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What happens in your brain when you read or write a poem? We listen to powerful poetry from you, our listeners, and uncover the neuroscience of why it helps us feel, process, and recover.
Today’s Happiness Break Guest:
SUSAN MAGSAMEN is a Neurology professor at John Hopkins, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Your Brain On Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
Find Susan’s book here: https://www.yourbrainonart.com/
Related Happiness Break episodes:
Using Art As Medicine Series: https://tinyurl.com/k3mneupx
Making Space For You: https://tinyurl.com/yk6nfnfv
How To Awaken Your Creative Energy: https://tinyurl.com/4fknd8ev
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
How Art Heals Us: https://tinyurl.com/yc77fkzu
Our Brains on Poetry: https://tinyurl.com/y9r9dyzd
Are You Following Your Inner Compass: https://tinyurl.com/y2bh8vvj
Follow us on Instagram: @ScienceOfHappinessPod
We’d love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
Find us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner, April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we have a special episode for you. When we did a series on art as medicine, we spoke with award winning poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, and put out a call to you to write and share your poetry with us. And we receive poems from all over the world.
TRACY: The other day, I wrote this poem for a little bird. I'd like to share it with you. This morning, before I see you, I hear your drumming, sporadic, staccato, deep and hollow, such a big echoing sound from such a small, feathered one just pecking wood.
DACHER KELTNER: Today we're going to hear and reflect on some of the poetry. We'll also dive deeper into what makes poetry a unique form of medicine for our minds. With Susan Magsamen.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: Poetry reduces anxiety and depression. It significantly lowers symptoms of mental health. It boosts emotional expression and processing and so, you know, we don't just want to survive, we want to thrive, right?
DACHER KELTNER: More after the break.
Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. In honor of National Poetry Month, we're sharing more evidence based research on the benefits of this ancient art form. Susan Magsamen is a neurology professor at Johns Hopkins and author of The New York Times bestseller, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, she says, both reading and writing poetry can impact stress levels.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: In a way, poetry acts like mindfulness. It reduces activity in the amygdala and it promotes relaxation, especially when you're reading it aloud or you're contemplating poetry.
DACHER KELTNER: Neuroimaging studies show that reading and writing poems can light up areas of the brain connected to memory.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: To rewire damaged areas or to move through alternate pathways of the brain where areas are not able to recover.
DACHER KELTNER: Not only can poetry help with cognition, it offers a meaningful way to process and express what we're feeling.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: There's a part of the brain called the Broca region, which is the language sort of center of the brain. It's the part of the brain that shuts down when you have experienced trauma, and you know the term, there literally are no words because there are no words, because you can't find the words. And we now know in creative arts therapies, when you are writing or creating art, it allows you to bring that out, to then find a narrative that you haven't been able to have words for and to re-engage the Broca region, which is pretty extraordinary.
DACHER KELTNER: As literary scholars well know, one of the major characteristics of poetry is its capacity to create symbols and metaphors.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: Poetry, through this idea of symbol and visual imagery that's created allows you to tap into that deep well of the unconscious.
DACHER KELTNER: This access to imagery, symbols and the psyche can help us process emotions.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN: Poetry gives us a form to express complex feelings, not just I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm good, I'm bad, but it helps to externalize and make sense of emotions. And so the Power Poetry right now isn't like an esoteric idea. I think it's something that we need to feel safe and feel whole and ultimately to flourish.
DACHER KELTNER: Next up, we'll hear poetry from you, our listeners. When we put a call out to you to write a poem and send us a recording, the responses were overwhelming and beautiful.
GUEST: Feathered friend, please lend me your long, long tongue, because, oh, how wonderful to have one like that secreted away in a coil, a coil.
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to this special episode of The Science of Happiness. In honor of National Poetry Month, it's time to hear some poetry from our listeners. First up Nina Escueta’s poem, They Tell Me to Go Home.
NINA ESCUETA: Mangoes, ripe and green to start off the day. Balmy breezes singing, whispering stay orange skies, painting fruit filled trees, bending with light cheese to pick for a night sweet ending. Sat by the window thinking of home of Jeepneys and caribou and green sea foam of friends and family. So close. But so far, one call, one day and one ocean apart.
Thousands of miles and I feel each one's weight. With each slur, hurled with each message of hate, confusion, longing and defiance, stew, go back to your country. I miss my home, but I belong here too.
DACHER KELTNER: Well, Nina's poem is timely and profound. There's a new science emerging, and we're part of it, of home, and it really speaks to what Nina's saying, that it's the sense of fruits like mangoes and the smell of foods and the breeze that you might feel. And then when she talks about that one call, and of course, that's mysterious, and we wonder what it is. And now separating her from family, and then I hear about what's happening with my students from different countries, and friends, and ICE detention centers, we know that violent separation is happening, and I think then we turn to the operative word of our political era in this moment, which is hate, the antithesis of this feeling of home, which is embracing and, and safe. And so I think sometimes we need poetry to, to really capture the feeling of the times. And that Nina's poem did that for me. Our next poem comes from Elina Hauki Perot, writing from Berlin, Germany, and its title is Patchwork.
ELINA HAUKI PEROT: I'm supposed to be following the recipe. But I don't know how to fold in broken cheese. The instructions don't mention how to fold the crumbling kind. I'm supposed to be preparing myself for winter, but my patchwork quilt of a soul has too many freight edges to keep out the cold.
I'm supposed to be setting roots somewhere, but where do you buy seeds for a home you've never seen? I'm supposed to make choices like a responsible adult. But I'm a child trapped in a fun sized body, lost in oversized shoes. I'm supposed to know what the heck I'm doing with my life, but I'm the poster child of impostor syndrome, a mannequin dressed for success, not surviving the crash test.
And yet somehow winter ends, cheese melts. Roots push through cracks because cracks let light in. Patchworks grow stronger with each stitch. Hard things become easy, and not because they change, but because we do. You stop searching for perfect answers and start asking better questions. What does burning smell like?
Is it the ashes of ruin or the smoky sweetness of a rebirth?
DACHER KELTNER: Life does feel like a patchwork, I think that I hear in Elina's poem. Hope. We don't follow the recipes of life. That's what this generation does. They're rejecting older recipes of what it meant to be a good person, and they're making cheese in their own way. And right now, in this, this time of crisis, our young people are really envisioning what happens after this kind of ugly, authoritarian time we're in, and I have faith too.
Here is David Barry's poem At Midday.
DAVID BARRY: At midday, the tender needles of the Douglas fir cradle, raindrops not yet stolen by the sun, a brush of the hand, and they are yours, diamonds dripping from your fingers. By touch or time, by gusts of wind from below the sloping hill, they must, against my longing, fall to the earth. It is evening now, and I hold a secret wish that in those unseen places away from touch and sun and wind, some drops remain, but I cannot know for sure I am not there. And I dried my hands long ago.
DACHER KELTNER: It's beautiful. I find David Berry's poem to capture kind of the complexities right now of our relationship to nature. And he has these rich, evocative descriptions of drops and touching them with his hand and the wind and the like. And on the one hand, I think you know when you look at the numbers of people who are enjoying national parks, over 300 million, and people who are gardening, and people who are getting out and enjoying the sky and hiking, all at record numbers coming out of covid. And we've profiled that a lot on the show, and he has very contemplative characterization of that of just feeling the senses and the wind and a reverential tone. And then at the same time, there's this worry, in some sense, that in touching the raindrops, human intervention, if you will, he eliminates the raindrops, and he worries and hopes that in unseen places, they're still there. I think that's how we feel right now in our relationship to nature, rightfully so, that our love of wonder and nature and biophilia. 40 years ago, when I was starting to really relate to nature, it wasn't as complicated. And now we know about climate crises and the disappearance of species and the plastic in the oceans. And so it's, it's more complex and mixed. And I liked how David's poem captured that.
Our next poem comes from Kat Dornian, and they sent us this poem from what is widely known as Calgary, and in the indigenous language is called Mokinstis. It's in the Blackfoot language, and the poem is entitled, Give Me Dust.
KAT DORNIAN: Give me dust, give me soil. Give me grubby knees, grass stains and bruises. Give me sand in my hair and bugs on my shirt. Fruit flies, butterflies, lady bugs and ants. The caterpillars falling from trees. The bumbles and buzzes of bees give me berries to dry in my pocket.
Give me rose hips, fresh peas and oak leaves. Leave an acorn a half chewed cherry, a sunflower seed. Leave a feather and give me a song. Call the crickets, nocturnal cats and chirpy bats. Give me the full moon, the blue moon and the Harvest Moon. Give me clouds when I'm out. Sunshine. When I'm in, gimme rain and snow and long nights filled with stars.
Give me wool and warmth and a cup of tea from fallen leaves, and when it melts, give me dust.
DACHER KELTNER: I was swept along on a journey into nature with Kat's poem, the rich, vivid detail of the encounters with nature of dust and bugs on shirts and and then the sense that it really reflects a merging of Kat and what is out in the natural world. And we've profiled that a lot in our show, coming out of the thinking of indigenous scholars like Yuria Celidwen, that we are nature, we are part of it. And I loved the ending, and it felt so, so strong, and it was almost like a battle cry, which is, you know, if I don't have this, give me dust, and maybe they are referring to the idea of just that's what life is.
Our next poem is from Carol Church, who wrote this in Highland Park New Jersey, and the title of the poem is Soul Sister
CAROL CHURCH: To my soul, soul sister, take off your bound up shoes. Turn things upside down. Wave your toes in the air. Imagine bubbles floating out of the tips of your toes or tendril, spiraling out, stretching for nutrients that feed you. Be that rich soil. Clear oxygen or cool waters or love that is always loving you.
Let your feet feel your home beneath you. Let your feelings pour out through your soul until you can feel the peace of rest tonight.
DACHER KELTNER: I think Carol's, Soul Sister is a plea for our times. It's a time of nxiety and depression rising and worry and a lack of trust in fellow human beings. I really feel that Carol is, whether it's for a sister or a deep friend, a soul sister, she's sensing the person is too bound up, and has forgotten the everyday joys and beauties of life. And I love Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist practitioner. He's always reminding us that you may feel fear and anxiety and pressure, but you just need to slow down, open your eyes, and you'll find the miracles of life. And Carol's poem is really a testimony to that, of putting the toes in the air and feeling your feet on the ground and feeling the wonders of nutrients and food and cool water. And once you just appreciate that, and we try to do that on our show, little moments of appreciation, then you'll find some peace.
We hope, hearing these poems calmed your amygdala and added something beautiful to your day. A big thank you to all of you for listening and engaging with our show. If you enjoyed this, consider leaving us a review and subscribing wherever you get your podcasts. More next time on The Science of Happiness, I'm Dacher Keltner.
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