why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[zainab]

Hello everybody,

This is my first post, forgive me for my weak English: blush:
My question is (How) .. not (Why) actually ...

How do we enjoy prose, poetry or any kind of literary arts?
From the perspective of neuroscience?
What is the deep origin of tasting metaphore?

I don't enjoy poetry.

check your brain 

---

That's really cool.  My usual response to something like this is to default to saying we really don't know, it's impossible to study, yada yada.  I guess I shouldn't be so hasty in concluding what we do or do not know from ignorance.

I'm afraid that the article doesn't help much. It says that poems we remember activate the part of the brain associated with memory, and poems we're trying to figure out active the part of the brain that works to figure things out. Etc. 

It doesn't address the real problem at all, which is how electrochemical events in the brain somehow present themselves to us as abstract ideas. No one has any idea how meat-cells expending energy give rise to thoughts of justice, and since good poetry complicates thoughts like this even more, one of the things good poetry does is to take us further away from any clear correlation between brain events and thought.

WOW! Do you mean that science not even close to solve this?

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, we like patterns, we like looking, and we like finding.  We also like words...alot.   Anything that lights a pleasure or reward center is going to be something we enjoy.  The how, broadly, appears to be something like a chemical addiction, lol.

Obviously, that doesn't answer the question Belaqua had....though it's certainly related.

[Belacqua]

WOW! Do you mean that science not even close to solve this?

This is a big topic, and people disagree. I've had people get angry at me when I say "we don't know." 

It's obvious, people have mental experiences. We think about abstract concepts, we feel strongly about different ideas, etc. 

It's also clear that in every case we know of, these experiences are related to electrochemical events in the brain. 

What's not clear is why the activation of certain meat-cells in the brain should give rise to things which are very much different from electrochemical events -- that is, abstract concepts, etc. As far as I can tell, nobody has any idea of why this happens. If you look at somebody else's brain, you can see that reciting a poem from memory activates a certain area of the brain. But you can't see the words being formed, you only see the activation of the cells. But how does a "self" get the experience of ideas as a result of this cellular activity? Nobody knows. 

(And despite what some people claim, fMRI studies are far from conclusive. MRI machines don't detect thoughts; they detect, for the most part, water and fat based on the abundance of hydrogen in a given area. Apparently when a given area of the brain is active, blood flow to the area increases shortly thereafter. So what we get a record of is the physical follow-on of cell activity. And of course each voxel in the MRI contains thousands and thousands of cells, so the whole thing is still pretty fuzzy.) 

We can make educated guesses about origins, obviously. Certain mental experiences help us survive, so evolution was likely to select for them. But the actual mechanism is a mystery. 

Here's an introduction to the problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_probl...sciousness

Poetry is wonderful because, at its best, it pushes language to the limits of what it can do. It invokes more or less endless associations of meaning, etymology, references to other literature and ideas, etc. It uses sound patterns, meaning patterns, sometimes visual patterns if it's written down. The idea that any given snapshot of brain activity could tell us something useful about poetry is just nonsense -- at least given the state of science as it is now.

[zainab]

Well, we like patterns, we like looking, and we like finding.  We also like words...alot.   Anything that lights a pleasure or reward center is going to be something we enjoy.  The how, broadly, appears to be something like a chemical addiction, lol.

Obviously, that doesn't answer the question Belaqua had....though it's certainly related.

Nice poetic description
I enjoed what you rote 

And i think there is NO answer yet!! Because i spent days searching studies and articles ,, and comeback with nothing!!


Will we ever know the evolutionary explanation of our enjoyment of language tricks? 

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not sure if we're discussing the OPQ or Bels question.  The evolutionary explanation of just about anything, again in broad terms, is pretty much always the same...and I suppose it's unsatisfying.  We do what the ones who managed to avoid swallowing the big crayon did.  Communication, and even chattering, is a hell of an advantage. Ultimately, it could have been completely random that doing so lit a pleasure center..but once it did, and we had a chemical compulsion to do so, it wouldn't take long for that to be well represented in the pool of survivors.

Speaking in those terms, the reason for some broad behavioral commonality can be as simple as that we're just the ones that are left. There could be other arrangements, other patterns of behavior..there likely were (and enjoyment isn't entirely uniform anyway)....but those Other Fuckers™ are all dead.

[zainab]

WOW! Do you mean that science not even close to solve this?

This is a big topic, and people disagree. I've had people get angry at me when I say "we don't know." 

It's obvious, people have mental experiences. We think about abstract concepts, we feel strongly about different ideas, etc. 

It's also clear that in every case we know of, these experiences are related to electrochemical events in the brain. 

What's not clear is why the activation of certain meat-cells in the brain should give rise to things which are very much different from electrochemical events -- that is, abstract concepts, etc. As far as I can tell, nobody has any idea of why this happens. If you look at somebody else's brain, you can see that reciting a poem from memory activates a certain area of the brain. But you can't see the words being formed, you only see the activation of the cells. But how does a "self" get the experience of ideas as a result of this cellular activity? Nobody knows. 

(And despite what some people claim, fMRI studies are far from conclusive. MRI machines don't detect thoughts; they detect, for the most part, water and fat based on the abundance of hydrogen in a given area. Apparently when a given area of the brain is active, blood flow to the area increases shortly thereafter. So what we get a record of is the physical follow-on of cell activity. And of course each voxel in the MRI contains thousands and thousands of cells, so the whole thing is still pretty fuzzy.) 

We can make educated guesses about origins, obviously. Certain mental experiences help us survive, so evolution was likely to select for them. But the actual mechanism is a mystery. 

Here's an introduction to the problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_probl...sciousness

Poetry is wonderful because, at its best, it pushes language to the limits of what it can do. It invokes more or less endless associations of meaning, etymology, references to other literature and ideas, etc. It uses sound patterns, meaning patterns, sometimes visual patterns if it's written down. The idea that any given snapshot of brain activity could tell us something useful about poetry is just nonsense -- at least given the state of science as it is now.

For many years since I embraced pure materialism, I thought that ideas and abstractions do not exist objectively!

fMRI does not capture the idea objectively. It can not photograph the word or capture the metaphor

But it sees the physical face obscured of the idea and the word .. and metaphor!

My question to you, friend .. Do ideas have an objective existence?

[The Grand Nudger]

If thought has a neural correlate, then it would be inaccurate to continue referring to them as abstractions...or, conversely, our idea of abstraction may be in error.  We already understand that certain classes of abstraction (essentially, the entirely of mechanical computation) actually do have physical referents that exist in a place and time.  It may be that the purported dichotomy between abstraction and objectivity is an artifact of ignorance.

[Belacqua]

My question to you, friend .. Do ideas have an objective existence?

In one sense they certainly do. Once an idea is common knowledge among people, it can be approached as objectively as anything else. It need not be a physical object to be objective. 

The best structure I've found for thinking about this is Popper's Three Worlds ontology. Common ideas are World Three objects. 

https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documen...pper80.pdf

But you may be asking whether any given idea in my mind can be said to have an objective existence. This is a different question. 

First, the word "objective" is surprisingly fuzzy, and you may want to find a more specific word. Something objective, strictly speaking, is just not a subject -- in the sense that the perceiving self is a subject and the thing perceived is an object. In that sense, I think it's true that if my self is contemplating an idea, it is an object. 

Is this what you mean by objective?

[zainab]

My question to you, friend .. Do ideas have an objective existence?

In one sense they certainly do. Once an idea is common knowledge among people, it can be approached as objectively as anything else. It need not be a physical object to be objective. 

The best structure I've found for thinking about this is Popper's Three Worlds ontology. Common ideas are World Three objects. 

https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documen...pper80.pdf

But you may be asking whether any given idea in my mind can be said to have an objective existence. This is a different question. 

First, the word "objective" is surprisingly fuzzy, and you may want to find a more specific word. Something objective, strictly speaking, is just not a subject -- in the sense that the perceiving self is a subject and the thing perceived is an object. In that sense, I think it's true that if my self is contemplating an idea, it is an object. 

Is this what you mean by objective?

 yeah they are objects, from this point of view: perceining
But do they have a realistic existence?
Sorry if I could not be clear.. this is my first experience to communicate in English 

[Belacqua]

yeah they are objects, from this point of view: perceining
But do they have a realistic existence?

I think we have to say they have realistic existence. 

Consider the alternative: suppose you say "I had an idea." And somebody who thinks that ideas don't have existence would say, "No, you didn't." But if you can describe the idea and convey it to others, then the objection that it was just an illusion and didn't exist is silly. 

This is a big problem for materialists, I think. Because the idea itself (or the perceived sensation, or the mind-only speech act, or whatever) does have real existence, but it is not identical with the electrochemical brain event. So what kind of existence it has is difficult to define. 

Sorry if I could not be clear.. this is my first experience to communicate in English 

You're doing fine language-wise! This is just as hard for native speakers.