this as a “pre-chill”. About 4.5 seconds before participants pressed the button to indicate that they had chills of some type, the researchers’ skin conductance readers showed data that revealed their emotions were already being stirred. This occurrence almost always happened at the end of stanzas in the poems read or at the end of the entire poem. Even participants who’d never heard a particular poem before displayed this emotional anticipation. “After verifying that poetic language can have a very strong emotional effect on the bodies and brains of listeners, we moved on to investigating stimulus features that contribute to these remarkable outcomes. The emotional power of poetry is widely believed to be promoted, or enhanced, through its formal structural composition.” In other words, the researchers concluded that poetry had a strong emotional effect on the bodies and brains of listeners (obviously). So, they continued further studies into what parts of poems almost directly impacted those sentiments. The researchers had some pieces of poetry reread to the participants. They focused on getting the pre-chill/chill results and monitoring when they happened throughout each poem. The results revealed a highly consistent pattern: chills would cluster (a) towards the end of a poem entirely, (b) towards the end of a stanza, or (c) towards the end of single lines. Part of this discovery was covered when investigating the “pre-chills.” But by conducting this further experiment, the researchers were able to provide more specific evidence for their previous findings.

In the pink heat map, each row represents a line in the poem, each square represents a word. The coloring of the squares corresponds to the number of chills a word elicited across all participants in the first study. The yellow model shows histograms of chill distributions across relative word positions for all 97 self-selected poems (‘Word | Poem’ means relative word position within the poem, with 1 representing the last word of the poem and the same for ‘Word | Stanza’ and ‘Word | Line’).

“..poetry transcends this methodical scrutiny. It valorizes the unconscious, opening us up to new perspectives; it implies the possibility of unlimited pleasure. When every aspect of a poem comes together — form, cadence, emotional appeal — it doesn’t just provide the literal chills and goose bumps that Wassiliwizky examined. Like Rilke’s “First Elegy,” it also instills a feeling of a great unknown, something that can’t be picked up by nodes and scans.” -Cody Delistraty, “This Is What Happens To Your Brain When You Read Poetry”

One of the other occurrences that the researchers spoke of when reviewing their findings was what they called a “piloerection.” Of course researchers who happen to be scholars on this subject matter would use large words like this one to describe something that’s actually fairly simple when explained. But not knowing what it meant at the time I was reading through the experiment notes, I decided to look into it. The medical definition for a piloerection is an involuntary erection or bristling of hairs due to a sympathetic reflex usually triggered by cold, shock, or fright or due to a sympathomimetic agent. After finding this, I realized that what they were referring to was really just a big fancy word and description for goose bumps. Of course, that may seem like semi-useless information now, but it actually did help me to understand their findings more. The different causes of a piloerection were cold, shock, fright, or a sympathomimetic agent. All of that left me wondering one thing: what in the world is a sympathomimetic agent?

In hopes of figuring out this question, into the research pit I dived and eventually, I was able to come back up with an answer. A sympathomimetic agent is a drug that produces physiological effects characteristic of the sympathetic nervous system by promoting the stimulation of sympathetic nerves. That’s a lot of random medical talk, so let me break it down the way I broke it down for myself:

• “A drug”: Well obviously this is from a medicinal view of the word, so we could replace the thought of a literal drug with, perhaps, a situation or moment where senses may be stimulated (like when reading or listening to poetry).
• “Produces physiological effects characteristic of the sympathetic nervous system”: How I chose to interpret this was the situation one is put into can stimulate emotions through the sympathetic nervous system, causing emotions to stir and causing this piloerection (goose bumps).

Here is where you can find the study and look into it for yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5597896/