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Award-winning poet Yrsa Daley-Ward and neuroscientist Susan Magsamen explore how poetry activates unique neural pathways — engaging emotion, memory, and language simultaneously in ways that prose does not.
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Canon
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Keltner frames oral poetry as a relationship technology: sharing poems aloud creates a shared emotional experience that bonds speaker and listener. Poetry readings function as community-building rituals, just as they did in ancient oral traditions.
Highlights
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Poetry activates brain regions that prose does not — the combination of rhythm, metaphor, and condensed language engages emotional and cognitive processing simultaneously
Magsamen presents neuroimaging data: reading poetry activates the right hemisphere (emotional processing), the default mode network (self-reflection), and language areas simultaneously. Prose activates language areas alone. Poetry engages the whole brain.Was this useful?