Poetry, music, emotions and the brain

https://www.britishcouncil.org/cubed/science-breakthroughs/poetry-brain

A LIFETIME’S WORTH OF QUESTIONS

They also discovered a clear difference in how people responded while reading a favourite passage versus reading any of the other texts, in that it activated a section of the brain associated with recognition and recollection. ‘If you are reading a favourite poem you more or less know it by heart,’ explains Professor Zeman, ‘so you’re not going to need very many cues from what’s written on the page and most of what’s happening is going to come from within.’ There was a strong correlation between emotionality and favourite passages.

There were other more tentative findings that Professor Rylance was curious about. ‘When we compared poetry with prose we got more information in some regions that are linked in a network that is called the Default Network,’ explains Professor Zeman, ‘a network of regions in the brain that is particularly active if you just rest. These areas seem to be associated with things we do with our minds when we are resting, like thinking about what’s happened to us recently, thinking about what’s going to happen in the near future, about other people, and that network seems to be more strongly associated with poetry than with prose. I think to be sure about that finding you would want to do a better-controlled study than ours. It was an interesting indication as far as it went.’