RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 1, 2019 at 5:33 am
(This post was last modified: January 1, 2019 at 5:34 am by Belacqua.)
(January 1, 2019 at 5:06 am)bennyboy Wrote: Well what science will do is get down to correlates-- read this or that poem, or have a subject read it, or whatever, and see what brain systems light up and how.
Yeah, this part makes sense to me. And that's not so far from the article that was pointed to earlier in the thread. You read about poem about kittens, and the part of your brain that likes cute and fuzzy is activated.
Quote:Eventually, you'll be able to watch people listen to a poem and tell which poem they're listening to.
This part seems more questionable, because a good poem alludes to a lot of different things, and affects different people differently.
In the Baudelaire I quoted earlier, there are a lot of variables. What if the reader's French isn't very good? What if he isn't familiar with melancholy as a traditional concept? What if he doesn't know who Sisyphus is? What if he doesn't get the allusion to Gray? The brain activations would be very different.
What if you had to learn the poem in high school, and it had happy memories for you? What if it was your ex-girlfriend's favorite poem and whenever you hear it you want to kill somebody?
Quote:But what neuroscience CAN'T do is explain why there's subjective enjoyment at all, or even a subjective mind-- as opposed to the Universe having no such thing.
Yes, this is the main problem. The jump from the electrochemical events to the experiences is unexplainable.
But if you want to say that on this forum, prepare for personal attack.
