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martyb writes:

How Our Brain Analyzes Poetry

[An] international research team theorized that the constrained structure of poetry serves as a mental template that allows readers and listeners to group creative poetic language into coherent meanings.

In order to test their hypothesis, the team focused on a genre of ancient Chinese poetry called Jueju, which has a highly constrained style. They generated artificial poems using a recurrent neural network so they could present novel Jueju poems to their participants, while controlling the poetic content.

Nearly eighty thousand ancient poems written over the course of five Chinese dynasties were fed into the neural network model, which then learned to create artificial poems based on the Jueju form.

The researchers synthesized each poem into a speech stream, removing the pauses, intonation, and other prosodic cues that a human speaker would produce, so that listeners had to rely on their knowledge of poetic structures in order to parse the stream.

Native Chinese speakers then listened to the artificial speech streams in an MEG[*] scanner, while the researchers aimed to detect neural signatures in the participants' brains that corresponded to the poetic structure. And indeed, the scientists discovered a brain rhythm of around 0.67 Hertz corresponding to the line structure of Jueju.

Even though the modern Chinese listeners were hearing each "pseudo ancient" poem for the first time and could not fully understand every phrase in the poems, they recognized the highly constrained structure and then actively grouped the poetic speech stream into lines according to their prior knowledge of Jueju. When the participants listened to the same poem for the second time, their brains had learned the structure, which allowed them to predict the forthcoming lines.

This study suggests that a constrained formal and conceptual structure provides a poetic temporal frame for listeners to group semantic units as intended by the poets and even to anticipate them. It indicates that not just poetic language, but the interplay of predictable forms and unpredictable contents are essential to the aesthetic experience of poems.

[*] MEG: Magnetoencephalography.

Journal Reference: Xiangbin Teng, Min Ma, Jinbiao Yang, Stefan Blohm, Qing Cai, Xing Tian. "Constrained Structure of Ancient Chinese Poetry Facilitates Speech Content Grouping", Current Biology (2020) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.059

Sure makes sense to me. At the simplest level, imagine reading this story as just a stream of letters with no capitalization, no punctuation, and no spacing between words, sentences, or paragraphs! Similarly, programmers rarely deal with just a stream of characters. One of the first things I do is look for patterns in my input data. I then consider data structures — such as a list, tree, array, or hash — that I can use to organize the information. Upon gathering and organizing that data, the information it contains is much easier to process and analyze. See, also, Niklaus Wirth's highly influential book: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs.

Further, as an outstanding example of how meter and rhyme can convey meaning that would otherwise be intractable, I offer you The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité. A couple verses help make this clear:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
   Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
   Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

[...] The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes.

Original Submission