why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Belacqua]

I was trying to delineate the distinction between the unconscious processing of information and what we finally perceive consciously, using our ill-adapted language.  Can you see the distinction and why it is important to the discussion?  

OK, no problem with the unconscious part. The interpreting gets done without our being aware of it.

Qualia are abstractions, so of course they look different.  The mystery is not in why we experience qualia, since they happen to us.  Nor is the mystery in why they look different, since we already know the brain automatically processes information into abstractions to present to consciousness.  Again, knowing the brain science is important.

I don't think it's sufficient to say that because something happens to us, therefore it doesn't need further explanation. Nor do I think that calling qualia abstractions explains how those abstractions present themselves to us.

When you read a book, you stop paying attention to the words as words.  You don't see little black squiggles on white pages of paper beyond a point.  You engage with the abstractions they represent.  This is no doubt the same way the electro-chemical  events in our brains work.  They have assigned meanings, perhaps based on the unique ways they were coded into each of our brains, and we engage with the meanings, the abstractions.

OK, the words cause me to remember meanings or even to picture objects in my mind. I engage with the things prompted by the words, not necessarily the words themselves. So that's an analogy. But it doesn't explain how the electrochemical events of the brain analogize themselves into qualia. 

We may not know all the details, but they are likely technical anyway.  Nothing about this is difficult in principle as far as I can see.

It's not difficult if we are satisfied to say "It just happens." But the experience of smell or color presents itself to me in non-abstract ways. Qualia are among the few things we have concrete experience of. Far from being just technical details, the ontological jump from electrochemical events to felt experience is completely unexplained.