![]() ![]() ![]() However, the emotional impact of poetic language and the associated aesthetic pleasure-which lie at the very heart of the human motivation to engage in art reception in the first place-have not been investigated with psychophysiological or neuroscientific approaches. Recent brain imaging studies have begun to elucidate some aspects of poetic language, specifically, the benefits of literary awareness for cognition ( O’Sullivan et al., 2015), neural correlates of perceived literariness in poetry as compared to prose ( Zeman et al., 2013) and the brain mechanisms involved in poetry composition ( Liu et al., 2015). In contrast to music ( Koelsch, 2014), the psychological mechanisms and neural foundations of poetry are not well understood ( Jacobs, 2015). The fact that poetry has accompanied humankind over such a long period suggests a strong grip on human cognition and emotion. The roots of poetry are likely to reach even much further into the past, to a time when literacy had not yet evolved and poems were passed down in oral traditions. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.ĭating back some 4300 years, written poetry is the most ancient record of human literature. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. ![]()
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