RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
December 26, 2018 at 2:09 am
(This post was last modified: December 26, 2018 at 2:09 am by Belacqua.)
(December 26, 2018 at 1:29 am)zainab Wrote: 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.
