Dopamine Rush: Guest Editor’s Discussion, Fall 2023

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

“Pleasures” by Denise Levertov

E taunts bow
 fingers dawn
lightly butchers

an author
 botches cadence
mutters in violet.

“Echolalia” by Noa Micaela Fields

Dear Readers,

This month as the Poem of the Day guest editors, we consider poetry through a scientific lens. We want to explore the neural mechanisms through which we enjoy poetry and the importance of the vocal performance of a poem to readers’ enjoyment. In our current psychology research, we ask: does expressiveness matter?

Humans can do something that no other animal can: attach meaning to the abstract whether in music, fine art, crafts, or, in this case, poetry and language. There are endless things about a poem that can excite us: structure, flow, imagery, how it feels in the mouth and in the head, how it takes us back to specific moments in our lives or forward to moments that might yet be. For us and for the neuroaesthetics community, two things are apparent: we love poetry for the way it is structured and for the meaning we can attach to it. 

People experience pleasure—and seek it too—because of the neurotransmitter dopamine. For millennia, dopamine has been important for survival, for the brain to enjoy and continue to want the things important for survival, such as food, reproduction, and the company of friends. In wanting, there is the sweet anticipation of the pleasure the desired dopamine rush causes; we do these things because we know we will feel good. 

Poetry, music, and the arts activate dopamine reward systems, despite not having any direct influence on the survival of humans as a species. Human reward systems are strongly interconnected with the pathways that help people think about themselves, others, and the world around them. As the modern human brain has evolved over the millions of years since humans diverged from the other great apes, people acquired higher cognitive functions that allow the attachment of meaning to the things they see, create, and experience. Maybe a lyric will remind you of being a grumpy teenager in your high school bedroom, or a certain insect might remind you of the summers of your childhood, or a line in a poem will take you back to the first time you fell in love. We derive pleasure from the connections we forge. Art mirrors the joys and grief we have felt. The ways poetry does this are complicated and mysterious—but here are some hypotheses.

Consider structure. People experience pleasure from the build-up to, expectation of, and anticipated release of dopamine. A good poem feeds this system perfectly.

A good structure builds momentum and tension that culminates in release at the end of the line, the stanza, or the whole poem. One study found exactly this: a poem’s poetic structure activates the build-up of tension leading to an exciting, goosebump-filled experience for listeners by the stanza’s end. If we consider the sonnet, for example, its form relies on the ability to build tension through a rhyming structure and then allows a final release in its last lines with the volta. Consider this extract from John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets.”

To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he? 
But who am I, that dare dispute with thee, 
O God? Oh, of thine only worthy blood 
And my tears, make a heavenly Lethean flood, 
And drown in it my sins' black memory. 
That thou remember them, some claim as debt; 
I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget. 

Poetry evokes a sense of satisfaction and pleasure when the structure establishes strong expectations. Richard Siken once wrote “A good line is a good line. A good line well placed is an experience.” The question we are asking is why? What is it about poetry that sparks our reward systems, causes the dopamine rush, and keeps us coming back for more? What is it about the structure and the semantics of poetry that resonates with us so much? Finally, how significant is a performance’s prosody to the listener’s enjoyment? 

Words aren’t only spoken; they are also sung. Prosody is the musical element of the voice carried by undulations of vocal pitch, crescendos and diminuendos, rhythms ranging from pi-zzi-ca-to- to arco, and timbres that rasp or ring clear. As in music, these are devices in the oratory toolkit. They have the power to express profound emotions in a code that transcends the boundaries of languages and cultures. Expressiveness can also support the structure of languages with a miniscule pause here to mark a syntactic boundary that cleaves two ideas apart, or a languid drawl there that stretches time and marks an salient idea not to rush past but to linger over. Expression, structure, and other aspects of poetry create devoted readers and listeners over time and many experiences of pleasure.

The poems we selected feed into these explorations. In a celebration of language and speech and all the weird and wonderful things we can do with it, we offer our curation of Poem of the Day!

Happy Reading,

Alisha Isherwood, Dr. Andrea Piovesan, Dr. Michel Belyk

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The guest editors of Poem of the Day represent the readers of the newsletter and of poetry: a broad and diverse group with many talents, interests, passions, and reasons for bringing the arts and humanities into their lives. Guest editors select poems for the month and write editor’s notes for each selection along with a blog post summarizing their experience and themes.

The guest editors for September 2023 are a team of researchers at Edge Hill University who used Poem of the Day data to support their work. In conversation with the team and Poetry Foundation staff, guest editorship of the newsletter became an exciting way to collaborate and share poetry’s influence with readers. 

Subscribe to Poem of the Day to read the guest editor’s selections and to experience future unique perspectives in poetry!

Read more about Poem of the Day in the archive editor’s blog.