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.


