mind: http://www.sciencenewsline.com/summary/2013100920020025.html
New brain imaging technology is helping researchers to bridge the gap between art and science by mapping the different ways in which the brain responds to poetry and prose.
Scientists at the University of Exeter used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, which allows them to visualise which parts of the brain are activated to process various activities. No one had previously looked specifically at the differing responses in the brain to poetry and prose.
In research published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the team found activity in a "reading network" of brain areas which was activated in response to any written material. But they also found that more emotionally charged writing aroused several of the regions in the brain which respond to music. These areas, predominantly on the right side of the brain, had previously been shown as to give rise to the "shivers down the spine" caused by an emotional reaction to music. .
When volunteers read one of their favourite passages of poetry, the team found that areas of the brain associated with memory were stimulated more strongly than 'reading areas', indicating that reading a favourite passage is a kind of recollection.
In a specific comparison between poetry and prose, the team found evidence that poetry activates brain areas, such as the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, which have been linked to introspection.
Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist from the University of Exeter Medical School, worked with colleagues across Psychology and English to carry out the study on 13 volunteers, all faculty members and senior graduate students in English. Their brain activity was scanned and compared when reading literal prose such as an extract from a heating installation manual, evocative passages from novels, easy and difficult sonnets, as well as their favourite poetry.
Professor Zeman said: "Some people say it is impossible to reconcile science and art, but new brain imaging technology means we are now seeing a growing body of evidence about how the brain responds to the experience of art. This was a preliminary study, but it is all part of work that is helping us to make psychological, biological, anatomical sense of art."
comments:
...(H.,)many questions and possible answers, a bit long the note. These scans... remain static, imprecise pictures still and as in most studies they aren't open access so one (I) can only suppose. Or pay.
There's always individual variability of course - for pop reasons journal titles go to broad, often misleading generalizations while many if not most researches also tend to let their own experience and tendency to hierarchic 'I' systems of affect thinking interfere with study set-up and data interpretation. But...music certainly contains and transmits more information than words, I think, and I'm in the camp of our species specific grammatical language evolving from gesture and music more than utterance. (ie when we had to stand up in groups in vast, tall grasses...where and what, before and after, along with increasing abstracted manipulation particularly using free hands.) It might have to do with abstracted vs contextual systems of meaning, words more to the former, music or song more with the later.
In all sensory input we process and integrate before awareness - bottom-up, so to speak. Then systems (neuronal networks) of emergent expressed awareness - what is sometimes a bit mistakenly, I think, still called consciousness - decide if and which of those integrated interpretive predictions, inferred pieces of the world, and I are to be expressed or not via top-down inhibition. When reading you always 'read' and infer rules first - but you aren't aware of it. When we read a new line of direct expositional prose -like this one - there are fewer logarithms, so to speak, less integration and it flows more directly into a more stale abstracted state with less emotion or context. It's all 'I'/now/here stuff. Change the line to 'See Bob run.' Now you have a less abstracted model, tons of contexts since it's a line you've read or heard a bizillion times in a bizillion different contexts - if you pause, you can already hear a recollection as you read it. Integration of what we call time is also going on. Now change the line to 'When oft upon my couch I lay, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye, that is the bliss of solitude, and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.' Now it's here again, you're here as you read it, but how much emotion is in your response - emotion that creates a context that is part of recollection. Not only literal memory, but beneath. Rhythms...
The first time you read a passage that 'gets' you in that way, one where rhythm and flow don't let the words die on the page but keep them light and alive, the part of you reading is here but bottom-up beyond your awareness, other integrative systems are accessing recollections or expressed representations of complexity and emotions and confirming in a stronger way before sending bottom-up for approval. In that way, as you read you recall before you read, a multi-strata recollection, or before you're aware of reading, because of the vast amount of information music -or words- in an integrated context. ie., poetry... transmits. Anyway. My imprecise, overly simplified 2 cents....
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(Aside, (h,)... you know, it's such an odd pleasure exchanging words with someone who writes well and unhurriedly, as if - no, not as if - time slows into a sort of warm, sweet-scented pool. Too much texting, too much twitter, too much letting the uninspired glow of a screen filter into and dissolve even the memory of nuance. Voice. Theory of mind(s). Anyway.. to avoid at least a doubling of words on this note, some over-simplification.
I suppose a short series of equations would be clearer but lord it's been literally 32 years spot on to last December, freshman year, engineering calculus 152, since I formally studied maths. Learning language - I used pop songs on young'uns when I tutored them English. More, I never actually, save one year plus one course at university, learned Italian (and it shows) but picked it up by reconnecting those 14 months in Italy as an infant with...singing opera arias, particularly, and a few iconic Italian pop tunes. Abstractions can be used in the opposite way. By abstraction here I mean removal from context - a simplification of substance, a removal of both integration and contained information - necessary for real-time manipulation and limited, abstracted articulation. Math is only descriptive, a sort of meta-language, (as Robert Powell suggested) like music, but not really. Language... you could describe as: the way, in plural living systems, an un-expressing one talks to itself. Compare to axiomatic reasoning, singular self-referring and irrationally abstract.. a tiny bit like neoliberal policy implementation. Ho-ho.)
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The part of us that is unaware, so to speak, integrates more information and change (time, temporal representations) than we can accept. An example is color, and the lingual-cultural influences on its top-down perception. ie. American english users from the age of 6 on will tend to refuse to acknowledge differing shades of blue and green consciously relative to Japanese speakers in the same context but will then via non-verbal priming identify objects with those same differing shades of green. There, words form a top-down inhibition of an unaware perception. Emotion instead is necessary to form differing 'I do' contexts. The hook and eye example you used - a fish hook, an open eye, is a great example of playing with deep things and emotionally modulated network dialog, going deeper and evoking a response with a second line, out of expected context. Emotional response from a striking passage does imply more context and information, not less, whereas simple expository prose will have more to do with the aware reading itself, the abstract manipulation, like a book of Ikea assembly instructions. It speaks to what you are to do, here, now, mostly, with less context - though there is always a dialogue between networks and always some recall. But the meanings of words are formed mostly outside of awareness, whereas their usage is formed largely within.
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(S,)....an expansion of the notion of the importance of the expression of networks through verbal language, and language's differing co-responding comprehension by individuals. With language...I'll use myself as an example because of familiarity... because of relative oddity most likely those networks outside of awareness were relatively overdeveloped and connected quickly in my developing brain and weren't so distant, and subsequently influenced the development of expression and comprehension of both language and myself, (or lack of affective, socially motivated self) in the representation of those intrinsic networks extrinsically. Hence long before the abstraction - not context - of grammar (leave the notion of Chomsky's universal grammar aside, it's tangent) that - my language usage in writing, more so poetry - was a bit, ah, more connected than usual, abstracted from abstraction, as it were, and likewise reading comprehension was dominated by placing the new into context, so that, to, was and remained a bit unusual.
The difficulty is in, ah, conveying a notion of a sort of plural I, of conveying the counter-intuitive but fairly well confirmed notion that first we do, then we fabulate the why we did to our extrinsic selves, or to self awareness - which is a limited version of I. A subset maybe only reflecting, in plural systems, a state of information (like liquid, solid, ecc.)
The usage of words or word-images themselves pertains more to that extrinsic I, but music - rhythm, flow, emotional response - strike larger networks of unawareness, that 'I' which isn't being awarely expressed. Even the meaning of words themselves, not the words themselves, strike unawareness first. Emotion is necessary to construct or encode varying responses to varying contexts, and those are particularly struck when more information has been transmitted. Learning - though it depends very much, i think, on the person learning, which is why different techniques should always have been used for differing types of students or learners, the opposite of what happened - words or language that belong and appeal to larger networks are inevitably easier. In which case the new finds a larger matrix in which to be placed. We learn and form maybe many versions of any moment, any memory.
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...(H.,) I am a geek. Because I can refer to the Star Trek episode, the Patrick Stewart series, based perhaps, even likely, on that your Hausa language perplexity (Piccard and an ET hausa-type speaker find themselves together, each stranded on the same planet, having to communicate.) Anyway. I'm not aware of any completely emotionless people or conditions. Even those humans born without a cerebral cortex exhibit preference (pleasure and dislike), implicating that the periaqueductal gray matter and culliculi are enough to form network models of self and world. There is Alexithymia, but that sort of goes to the same point discussed - translating bottom-up. They have emotion and often display it in outbursts, but cannot identify it, or can't find it. Ie it doesn't make it from unawareness into awareness, or operation. Or affirmation. It isn't that emotion - or equivalent in some other species - is necessary to encode per se. But it's likely necessary to encode variability of I and context.
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