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.
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?
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…
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!
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.
#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.
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.
>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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Haven’t seen the Turner, MR, but will look it up. Is it wackier than post-structuralist wackyland?
& 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.
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.
I note a lexical “yes” to that somewhere in my medulla oblongata, or maybe it’s the cranial octopus.
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.
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…
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.