why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Belacqua]

Does everybody remember when neuroscientist Ramachandran was advocating his study of "neuroaesthetics"? It was 20 years ago, but some people took it seriously at the time.

Here is his opening statement about the visual arts:

The purpose of art, surely, is not merely to depict or represent reality—
for that can be accomplished very easily with a camera—but to enhance,
transcend, or indeed even to distort reality. . . . What the artist tries to do
(either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of
something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the
same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.

Shocking to think that people couldn't see the fatal flaws built into this. You'd think his friends would pull him aside and tell him that things have moved on since Zeuxis' grapes.

It's a good example of the dangers of misapplying methods. He has to oversimplify to the point of absurdity in order to study something in his MRI machine, and risks tricking naive people into thinking that art is what he can search for. A lesson about scientism in general.

[bennyboy]

Because they're depressed, in most cases, at least.  Yes, depression causes us to act irrationally, yes..depression amplifies our suffering and minimizes our joy, but depression is almost always treatable...so there's no such thing as "permafucked".  

I'm not so sure that suicidal impulses represent dysfunction at all. I've been quite engaged with it these days, actually, and my feelings about it are pretty complex. Sometimes, it's just an over-arching sense of bleakness-- that's probably chemistry, and it comes and goes. But sometimes it doesn't feel like that at all-- it feels like a pronounced clarity-- a general philosophical understanding of mortality, maybe mixed with ideas about determinism, about the mythological nature of the idea of self, and so on. My experiences with knockout drugs in surgery certainly informed me a lot on what mind is or isn't, as well.

When I say "permafucked," I'm not talking about inescapable suffering. I'm talking about the narrative of the self, and cracks in the mythology of it. There's maybe a sense of transplantation-- that one's own narrative and the Cosmic narrative are at odds, and that there's something intrinsically not-belonging in that.

Depression is a very hard thing even to define. Even though it's mainly rooted in chemistry, it's the way that manifests in the way ideas form at the conscious level that are the real killer, not the anhedonic feelings. (in my opinion at least) But it's maybe a call to choose either red or blue, rather than crossed wires, methinks.

[The Grand Nudger]

Because they're depressed, in most cases, at least.  Yes, depression causes us to act irrationally, yes..depression amplifies our suffering and minimizes our joy, but depression is almost always treatable...so there's no such thing as "permafucked".  

I'm not so sure that suicidal impulses represent dysfunction at all.  I've been quite engaged with it these days, actually, and my feelings about it are pretty complex.  Sometimes, it's just an over-arching sense of bleakness-- that's probably chemistry, and it comes and goes.  But sometimes it doesn't feel like that at all-- it feels like a pronounced clarity-- a general philosophical understanding of mortality, maybe mixed with ideas about determinism, about the mythological nature of the idea of self, and so on.  My experiences with knockout drugs in surgery certainly informed me a lot on what mind is or isn't, as well.

Suicidal ideation is the very definition of dysfunctional.  Things always feel like chemistry, we're just not used to thinking of our feelings that way.  

When I say "permafucked," I'm not talking about inescapable suffering.  I'm talking about the narrative of the self, and cracks in the mythology of it.  There's maybe a sense of transplantation-- that one's own narrative and the Cosmic narrative are at odds, and that there's something intrinsically not-belonging in that.

Which is an interesting trick..isn't it?  OFC we belong, where else would we belong and how couldn't we belong...but we don't always recognize that.

Depression is a very hard thing even to define.  Even though it's mainly rooted in chemistry, it's the way that manifests in the way ideas form at the conscious level that are the real killer, not the anhedonic feelings.  (in my opinion at least)  But it's maybe a call to choose either red or blue, rather than crossed wires, methinks.

If you're having suicidal thoughts, and normalizing the impulse via some crack at philosophy...then you need to talk to somebody other than myself.  Depression is treatable, you don't have to feel this that way.

[bennyboy]

Suicidal ideation is the very definition of dysfunctional.  Things always feel like chemistry, we're just not used to thinking of our feelings that way.  

Yeah, I'm not sure that's true. Function implies a goal-- but other than instincts, which in many cases we actively seek to override using rationale, what goals are really intrinsic? Is participation in the evolutionary dance right because that's what we're supposed to be programmed to do? If so, then abortion is out, homosexuality, and many of the other things that are represented in the idea of genetic fitness.

If you're having suicidal thoughts, and normalizing the impulse via some crack at philosophy...then you need to talk to somebody other than myself.  Depression is treatable, you don't have to feel this that way.

Yeah yeah, I'll assume that you've said all the things a person is supposed to say when people talk like that.

Don't worry, I'm not on that page right now. However, I've had some forays into that territory, and I'm very interested in how it presents philosophically. Depression is fascinating, actually, because it isn't just a sense of sadness-- it's something much more profound than that.

[Belacqua]

I'm very interested in how it presents philosophically.  Depression is fascinating, actually, because it isn't just a sense of sadness-- it's something much more profound than that.

If you get the chance, you might want to look at Ricoeur's book Freud and Philosophy. I know Freud is considered a thing of the past, but there is a lot in this book that's challenging. 

We all know, intellectually, that we are not angels -- we are not divine sparks of reason entrapped in meat bodies temporarily. We think and feel as we do entirely because of physical processes. But fully grasping that and its implications is harder than it might seem. 

No doubt you know the thesis of Civilization and its Discontents. Here Freud has a more clear-eyed look at things than a lot of the people who came after, because he describes unflinchingly how the fact that people are animals means their internal drives are not rational and cannot, in the end, be reconciled. The idea that we are "naturally" happy things and that depression is somehow a chemical malfunction is just not true. We are naturally conflicted things, made of chemicals, and there is no reason to think that balance is more standard than imbalance. 

"Goals" is a tricky word, but we do have drives that push us onward. (This is the philosophy that Freud took from Schopenhauer, simultaneously with Nietzsche. It also seems biologically undeniable.) The trouble is that the drives we have conflict and are often not reconcilable. 

It seems clear to me that depression is one expression of the conflict of certain drives.

[bennyboy]

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.

[Belacqua]

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.

There's a story about Plotinus which if it isn't true should be:

Porphyry suffered chronically from melancholy, which we would call depression. His teacher Plotinus told him that melancholy is caused by an imbalance in the humors, specifically too much cold and dry. The treatment, then, is to go somewhere hot and wet in order to restore balance. 

Porphyry took the advice and spent a couple of years on Mediterranean beaches, and was cured. 

Though we would disagree with the analysis of the cause, the advice seems good to me. I suspect I would be cured too, if I spent a few years in the company of hot and wet Mediterranean girls.

Anyway, depression is one of the great problems of history, and the imagined causes and cures vary with whatever is the popular pseudo-science of the day. One of the reasons clinical depression is booming now is that drug companies make money from it, even though many studies show that their drugs are as useful as placebos, and certainly less effective than Plotinus' cure. All that talk about serotonin is likely to go the way of humoral theory before too long. 

I don't see depression as having an evolutionary benefit, exactly, but it does seem to me an unsurprising result of inherent conflict. That's not to say that we can't make it somewhat better.

Here is a download of a wonderful book on pre-modern melancholy:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5...4AB6FC1426

[bennyboy]

There definitely a connection to weather. Seasonal affective disorder is a thing, for sure. They correlate it with holidays-- depression about family dysfunction and all that. But I think it may very well be that Christmas falls right around the shortest, darkest, coldest days of the year.

And yes. . . warm weather combined with tiny clothes seems a pretty fair remedy for depression in my view as well, or at least a pleasant distraction from it.

[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.

[bennyboy]

Hmmmm

It may be that high rates of modern depression have to do with the fact that we control light and sleep and work at strange hours, naturally speaking.