digital emunction | a multiauthor blog founded and edited by robert p. baird

Riposte: Our Promiscuous Brains

I haven’t read the arti­cle Bobby refers to. (Monkey exper­i­ments … snore.) How­ever, I have been read­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tist Stanis­las Dehaene’s Read­ing in the Brain, which has much to say about the archi­tec­ture of our brains and how our read­ing and writ­ing sys­tems adapted to it. I won’t go into all of it (par­tic­u­larly since it will be the sub­ject of a future Lingo column) but it does have pos­si­ble impli­ca­tions for (page-​based) poets that might be useful to float here.

1. Read­ing and writ­ing are still rel­a­tively new to us as a species. “Writing was only born fifty-​four hun­dred years ago in the Fer­tile Cres­cent, and the alpha­bet itself is only thirty-​eight hun­dred years old.”
2. Read­ing is dif­fi­cult. As hyper-​specialized read­ers, we can’t appre­ci­ate how rad­i­cally lit­er­acy reor­ga­nized our brains, and how much work the brain still has to do to break down and recon­sti­tute words into mean­ing, across hemi­spheres, within mil­lisec­onds.
3. There are two dis­tinct path­ways the brain may take to retrieve mean­ing from the writ­ten word: the lex­i­cal route and the phono­log­i­cal route.
4. The phono­log­i­cal (speech-to-sound) route is slow and inef­fi­cient. It forces us to pro­nounce the words men­tally to figure out what they mean, as opposed to retriev­ing a mean­ing through a fixed, mem­o­rized data bank of words (the lex­i­cal route). (Though these routes oper­ate in par­al­lel and simul­ta­ne­ously, Dehaene claims there is actual rivalry between them. One or the other must get the upper hand.)
5. If a word is unknown, rare, or irreg­u­lar, you are forc­ing the brain to go the slow & inef­fi­cient way to mean­ing.
6. Seman­tics mobi­lizes a wide­spread array of brain regions; mere prosody (e.g. non­sense) does not.

If you were just start­ing out as a poet, would know­ing this make any dif­fer­ence to you with regard to your style or your expec­ta­tions for your “career”—your read­er­ship, your recep­tion? Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own dif­fi­culty as well as its plea­sures (prosodic, sen­sual, scenic) to max­i­mize its poten­tial as a unique cul­tural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?

And why aren’t we (poets across the inter­net) asking these ques­tions rather than snip­ing about the usual things — whether X mag­a­zine is boring, whether Y poet is avant-​garde enough, whether Z critic is secretly refer­ring to one­self when pooh-​poohing unnamed poets in a mag­a­zine essay? For instance.

34 Responses

  1. Jordan

    Hurray! enthu­si­asm and data, flame and fuel. Let’s see whether we can keep from quib­bling it to death before lunch.

    > why aren’t we

    My ill-​considered and prob­a­bly grouchy-​seeming response: we’re social, and as such keep on play­ing follow-the-alpha whether or no we want to.

    Set­ting aside my inborn skep­ti­cism for pro­grams to make us smarter and more sym­pa­thetic that do not only con­sist of spend­ing unbe­liev­able quan­ti­ties of time tread­ing down slow and inef­fi­cient roads until they become traffic-​clogged highways…

    It sounds as though Dehaene is point­ing in sev­eral direc­tions at once, some of which are also acti­vated in Austin’s Zen and the Brain. A lot gets said about recon­fig­ur­ing the brain. What does this mean beyond ‘make the road by walking.’

    Am I right to see ten­sion here about claim­ing the inef­fi­cient and obso­lete for poetry?

  2. Henry Gould

    A one-a-day 5-min. dosage of read­ing my poetry will actu­ally make you 50% smarter in just three weeks! I kid you not! I pul­leth not thy leg! I deceive not thy hip­pocam­pus nor any other Ur of yr brain land­scapes! (Did you com­pre­hend ALL THREE of the pre­vi­ous sen­tences? If so, you are ready for HG’s Poetry-​Smart Health Sup­ple­ments today!) Call now! Not avail­able in book­stores, or else­where!

    Zig­gu­rat, syzygy, hunker down…

  3. It’s a bit of stretch, but this brought to mind J.L. Austin’s clas­sic How to Do Things with Words: sen­tences don’t state facts, but per­form cer­tain kinds of actions, etc. I guess this is hor­ri­bly old-​fashioned think­ing, but at least I didn’t say there were seven types of ambi­gu­ity!

  4. After I wake from my monkey dreams, I’ll have to think some more about Ange’s very good ques­tions, but right now I’ve got one of my own. Are there any poets out there who read lex­i­cally rather than phono­log­i­cally? The former mode is what allows for speed read­ing, but every time I’ve tried it I’ve given up in terror at the per­cep­ti­ble dimin­ish­ment of…something. I usu­ally think that I’m just not read­ing thor­oughly enough, even though I know stud­ies have shown that infor­ma­tion reten­tion is more or less equal across both path­ways. I wonder now, though, if what I’m miss­ing is in fact the prosodic “information” that comes with the seman­tic. And I wonder if there are any poets or poetry lovers who find them­selves able to read and enjoy poetry with­out it.

  5. Henry Gould

    #3 & 4, very inter­est­ing, if true. As for me, I think I “hear” every­thing I read : can’t even imag­ine this faster-​lexical method.

    I have the sus­pi­cion, though, that much poetry nowa­days is WRIT­TEN “lexically”. Kind of tone-​deaf, in other words.

  6. 2. Read­ing is dif­fi­cult. As hyper-​specialized read­ers, we can’t appre­ci­ate how rad­i­cally lit­er­acy reor­ga­nized our brains, and how much work the brain still has to do to break down and recon­sti­tute words into mean­ing, across hemi­spheres, within mil­lisec­onds.

    Well, here’s one answer for Ange. The above isn’t news to me at all. I’ve long been con­duct­ing an ama­teur study of the phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of read­ing (n=1) and my first and most obvi­ous result is that the mam­malian brain, given its druthers, would rather be doing just about any­thing than sit­ting alone with a book. And the more syn­tac­ti­cally, seman­ti­cally, and prosod­i­cally dense the book, the less the brain-qua-information-decoder likes it. It’s the reason why 99 out of 100 people would rather watch TV or a movie than read a book, even when they know the book will be more enjoy­able, it’s the reason why antiprosodic air­port thrillers out­sell Ash­bery, and it’s one of the rea­sons why lament­ing the loss of poetry’s audi­ence to other media is use­less.

  7. Henry Gould

    >my first and most obvi­ous result is that the mam­malian brain, given its druthers, would rather be doing just about any­thing than sit­ting alone with a book<

    Hence the value of early inoc­u­la­tion.

    What about Mallarme’s propo­si­tion, in this regard? That the Uni­verse exists IN ORDER to be reflected in The Book. Has a sort of Protes­tant res­o­nance. “Heaven & Earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass away.”

  8. Henry Gould

    Soon read­ing will be treated as a crime or an addic­tion, & you’ll be pun­ished by the Health Author­ity if you’re not out jog­ging 5 hrs/day, with head­phones, watch­ing car­toons on your ipod. Libraries will be burned to the ground by roving bands of officially-​illiterate secu­rity per­son­nel.

  9. Michael Robbins

    I know you’re not nec­es­sar­ily knock­ing them, but I do want to put in a word in defense of air­port thrillers, some of which are won­der­fully intel­li­gent brain candy, which even the most dili­gent of us need from time to time. I just fin­ished Stephen King’s new book, speed­ing thru the final 700 pages in a week­end, & am eagerly wait­ing for Greg Rucka’s new one to come out in paper­back. I keep mean­ing to write a post about thrillers, crime fic­tion, & the like.

    • Not knock­ing at all! Just making an argu­ment why brain candy is sweet. I grew up on Clancy and Grisham, and lately I’ve been loving me some Carl Hiassen.

      Since you’ve read the King, I can ask you: I know it’s a Simp­sons rip-​off, but is it pos­si­ble that the book is not a global-​warming alle­gory? The reviews never men­tioned it, but from the descrip­tions it seemed hard to imag­ine oth­er­wise.

      • Michael Robbins

        Not pos­si­ble: lots & lots of talk about increas­ing tem­per­a­tures & col­lect­ing par­tic­u­late matter. And the climax is a rather ter­ri­fy­ing account of what hap­pens to the air inside a closed system during a firestorm.

      • Excel­lent. Thanks.

  10. Robert - I tend to read novels, short sto­ries, etc, lex­i­cally, and poetry/prose poetry phono­log­i­cally. In fact, my per­sonal test as to whether a text is poetry or prose tends to hinge upon which of these read­ing styles engages with it most suc­cess­fully. There are always cross-​over points of course - a lot of extremely dis­jointed, visually-​oriented poetry ben­e­fits from lex­i­cal read­ings, methinks; and there always come moments, when read­ing a good prose styl­ist, when one wants to savour each syl­la­ble.

    Ange, to pick up on just one point: your ques­tion on why one would snipe about “whether Y poet is avant-​garde enough,” is actu­ally one that has long preyed on my mind. Why is being avant garde con­sid­ered a virtue in itself? Does anyone here wake up in the morn­ing and think, “hmmm, how can I be as avant garde as pos­si­ble today?”

    (which is more avant garde, an ele­phant or a giraffe?

    - an ele­phant, but a giraffe is more sur­real)

    • Thanks Cy. Inter­est­ing that the “extremely dis­jointed, visually-oriented” lay­outs push you toward lex­i­cal read­ings. I would guess that would sur­prise a lot of poets who imag­ine their dis­per­sions work the oppo­site way.

      • I read that way, I think, because I’ve found “slow” read­ing tech­niques, when applied to such dis­junc­tive texts, result in pro­found, ago­nis­ing bore­dom. I don’t enjoy said bore­dom, so resort to lex­i­cal read­ings where the words act as visual (as opposed to pho­netic) sig­ni­fiers. This also allows the eye to drift across the page, pick­ing up words in chang­ing pat­terns - which I under­stand is often the way such texts are meant to be read, you know, the whole “oooh, each reader cre­ates a dif­fer­ent text from my jumble of words, how liberating!” approach.

  11. Henry Gould

    I tend to think of poetry as dis­tinct from any other form of language-​use. & I think it chan­nels both the lex­i­cal & the phono­log­i­cal : & that these are framed, para­dox­i­cally, by a “silent” dimen­sion - ges­ture.

    A poem is an action “verbalized”, a per­for­mance. An “embodiment”; or speech fused with, & syn­the­siz­ing, & rep­re­sent­ing (miming) BOTH sender & (imag­ined) recip­i­ent of its signal.

    It is lan­guage applied to the imme­di­ate Now of its enact­ment, its pre­sen­tas­tion. Every­thing in the sphere of poetry is vital­ized by this dra­matic dimen­sion. As such, poetry rep­re­sents real­ity in a unique way, dif­fer­ent from other modes of “scribal” dis­course (let’s say, the “merely” lex­i­cal, the “encyclopedic” (see Giuseppe Mazzotta’s book, Dante’s Vision & the Circle of Knowledge” on this whole issue).

    A con­se­quence of this view is that I have trou­ble with approaches that reduce to “POETRY = LANGUAGE” (in one form or another). Poetry is actu­ally a kind of dramatic-​gestural “sign language”. Its form is closer to Aristotle’s (The Poet­ics) sense of a (dra­matic, sculp­tural) con­crete, plot-​driven SHAPE, which is not explain­able within a reduc­tive lin­guis­tic or rhetor­i­cal frame­work (even if it’s brain sci­ence).

  12. AM

    First, apolo­gies for not being more present; I have mul­ti­ple dead­lines plus unan­swered cor­re­spon­dence dating back, well, to the last decade.

    Maybe it’s a bit mis­lead­ing to bring up the Dehaene book in this fash­ion. It’s a detailed, tech­ni­cal book by an exper­i­men­tal cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist, and doesn’t sit com­fort­ably next to some­thing like Austin. When he talks about the lex­i­cal vs. phono­log­i­cal routes, he’s not talk­ing about some­thing we can con­sciously dis­cern; he’s talk­ing about exper­i­ments in neu­roimag­ing:

    “…from reti­nal pro­cess­ing to the high­est level of abstrac­tion and invari­ance unfolds auto­mat­i­cally, in less than one-​fifth of a second, with­out any con­scious examination.”

    “Any reader easily retrieves a single mean­ing ot of at least 50,000 can­di­date words, in the space of a few tenths of a second, based on noth­ing more than a few strokes of light on the retina.”

    So it may be unfair of me to pro­voke a con­ver­sa­tion about a book only I have read (I know, when did that ever stop us?). But I brought it up pre­cisely because I’m tired of the (sorry Jordan) “it’s social” line. No, it’s not just social. The hatred and self-​hatred out there is about a refusal to see poetry as some­thing inher­ently human and small but intensely plea­sur­able and trans­port­ing for all that. (Also am not sure about “Am I right to see ten¬sion here about claim¬ing the inef¬fi¬cient and obso¬lete for poetry?” Are you claim­ing that, or sug­gest­ing that I’m claim­ing that? I hope I’m not.)

    More later…

    • Am I wrong, then, to link the lex­i­cal neural path with speed read­ing and the phono­log­i­cal with sub­vo­cal­iza­tion? “Conscious examination” isn’t quite syn­ony­mous with “conscious discernment”—it’s pretty easy to imag­ine cases where you have the latter with­out the former.

      • AM

        I know what you’re talk­ing about re sub­vo­cal­iza­tion, but the phono­log­i­cal route is some­thing even the word “chalice” goes through — a word you know but don’t see very often. (That, by the way, sug­gests to me that poets like myself who like to use unusual words do so for rea­sons that lie in the brain. They are innately plea­sur­able, not just some way to show off.)

    • Jordan

      > tired of the

      Hmm. When I said “it’s social” I meant “it’s political.” The hatred and self-​hatred is about set­ting aside the right for plea­sure and trans­port — for one­self and one’s home team.

      • AM

        For sure, Jordan. I thought for a minute you meant that we write the way we do because it’s social. Which it is, partly. But only partly.

  13. Michael Robbins

    Yeah, we’ve put up for too long with notions of lan­guage as exclu­sively a social cat­e­gory. No one ever pro­poses a social theory of lift­ing or get­ting out of the way of stuff or sleep (all of which have their social aspects). You’re prob­a­bly already aware of it, but if not you might be inter­ested, Ange, in The Lit­er­ary Mind: The Ori­gins of Thought & Lan­guage, by Mark Turner, a pro­fes­sor of neu­ro­science, cogsci, & Eng­lish. I think Turner’s hypothe­ses are quite wack­y­land, myself, but it’s an engag­ing book.

    And the dis­agree­able pedant grum­bled that a new decade begins next year, unless some­where along the way we had one that was only nine years long.

    • Henry Gould

      Michael, the mil­len­nium began on 1/1/2000, 10 years ago. This is the begin­ning of the 2nd decade of same.

      Same reason they call, say, 43 A.D. a year in the “1st Century” (& like­wise the “2nd” cen­tury years are the “100s”). Dec. 31, 99 A.D., was the last day of the first cen­tury. Dec. 31, 2009, was the last day of the 1st decade of the 21st cen­tury.

      Maybe you’re con­fus­ing our system of count­ing (dec­i­mal system) with cal­en­dri­cal time.

      Clear as mud?

      • Henry Gould

        OK, so I was author­i­ta­tively wrong YET AGAIN…

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero

        At least I intu­ited my own mis­take. & I have 10 fin­gers, I think.

        - Henry Year Zero

      • Henry Gould

        I’m start­ing to like the Year Zero. I’m start­ing to feel right at home in it. & I wonder if we all just took the plunge & accepted the Year Zero, then all our prob­lems with his­tory, reli­gion, Jesus, & Time, etc., would be nicely resolved & cleared up, finally. Amen.

      • Michael Robbins

        I wish we had had a year zero so my pedan­tic homuncu­lus could stop grum­bling when­ever any tells me it’s a new decade in a year that ends in zero. At least I won’t live to see another cen­tury turn over a year after every­one said it did.

      • The Year One was des­ig­nated so ret­ro­spec­tively, so the ques­tion of “when to begin counting” is . . . social!

        What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is that the cal­en­dar changed dras­ti­cally sev­eral hun­dred years ago. What this means is that, because the Gre­go­rian Cal­en­dar dis­placed the Julian Cal­en­dar, 1,000 years before Jan­u­ary 1, 2000 was not called Jan­u­ary 1, 1000 at the time. In fact, I made a bet with a friend of mine that 1,000 years after Jan. 1, 2000 would not be called Jan. 1, 3000; that, in other words, the cal­en­dar would change again. We bet a quar­ter, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to put our com­bined 50 cents into a 1,000 year trust account to be accessed by our heirs.

        Great post, Ange — I hadn’t known about the dis­tinc­tion between lex­i­cal and phono­log­i­cal read­ing, and have found people’s obser­va­tions and com­ments about it great too. One ques­tion, though, regard­ing this: “Seman­tics mobi­lizes a wide­spread array of brain regions; mere prosody (e.g. non­sense) does not.” Daniel Lev­itin main­tains, in “This Is Your Brain On Music,” argues that the music opens a greater array of brain regions than any other activ­ity. To the extent that prosody par­takes of musi­cal qual­i­ties, couldn’t prosody open up brain regions on its own?

        I’ve long felt that lan­guage itself is musi­cal, spoken lan­guage espe­cially, with its reliance on the musi­cal qual­i­ties of melody, tempo, dynam­ics, and timbre to convey a huge per­cent­age of its mean­ing. All very inter­est­ing. Thanks.

    • AM

      Haven’t seen the Turner, MR, but will look it up. Is it wack­ier than post-​structuralist wack­y­land?

  14. Henry Gould

    & Michael, are you sug­gest­ing that, say, a “language theory” (or a neuro-​scientific theory?) of poetry would be dis­tinct from a “social theory”?

    I think you could inves­ti­gate the “biology” of poetry (my friend Osip Man­del­stam took an inter­est in this) with­out assum­ing it’s con­fined to indi­vid­ual gray mat­ters.

    • Michael Robbins

      I think everyone’s refer­ring specif­i­cally not to “individual” gray mat­ters, Mr. Whit­man, but to gray matter as such. But I’m also not sug­gest­ing a lan­guage theory of any­thing should ignore the social, just that it should be more obvi­ous to intel­lec­tu­als that lan­guage is a bio­log­i­cal fac­ulty, & our response to poetry is in part bio­log­i­cal.

      • Henry Gould

        I note a lex­i­cal “yes” to that some­where in my medulla oblon­gata, or maybe it’s the cra­nial octo­pus.

  15. Kent Johnson

    Sorry to be some­what off-​topic and self-​referential, which is not like me at all, as you know, but can’t resist– maybe, though, the note has some­thing to do with the mys­te­ri­ous sources of lan­guage:

    Amazon is report­ing that the book most fre­quently bought with my col­lec­tion Homage to the Last Avant-​Garde is Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles: A Quar­ter Cen­tury Cel­e­bra­tion.

  16. AM

    John, hi — Part of the dif­fi­culty in answer­ing your ques­tion is that I have an advanced copy of the book with no index. So I can’t guar­an­tee that Dehaene doesn’t men­tion music some­where in this book. Yet it is pretty much starkly absent from the chap­ter on phono­log­i­cal path­ways.

    I haven’t read the Lev­itin book, though I will put it on my list. I do have another book on the origin of lan­guage, Find­ing Our Tongues, that does have a dis­cus­sion of music and prosody. I don’t know how it would dove­tail with Dehaene. This is the prob­lem with read­ing such books. They’re very spe­cial­ized, with tightly drawn bound­aries, and sur­pris­ingly little over­lap. But Dehaene does offer one expla­na­tion for why I’d rather read Wal­lace Stevens than Kurt Schwitters…

  17. Read­ing a sound poem is akin to read­ing a musi­cal score: Very dif­fer­ent than hear­ing it. The lim­i­ta­tion of most sound poetry is that it par­takes of less of the music of speech than music in gen­eral does. I think about this all the time when lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal singers singing Eng­lish — unlike “pop” or “folk” singers (tellingly, “vernacular” music), most clas­si­cal singer have little feel for speech.

    So, anyway, much as I’m intrigued by and inter­ested in what Schwit­ters was doing, Stevens “does more” for me (or is “to me”?) too.

    The bor­der­line cases in song intrigue too: The emo­tional import of “hey nonny nonny” or “awopbopaloobop.”

    Thanks again.



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