You are on page 1of 2

Poets vs.

Critics: Different Brain Systems


So! Poets and their interpreters use different brain systems.
Published on November 24, 2009 by Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. in This Is Your Brain on Culture

Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets,
Jerry McGuire,convoked a group to read poems. Jerry's idea was to bring poets and critics together in
order to compare their readings.
What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group. It turned out that
poets and critics read poems quite differently.
The critics concerned themselves with things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings. The
poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns,
and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems. To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but
nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.
Now, it turns out, they may have been using different systems in their brains. Kenneth Heilman, a
neuropsychologist at the University of Florida, has a fine paper setting out the "information-processing
approach" to the various aphasias. He lists eleven different aphasias, and his paper uses the kind of block
diagrams computer programmers use to distinguish and interrelate them.
Heilman mentions eight interconnected blocks, some referring to well-known and clearly
defined brain regions and systems, others to geography less certain. He mentions, obviously, the auditory
cortex (Heschl's gyrus) that somehow--no one knows how--breaks the incoming sounds into phonemes.
Then there is a "phonological input lexicon," corresponding to Wernicke's area, that "remembers" the
sounds of various words. There is a motor system that makes the sounds of speech and "phonetic-speech
movement programs," Broca's area. It embodies the programs for forming various words and other
sounds. Both these systems rely on a "phonological output lexicon" that remembers what those words and
other sounds are supposed to sound like.

At a still higher level of processing, the brain's intentional systems (anterior cingulate and frontal lobes)
create what Steven Pinker calls "mentalese" and stimulate speech production systems to turn those mental
thoughts or proto-utterances into physical words and sentences. On the input site, there are object
recognition units (ventral temporal occipital lobe) that associate words with perceptions of objects. At, so to
speak, the highest level of the whole verbal system, there is a semantic-conceptual field that deals with
meanings (probably widely dispersed in the parietal and temporal lobes.

All these are interconnected, mostly by two-way conduction. Heilman shows, in this article, how one can
account for eleven different aphasias by the loss of this or that unit or connection between these various
units iindicated by the letters n the block diagram. It's a powerful demonstration of the kind of thing an
information-processing model can do.
One particular thing this model can do is explain what happened in Jerry Maguire's poetry group. People
interpreting poetry have to be more concerned with themes and meanings--obviously. That's what
professors and critics are paid to do. People composing poetry have to be more concerned with the output
side of things, and what is special about poetry are the sounds. In very simple terms, the poets were
reading poetry primarily in terms of Broca's and Wernicke's areas. The critics were reading primarily in
terms of that top-level semantic-conceptual field.
No doubt matters are more complicated than that. I always tend to over-simplify. Certainly both groups
used all these systems but with different weightings. But I do find this solution to the problem Jerry
Maguire's group posed immensely satisfying.
The item I'm referring to:
Heilman, Kenneth M. (2006). "Aphasia and the Diagram Makers Revisited: An Update of Information
Processing Models." Journal of Clinical Neurology 2.3: 149-162.

You might also like