News flash: poetry makes you smarter
I knew it. I knew it!
Psychologists at Dundee and St Andrews universities claim the work
of poets such as Lord Byron exercise the mind more than a novel by Jane
Austen.By monitoring the way different forms of text are read, they found
poetry generated far more eye movement which is associated with deeper
thought.Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose.
Preliminary studies using brain imaging technology also showed
greater levels of cerebral activity when people listened to poems being
read aloud.Dr Jane Stabler, a literature expert at St Andrews University and a
member of the research group, believes poetry may stir latent
preferences in the brain for rhythm and rhymes that develop during
childhood. …"It may be because readers are trying to hear the words or recreate the imaginary event the poet has provided a script for.
"Also, children seem to be born with a love of rhyme and rhythm.
Then something happens and by the time we see them in the first year at
university many of them are almost frightened of poetry and clamouring
to study the contemporary novel."— "Verse broadens the mind, the scientists find," The Scotsman, 4/3/05
That is so cool.
I can’t verify that all children have rhythm. I have two and one of them has rhythm and the other doesn’t. BUT the one who doesn’t has always held rhyming in a higher regard and memorized at an earlier age and I think memorization is connected with cadence.
I knew there was a reason I spent so much time reading poetry.
Of course, after thirty years of trying to teach it to high school students I knew that It demanded higher reading skills to comprehend.
Well there go my prose-reading plans for the weekend…
One more reason to use Byron in my physics class. I need to save that reference for a paper I’m publishing on the topic of Byron and thermodynamics!