Poetry Lights Up Your Brain Like a Favorite Song, fMRI Shows

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A new study from McGill University reports that listening to snippets of happy or peaceful music prompted study participants to recall vivid positive memories. Conversely, listening to sad or emotionally scary music (chosen by the researchers) caused study participants to recall negative autobiographical memories.

The February 2017 study, “More Than a Feeling: Emotional Cues Impact the Access and Experience of Autobiographical Memories,” was published in the journal Memory & Cognition.

For this study, the Canadian researchers tested how musical cues from two different aspects of emotion—valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low)—influence the way that people recall autobiographical memories. Musical snippets were grouped into four retrieval cues: happy (positive, high arousal), peaceful (positive, low arousal), scary (negative, high arousal), and sad (negative, low arousal).

While listening to the musical selections, participants were asked to recall autobiographical memories from specific events in which they were personally involved and that lasted less than one day. As soon as a memory came to mind, participants pressed a computer key and typed in their accessed memory.

The researchers found that memories were accessed most quickly and vividly based on musical cues that were high in arousal, positive in emotion, and classified as "happy." The relationship between the type of musical cue and whether it triggered the remembrance of a positive or a negative memory was also noted. As would be expected, scary music often triggered anxious memories and sad music generally triggered memories of despair or heartbreak.

Obviously, everybody has particular songs from your past that evoke strong positive or negative emotional responses and autobiographical memories. When I first read about this study, I was excited to learn that researchers had finally unearthed empirical evidence that corroborated something I discovered anecdotally in the summer of 1975, when I was 9 years old and went to see the movie Jaws.

Prior to seeing this Steven Spielberg blockbuster with the marketing tagline "See it before you go swimming...You'll never go in the water again!" I was an innocent youngster who loved going to the beach and swimming in the ocean while humming bubbly, carefree Beach Boys pop songs such as "Surfin' U.S.A." or "Fun, Fun, Fun."

Unfortunately, after seeing Jaws everything changed. I developed a phobia about swimming in the ocean, which led to a fear-based avoidance behavior of never going into the ocean throughout my adolescence and young adulthood.

Ultimately, it was John Williams' soundtrack to Jaws that embedded the primal fear of swimming in the ocean. Just the smell of the sea and sand could create flashbacks to the horror film anytime I was at the water's edge ... much like the screeching violins in Psycho, prior to Janet Leigh being stabbed in the shower might cue fear about entering creepy motels.

Of course, Spielberg's terrifying cinematic technique of positioning the movie-goer in the vantage point of sharks' eyes prior to attacking a silhouetted victim swimming at the surface of the water created powerful visuals to go along with Williams' soundtrack. This double whammy created indelible scary "music-based memories" about open water swimming that have never really gone away.

For many years after seeing Jaws, anytime I got knee-deep in water and began to wade in deeper, I'd recall Roy Scheider asking the marine biology expert, "Is it true that most people get attacked by sharks in about three feet of water, about ten feet from the beach?" And the "Yes" response... then I'd start hearing the Jaws theme playing in the back of head, feel the early warning signs of physiological panic attack, and run back to the safety of my beach blanket under an umbrella.

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"Promise to Try" is a tribute to Madonna's mother, who died of breast cancer when Madonna was just 5 years old. For me, this song is the ultimate 'beautiful but sad' anthem. It is both comforting and inspiring; although it's heartbreaking there is is something triumphant and life-affirming, as summed up in the wistful lyrics, "Keep your head held high, ride like the wind. Never look behind, life isn't fair. That's what you said, so I try not to care."

As cheesy, hokey, and sophomoric as it might seem, part of my pre-race athletic ritual was to recreate the experience of first hearing this music by bringing some patchouli and Coppertone to the starting line to recreate the pure bliss that was encoded in my memory banks the first time this music became a part of my autobiographical memories.

The smell of Coppertone did something to my brain chemistry that complemented the soundtracks of music or poetry in my mind. Later in my athletic career, also had an epiphany that I could also use the smell of Coppertone as an olfactory cue to help me cope with the monotony of swimming for hours on end in the windowless basement of the Equinox gym on Greenwich Avenue in the dead of winter, when I was training for regular and Triple Ironman triathlons throughout the 1990s.

Unfortunately, Ironman triathlon rules forbid the use of headphones during competitions. Blasting music on my Walkman (and later an iPod or smartphone) was always like rocket fuel for me during my workouts. Music became a crutch that I relied on too heavily in training. During competitions, I couldn't listen to music, which was like having my umbilical cord to my lifeline of inspiration yanked away.

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ― Robert Frost

Luckily, through trial and error, I began to realize that while I was running, biking, and swimming extremely long distances without music, random poetic phrases would bubble up and pop into my mind. I've never been much of a bookworm, but when I was in high school and college, poetry always resonated with me more than reading fictional short stories or novels—which rarely strike an emotional chord the way music does.

Once I realized that headphones had been banned from all Ironman competitions. I fastidiously started to build up an arsenal of poetic verses and other nuggets of thought that I could memorize and use in lieu of music during athletic competition.

I began transcribing various poetic stanzas that struck a particular emotional chord onto green fluorescent green notecards which I kept on my nightstand. Before going to bed, I'd flip through the notecards and memorize poetic phrases and other quotations. During athletic events, I could keep myself entertained and self-regulate my explanatory style by reciting poems. I used this technique to create an optimistic and upbeat mood during sports competitions, just like I used music to create a specific mood during my athletic training.

I always thought my penchant for reciting poetry was just some idiosyncratic quirk that I'd stumbled on as an athlete until I read a fascinating neuroimaging study which found that poetry can light up the brain just like a favorite song. This was an "Aha!" moment for me.

Scientists at the University of Exeter mapped brain activity using fMRI as study participants read various types of poetry and prose.

Source: Courtesy of University of Exeter

In 2013, Adam Zeman, professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK published his groundbreaking report from "By Heart An fMRI Study of Brain Activation by Poetry," was in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. For this study, Zeman and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to illuminate which parts of the brain are activated when someone is reading various types of literature.

Brain activity was scanned inside the fMRI when study participants were reading four different types of poetry and prose: (1) very dry and boring text (such as an excerpt from a heating installation manual); (2) evocative passages from various novels; (3) easy and difficult sonnets chosen by the researchers; (4) study participant’s favorite poetry that they knew by heart.

As would be expected, the team found that neural activity in the "reading network" of brain areas was activated in response to any type of written material.

However, of these four different types of literature, only self-selected poetry that resonated emotionally with a study participant caused the brain to light up in the fMRI as if he or she was listening to music that struck a deep emotional chord. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only study to specifically examine differing responses to poetry and prose inside an fMRI.

When I read this study a few years ago, it jumped out at me for a variety of personal reasons mentioned above in terms of optiming my athletic performance. Additionally, when I was writing The Athlete's Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss (St. Martin's Press), my very patient and brilliant editor, Diane Reverand—along with book designer Gretchen Achilles—worked tirelessly with me to infuse poetic verses (and quotations that struck an emotional chord like poetry) in between my prose. Flip-flopping between poetry and prose was something that felt right to me, but now I realize that it also illustrated how my brain worked and that I was trying to infuse the musicality of poetry into the manuscript.

One of my favorite poets is Henry Rago. He began writing poetry when he was 16 and was the editor of Poetry Magazine from 1955-1969. Rago only published one book of poems, A Sky of Late Summer (Macmillan). Stanley Kunitz (who wrote one of my favorite poems, "Touch Me" with the famous line, "What makes the engine go? Desire, Desire, Desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.") once said,

“Henry Rago’s special gift permits him to strike for the absolute as an act of meditation, and yet to remain wakeful for the surprises of poetry. The best of his poems, of which “The Knowledge of Light” is representative, reach an astonishing depth of simplicity. They achieve a kind of claritas, the splendor of the true."

Certain stanzas from "The Knowledge of Light" resonate more deeply with me than others depending on the time and place I'm at in my life. In 2006, as I was completing the manuscript for The Athlete's Way, I approached the estate of Henry Rago for permission to sprinkle stanzas from this poem throughout my book. Generously, Henry Rago's daughter, Christina, kindly agreed to allow me to insert random chunks of her father's poem within my prose if I agreed to include the poem in its entirety at the end of the book.

"The Knowledge of Light" appears on pp. 338-339 of The Athlete's Way. If you are unfamiliar with this poem and are reading it now for the first time, I'd recommend taking a few minutes to memorize a stanza or two that resonate with you. Reciting these words anytime you want to activate brain regions like a favorite song might come in handy at some day.

The Knowledge of Light
Henry Rago

I

The willow shining
From the quick rain,
Leaf, cloud, early star
Are shaken light in this water:
The tremolo of their brightness: light
Sung back in light.

II

The deep shines with the deep.
A deeper sky utters the sky.
These words waver
Between sky and sky.

III

A tree laced of many rivers
Flows into a wide slow darkness
And below the darkness, flowers again
To many rivers, that are a tree.

IV

Wrung from silence
Sung in lightning
From stone sprung
The quickening signs
lines quivered
Numbers flew

Darkness beheld
Darkness and told
Each in each
The depths not darkness.

V

To know
Meaning to celebrate:
Meaning
To become “in some way”
Another; to come
To a becoming:
To have come well.

VI

Earth Awakens to the work it wakens.

These dancers turn half-dreaming
Each to the other, glide
Each from a pool of light on either side
Below the dark wings
And flutter slowly, come slowly
Or drift farther again,
Turn on a single note, lifted,
And leap, their whirling lines
Astonished into one lucidity:
Multiples of the arc.

Shapes of the heart!

VII

The year waits at the depth of summer.
The air, the island, and the water
Are drawn to evening. The long month
Is lost in the evening.

If words could hold this world
They would bend themselves to one
Transparency; if this
Depth of the year, arch of the hour
Came perfect to
The curving of one word
The sound would widen, quietly as from crystal,
Sphere into sphere: candor
Answering the child’s candor
Beyond the child’s question.

Even if you're not a poetry lover, hopefully, reading about the link between all types of music—from scary to happy, peaceful, and "Self-Identified Sad Music" will motivate you to use music along with any self-selected poetic verse that resonates with you, to achieve self-regulatory goals and better moods.