Content uploaded by Ernst Pöppel
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Ernst Pöppel on Oct 18, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
The neural lyre: Poetic meter, the brain and time
... As it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, the start of the twenty-first century has also been crucial for the empirical study of literature. After the "decade of the brain" in the 1990s, a neuroscientific paradigm also entered the understanding of literary reading (Turner & Pöppel, 1983), and the empirical study of literary reading led to development of the "Neurocognitive Poetics Model of literary reading" (NCPM; Jacobs, 2015). The standards of experimentation have changed with the use of such methods as eye tracking, EEG, and fMRI; and physiological measures such as Skin Conductance Response (SCR), goosebumps, and heart rate have become more and more frequent. ...
... They have an explicit attentional function for maintaining rhythm (Fuller, 2001) and for directing breathing patterns in oral reciting, bearing the potential to be mapped onto subvocalized reading patterns. Turner & Pöppel (1983) proposed a time unit per verse (2-4s, average peak around 2.5-3.5s), which may shape reading/reciting MRRL and contribute to temporal prediction and segmenting, regardless of number of syllables (for a critique of the 3-sec-postulation see Fabb, 2013; but see Kien, J. & Kemp., A., 1994 for a comparison of durations of lines with biological action units; Wang et al., 2015Wang et al., , 2016; for a review see Yu & Bao, 2020). ...
The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eye-movements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regu-lar, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomalies. We hypothesized that silently reading MRRL results in build-ing up auditive expectations that are based on a rhythmic “audible gestalt” and pro-pose that rhythmicity is generated through subvocalization. Our results revealed that readers were sensitive to rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies but showed differential effects in poem and prose layouts. Metrical anomalies in particular resulted in robust reading disruptions across a variety of eye-movement measures in the poem layout and caused re-reading of the local context. Rhyme anomalies elicited stronger effects in prose layout and resulted in systematic re-reading of pre-rhymes. The presence or absence of rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies, as well as the layout manipulation, also af-fected reading in general. Effects of syllable number indicated a high degree of subvo-calization. The overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL.
This study introduces a two-stage approach to the analysis of long MRRL stimuli and contributes to the discussion of how the processing of rhythm in music and speech may overlap.
Human illness and healing are not simply technological problems, but are true mysteries. The highest response of the healer is to respond to the other by evoking the human mystery inside himself or herself Healing; at its highest calling, combines the technical mastery of the problem with the response of the whole human being to the mystery. That response of the whole human healer; with its rhythm and its figures of speech, its empathy and its scientific objectivity, its concreteness and application to the individual situation and its openness to the universal, is poetry.
This book suggests that poetry offers a way to remain in the world – not only by declarations of intent or the promotion of remembrance, but also through the durable physicality of its practice. Whether carved in stone or wood, printed onto a page, beat out by a mimetic or rhythmic body, or humming in the mind, poems are meant to engrave and adhere. Ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and the ephemerality inherent in mortality. Yet it couples its presentation of this awareness with an offering of meaningful embodiment in shifting forms that are aligned with, yet subtly manipulative of, mortal time. Sarah Nooter's argument ranges widely across authors and genres, from Homer and the Homeric Hymns through Sappho and Archilochus to Pindar and Aeschylus. The book will be compelling reading for all those interested in Greek literature and in poetry more broadly.
I consider poetry composition from both the “inside” view of a poet and the “outside” view of a cognitive psychologist. From the perspective of a psychologist, I review behavioral and neural studies of the reception and generation of poetry, with emphasis on metaphor and symbolism. Taking the perspective of a poet, I discuss how the seeds for a poem may arise. Finally, I consider the prospects for future developments in a field of computational neurocognitive poetics.
“Myths” did not start as quaint stories but as compellingly memorable devices to record events and observations in nonliterate societies. By understanding how people encoded information so as to maximize their brains’ abilities to remember, we can begin to extract at least some historical information from these inherited tales. But not all oral tradition is directly useful to historians because not all the information thus recorded is of events, and the clarity of the events diminishes radically as the lifestyle and especially the location of the storytellers change.
Neuroaesthetics, the science studying the biological underpinnings of aesthetic experience, recently extended its area of investigation to literary art; this was the humus where neurocognitive poetics blossomed. Divina Commedia represents one of the most important, famous and studied poems worldwide. Poetry stimuli are characterized by elements (meter and rhyme) promoting the processing fluency, a core aspect of neuroaesthetics theories. In addition, given the evidence of different neurophysiological reactions between experts and non-experts in response to artistic stimuli, the aim of the present study was to investigate, in poetry, a different neurophysiological cognitive and emotional reaction between Literature (L) and Non-Literature (NL) students. A further aim was to investigate whether neurophysiological underpinnings would support explanation of behavioral data. Investigation methods employed: self-report assessments (recognition, appreciation, content recall) and neurophysiological indexes (approach/withdrawal (AW), cerebral effort (CE) and galvanic skin response (GSR)). The main behavioral results, according to fluency theories in aesthetics, suggested in the NL but not in the L group that the appreciation/liking went hand by hand with the self-declared recognition and with the content recall. The main neurophysiological results were: (i) higher galvanic skin response in NL, whilst higher CE values in L; (ii) a positive correlation between AW and CE indexes in both groups. The present results extended previous evidence relative to figurative art also to auditory poetry stimuli, suggesting an emotional attenuation “expertise-specific” showed by experts, but increased cognitive processing in response to the stimuli.
This paper presents the results of a transdisciplinary research conducted by scholars working in the humanities and experimental psychologists in order to find an interface between the needs of a qualitative approach (mainly based on the evaluation of stylistic features) and those of a quantitative analysis, in order to find useful features for testing different reading behaviors and for new hermeneutical enquiries. The results of our research, which was conducted in two Labs (Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion at the FU Berlin and the NewHums – Neurocognitive and Human Studies at the University of Catania), consistently differ from previous ones, as they focus on the whole multi-layered foregrounded texture of a poem and try to evaluate predictable differences in reading, re-reading behaviour and meaning-making processes.
We present the FAM, targeting foregrounding elements in three main categories: the phonological, morpho-syntactic, and rhetoric. To identify those elements, four different text levels were taken into account, the sublexical level of phonemes and syllables, the lexical level of single words, the interlexical level of word combinations across longer distance (e.g. two lines), and the supralexical level of whole stanzas or an entire poem. In contrast to previous quantitative analyses on short, isolated sentences and texts, mostly expository in nature (‘textoids’), or on single words or segments, the text is considered as a whole, marked by density fields that work as milestones along a reading route.
The defence of poetryed) Selected prose in poetry
- P Sidney
Sidney P (1969) The defence of poetry. In : Kimbrough R (ed) Selected prose in poetry.
Reinhart and Winston, New York, p 110
Pleasure, reward, preference: Their nature, detenninants, and role in behavior. Academic, San Diego Routtenberg A (ed) (1980) Biology of reinforcement: Facets of brain stimulation reward. Academic
- C D Laughlin
- E G Aquili
Laughlin CD, d'Aquili EG (1974) Biogenetic structuralism. Columbia University Press,
New York
D'Aquili EG, Laughlin CD, McManus J (eds) (1979) The spectrum ofritual:
A biogenetic structural analysis. Columbia University Press, New York
Berlyne DE, Madsen KB (eds) (1973) Pleasure, reward, preference: Their nature,
detenninants, and role in behavior. Academic, San Diego
Routtenberg A (ed) (1980) Biology of reinforcement: Facets of brain stimulation
reward. Academic, San Diego
Oids J (1977) Drives and reinforcements: Behavioral studies of hypothalamic functions. Raven, New York
ed) Selected prose in poetry
- Ii
- Sidney
II. Sidney P (1969) The defence of poetry. In : Kimbrough R (ed) Selected prose in poetry.
Reinhart and Winston, New York, p 110