why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Angrboda]

You know, it seems to me that SO MANY people are depressed, and so many commit suicide, that it may actually be an evolutionary feature rather than a bug.

Clinical depression with dogs shows that they will cease to avoid electric shock if it comes randomly-- because one way or the other, in order to continue acting, they have to have some sense that there's a point in acting.

It might be related to sleep, which has some supposed evolutionary purpose. The two are in many ways different physiologically, but there may be some similarity which points to the phenomena of depression being normal and useful in its original context, but dysfunctional when taken to an extreme in a different context. I don't know. I'd have to know more about the physiology of sleep than I do. The actual sleep response isn't similar, as far as I know, but the drowsiness which precedes sleep may be. In diurnal variation, we tend to experience lethargy, drowsiness, and sleepiness at certain times of the day and not others. Those times are similar to what is experienced in depression, but perhaps not the same.