PODCASTArt As Medicine: The Science of Happiness

Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.

Learn how poetry can help your brain handle stress, process feelings, and spark insight.

Summary: This episode of The Science of Happiness is part of our series Using Art As Medicine. We explore poetry, one of the oldest artforms, powers our brains, calms our nervous systems, and reduces anxiety by opening doors into our psyche. Whether you're reading or writing it, elements like rhythm, metaphor and rhyme improve memory, cognition and even self-esteem. 

How To Do This Practice:

1. Find Your Moment: Notice the time of day when you feel closest to yourself. It might be early morning before the world wakes up, or another quiet pocket of time when your thoughts are unfiltered and your heart is open.
2. Set the Scene: Create an atmosphere that supports you. Play music that matches your mood or inspires imagination. Let it be soft and inviting, not distracting, just enough to signal to your body that this is a sacred moment.
3. Choose Your Tools: Use what feels natural. Journal, laptop, scrap paper, napkin, the format doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re ready to begin.
4. Write Without Interruption: Set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes. Let your pen or fingers move freely. Don’t stop, don’t edit, and don’t worry about making sense, just see what comes.
5. Welcome the Unsaid: Allow what’s hidden, half-formed, or surprising to emerge. 
6. Let It Be What It Is: When the timer ends, pause. Don’t rush to interpret or fix your words. You’ve just made contact with something real, let that be enough.

Today’s Guests:

YRSA DALEY-WARD is an award-winning poet and author. Her debut novel, The Catch, comes out June 3rd.
Learn more about Yrsa here: https://yrsadaleyward.squarespace.com/

Pre-order her book here: https://tinyurl.com/yanw6bb5

SUSAN MAGSAMEN is a Professor of Neurology at John Hopkins, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Your Brain On Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
Learn more about Susan Magsamen  here: https://tinyurl.com/33v8m5md

Read Susan Magsamen’s book here: https://tinyurl.com/426k87f2

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

Using Art As Medicine Series: https://tinyurl.com/k3mneupx

How Art Heals Us: https://tinyurl.com/yc77fkzu

Why Going Offline Might Save Us: https://tinyurl.com/e7rhsakj

How Awe Helps You Navigate Life’s Challenges: https://tinyurl.com/2466rnm4

Related Happiness Breaks:

How To Awaken Your Creative Energy: https://tinyurl.com/4fknd8ev

Making Space For You: https://tinyurl.com/yk6nfnfv

A Self-Compassion Meditation For Burnout: https://tinyurl.com/485y3b4y

Tell us about your experience with poetry. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

YRSA DALEY-WARD: I remember Roald Dahl and reading about kids that had really difficult lives and really like tough circumstances. And I identified with that as a child, because it was the same in my house. There were a lot of circumstances that were probably not the most conventional and difficult. So there was something about seeing children still be able to inhabit these worlds that were mystical and magical, and then holding this other difficult fact of not living with their parents, or their parents have died, or something like that. So the poetry in let's say James and the Giant Peach, for example, was just so funny and so poignant and loaded with meaning. And when I knew that you could do that, you could take the deepest parts of yourself, you could take those parts of yourself that maybe you're ashamed about or maybe don't fit in with other people, that even to this day, it's my reason to be because there are so many ways in which, you know, I don't feel maybe like I fit in with the world. But then when I write, it kind of translates it in a way that makes me see that we're kind of more alike than we're not. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari, one part of caring for ourselves that often gets overlooked is creativity, how making and experiencing art can help us feel more grounded, present and connected. So this mental health awareness month, we're exploring the science behind how art can be medicine. In our last episode, we talked about how visual art, things like painting and drawing, can be helpful, both personally and in clinical settings. Today, we're turning to something just as timeless, poetry. Neuroimaging studies show that reading and writing poems light up areas of the brain connected to memory and emotional processing. To share more about how poetry helps us navigate life's complexities, we're joined by award winning poet and author Yrsa Daley-Ward later, Dr. Susan Magsamen discusses what neuroscience reveals about how engaging in the arts can shape our brains and bodies.

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: When you're writing or performing poetry, the inner critic is quieted, and that enhances creative flow. It actually increases part of the prefrontal cortex that's related to self expression

SHUKA KALANTARI: More after this break. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Recently, our host Dacher Keltner sat down with poet and novelist Yrsa Daley-Ward to talk about how the written word can shape our lives. Yrsa has worked with artists like Beyonce and uses her art to advocate for mental health. Her debut novel The Catch, comes out June 3. Yrsa and Dacher discussed how poetry can help us find pockets of peace and offer honest reflections on life. Here's part of their conversation.

DACHER KELTNER: Yrsa, thanks so much for being with us. 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation. 

DACHER KELTNER: We're so grateful. You have such an extraordinary life and career in writing. Congratulations on your debut novel, The Catch. I'd love to know just a little bit more about, you know, the work you've done that really led to your writing poems and novels. 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: I feel like I've never done anything else. I feel like I came into the world with that. I was lucky enough to have a mother. She was a Jamaican immigrant, and it was very important for her to impress on me the need to read well and to write well. So we would read everything in my house. There was nothing off limits, and I think that being introduced to story and rhythm and metaphor so early just did something to my young brain. And writing is just the place that I go to tell the truth about myself and also to discover the truth as well, to discover what I think and what I feel. 

DACHER KELTNER: What do you think it did to your brain as a child? You know, the Greek philosophers felt that poetry was kind of the highest form of consciousness in the imagination. What do you think?

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Well, there's something that poetry does to the brain. I think there's the rhythm and the structure, but there's something about learning with poetry that helps you to understand different truths at once. And it's kind of like a bridge into more complex feelings, you know, so that we don't just think in the black and white and we think with all the colors as well, it kind of splits it up. And I think it can also help you to look at things in different ways. I really do believe it does that, those circuits that might take you. Longer, if you don't engage with that kind of work, get developed a lot sooner. And I just think it helps you to metabolize the world differently and sometimes in a more beautiful way. And who doesn't need that? We all need that.

DACHER KELTNER: So well, put you just gave me goosebumps. Eftychia Stamkou, who's a professor in Amsterdam, and I just did a paper on the imagination and poetry and writing, or some of our highest forms of the imagination, of going to worlds that don't necessarily exist in reality. And it's amazing how often imagination just comes alive during hardship. Do you find that to be true? 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Absolutely and I think imagination, I mean, what that can bring to you, if you feel like you're in a box or you feel stuck, it brings you into your body, into the present, even from a neuroscience perspective, I mean, that's a lot healthier for you than your nervous system spiking because you're in fight or flight or you're in survival. You can't be in survival mode and be deep in your imagination at the same time. You know we're soothing ourselves, as readers have been soothing ourselves with this all our lives, without even knowing about the science behind it. 

DACHER KELTNER: Place, always. You know in context is always so important to fiction and poems and place in home is sort of a challenge these days, you know, with our more itinerant ways, and you have an extraordinary background, yeah, you know, from being raised in the UK and then landing in South Africa and London and now in LA, you have a Jamaican mother. How do you sort of bring this all together in your sense of place, in writing, what have you discovered? 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: I have had a searching mindset, and I like to discover new things, and that sense of home is not fully crystallized for me yet, but I have been to a lot of beautiful places, and it does form as a gorgeous foundation for just noticing the art of noticing, the art of being aware and sensitive to things new and old that are around us. 

DACHER KELTNER: Does that make its way into your writing? As an act of noticing and contemplation? 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Completely, yeah, because it's nature. It's things that you it's people, places and things that you see. It's so sensual to be able to to not always see the world through your own filters, what's going on for you, but to look at what's actually there and what shows up every day. Nature shows up all the time for us, and we don't necessarily do anything for that joy. It just is. 

DACHER KELTNER: All the time. You're right. I mean, connection adds 10 years of life expectancy. I love your thesis. It's the opposite of depression. I haven't heard that in 40 years of thinking about depression. That's cool. Can you tell us about a time when poetry or fiction really was vital to you as a form of connection, or in your life?

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Definitely growing up. So I wasn't raised with my mum. I was raised with my grandparents, and they were very strict religious people. It was quite a substantial amount of time. I moved in with my grandparents when I was almost six, and I didn't leave there until I was going on 12, so that's a big chunk of your formative years. And falling into a story was like taking a dive into some mystical realm. It was respite. It was an alternative to what was really going on. Same with poetry, because of how it forms images in your mind, the rich imagery, the lives that other people live. And I've always found it so fascinating and so gentle, even if it's not, even if the story isn't, you always see yourself in a way.

DACHER KELTNER: Do you remember some of the first words you wrote as a child in a poem?

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Oh yeah, absolutely, I was obsessed with my big brother because I never saw him. He was in the army, and he ran away from home to join the army when he was just going on 16. And he goes, before I start this poem, please, may I introduce my darling brother, Rodney, who loves pineapple juice. He joined the army five years ago. He's very big and strong, and if you think he's a coward, you're definitely wrong. I like him a lot. He's very kind and nice. He likes all kinds of food, especially rice. But as all poems do, this poem now must end when I need him in brackets [all the time]. He's more than just a friend. Long life to Him, for there's no other who takes the place of my dear brother.

DACHER KELTNER: Oh, I'm curious how reading and writing affect you differently or similarly. You know, there's interesting research. Looking at how you know, reading poetry actually can activate the amygdala, which is usually something that's deactivated by writing and expressive writing. What's it like for you when you read and write? Do they feel like different things? 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Nobody's asked me that before. They're similar, but different, right? They do different things. The writing, for me, feels more like a clearing out a connection to source, whatever that is, and reading feels like it activates my imagination and empathy and connection with not even the author, but with the larger world.

DACHER KELTNER: In your writing and interviews, you've talked about how writing poetry has made you courageous and brave. It's given you the opportunity for that. Yeah, and we need so much courage and bravery right now in our world of authoritarianism and the return of blatant racism and shipping citizens off to prisons in different countries without due process, we need a lot of courage. And I would love to hear your story of how, with your identity, writing, poetry, becoming a public figure, taught you about bravery? 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Writing is just the space where that fear is gone. It is gone, and I'm not afraid to say anything, which is why it's so attractive to me. I guess it's like when people have a few drinks and then they're like, this is the real me. There's something about it that makes me feel braver. I was brought up super religious, and brought up to be afraid of the caregivers of very strict grandparents and afraid of everything. Really, I was so shy and people pleasing. I have elements of that, probably today, but there is something about the written word that I don't do that there, and so it does. It steals me, and I actually don't know how life would have been without this outlet. When you write, you permit yourself to access your memory stores, your imagination, your creativity, which we all have, whether it's painting a room or making dinner. And there's something about that that brings forth agency and also helps you to set things in motion. A lot of people say that when they write things down, the things come to pass. It's about seeing and organizing your thoughts for yourself.

DACHER KELTNER: You know you and your kind of conversations about writing have been bold and really forward thinking and saying really poetry isn't just beauty, it's medicine. We know it's good for your heart rate and inflammation and blood pressure and handling trauma, you know, going through difficult times, and it's starting to be implemented in nursing homes and hospitals and kids who have trauma. It's a lot of benefits from family bonding to creativity. What got you to the idea that poetry is medicine?

YRSA DALEY-WARD: One of the things that I really enjoy doing, I do a lot, is poetry performances. So I either do that with a musician, or sometimes it's acapella, and just the feedback you get from people, the way that we can connect when you just speak a poem in a room full of people, and everybody can feel something that can't be a mistake. You know, the date is right there. You feel it. They feel it. Like a circuit is happening. So it's got to be medicine, anything that encourages connection. And you know, they say that's the opposite of depression and all of this, isn't it? 

DACHER KELTNER: How do you recommend, in this spirit of democracy, for people to start writing poems?

YRSA DALEY-WARD: Find out when your moment is. So for me, my dream moment is when I'm fresh out of dreams. It's the early hours before anybody's up and before the day has had time to beat me down. That is a perfect time for me to just start. And when I say start, it's just taking the journal or the laptop, if you, if that's how you're, you know comes through your brain, and just writing uninterrupted for a good five to 10 minutes. 10 minutes is great. Five minutes if five minutes is all you have, and not judging you talked about it before, but not judging what comes out, seeing what's there, what you're working with, what lives inside you, writing into the unsayable. And I think that is just a fantastic way to discover what's going on with you, and it's something I suggest to everybody, whether they're the third novel level or whether they've never written before, because you'll be surprised. We're holding so many things that things get forgotten or things get pushed down, or we have things half processed. There's just so much that can happen if that's what you do. So that's what I suggest, simply just by beginning and don't judge it and don't edit it and don't correct it, just let that be your relationship with the pen.

DACHER KELTNER: Well, Yrsa Daley-Ward, it is an honor to be in conversation with you. I've learned. So much as have, I'm sure, our listeners and thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. 

YRSA DALEY-WARD: This was lovely. Thank you so much.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Hi everybody. Shuka here, we want to hear poetry from you. Our listeners. Send us an audio recording to happinesspod@berkeley.edu Introduce yourself by starting with my name is, and then share your poem. You might hear it on The Science of Happiness. Yrsa will be sharing her own unpublished poetry with us on our next happiness break, so tune in next week. Up next we hear from Dr. Susan Magsamen, who delves into the neuroscience behind Yrsa’s observations about poetry showing us how it literally can change our brains and bodies. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: We see that the way poetry works on the brain is that it actually facilitates deep reading and reflection, that encourages metacognition and closer attention. So you're actually fostering this deeper engagement. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: Stay with us after this short break. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka. We're getting deeper into the science of poetry with Dr. Susan Magsamen, a professor of neurology at John Hopkins, and author of The New York Times bestseller, Your Brain On Art, How The Arts Transform Us. Our producer Truc Nguyen spoke with Susan about how it can rewire weakened neural pathways and help us better process emotions.

TRUC NGUYEN: When Yrsa Daley-Ward says that poetry does something to her brain, it's not just a metaphor. And the use of metaphor in poetry isn't just decorative. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: A rough day is a metaphor, right? You've had a rough day or a rainy day, the brain region links that to physical sensation to something called the somatosensory cortex, and it actually lights up. It actually recruits sensory brain systems that make language more vivid and embodied. 

TRUC NGUYEN: Susan says, we're born with over 100 billion neurons and quadrillions of neural pathways. They're like roads connecting our brains, bodies and nervous systems.

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: It turns out that arts and aesthetic experiences are some of the best conductors of creating these synaptic connections that build neural pathways. 

TRUC NGUYEN: The stronger the pathways, the stronger the systems helping us withstand all the twists and turns in life. And remember when Yrsa was able to recite that poem she wrote 30 years ago? 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: The rhythmic and structured nature of poetry improves encoding and recall of information.

TRUC NGUYEN: Since poetry has this ability to deeply encode content and can be stored in different parts of our brains, it's like having the option to open another doorway when one is closed.

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: So let's say you have Alzheimer's and you can no longer recall through the hippocampus. There's other regions of the brain that are holding that rhythmic poetry that allows you to be able to recall it. It's also interesting that at the same time that we're encoding memory, we're also encoding this idea around emotion and empathy and perspective taking. 

TRUC NGUYEN: Qualities in poetry like rhythm, metaphor and rhyme sets it apart from other types of literature. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: Poetry is not necessarily designed to be storytelling, but it's really more around eliciting a moment or a feeling or an insight, and that's different than the way fiction or nonfiction is structured. Characteristics of poetry is this ability to be able to create symbols and metaphors that really, in essence, create a archetypal narrative in your brain, and a poem often creates a feeling and a picture for you, an image or multiple images, depending on the poem, and that's very different than fiction.

TRUC NGUYEN: So whether you're reading or writing it, poetry not only brings a dopamine boost, but it also helps us better understand our own stories and emotions. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: Poetry engages both hemispheres, the left hemisphere, which is more language and logic, and the right hemisphere, which tends to deal more with imagery or emotion. So it enhances this integrative thinking.

TRUC NGUYEN: Poetry also helps ease stress by calming the amygdala, the part of the brain tied to fear and anxiety, and it sparks the imagination.

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: When I think about poetry, I think about imagination, and also, you know this correlation between imagination and stress, if you're engaged in a creative task like writing poetry, it actually increases the prefrontal cortex, and this part of the brain called the Default Mode Network, which is part of that brain that allows you to daydream and mind wander,

TRUC NGUYEN: And it increases another part of the prefrontal cortex. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: The medial prefrontal cortex, that's related to self expression. So when you're writing or performing poetry, the inner critic is quieted, and that enhances creative flow. You could also think of it as you know self transcendent experiences, or where stress and ego awareness sort of diminish.

TRUC NGUYEN: The stressed out mind. Is like living in a cluttered house when there's too much stuff, it's hard to move around. 

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: We're only conscious of about 5% of what's really going on. The psyche holds so much content. And I think what poetry does is tap into the unconscious, into those things that we hold, but we don't necessarily have top of mind, if you will. And so poetry through this idea of symbol and visual imagery that's created allows you to tap into that deep well of the unconscious.

TRUC NGUYEN: Poetry creates space. Susan reminds us our brains keep changing and growing throughout our entire lives.

DR. SUSAN MAGSAMEN: It's really kind of a truth that does not get shared broadly, and I think that's why I call it Creative Aging. But it's really so important to know that you're not only playing the cards you're dealt with, right, that there's always a new hand when you're engaged. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: Remember, we want to hear poetry from you. Our listeners send us an audio recording to happinesspod@berkeley.edu you might just hear yourself on The Science of Happiness. Our guest next week is someone who's done it all, two Olympic gold medals, a World Cup title and a spot in the Soccer Hall of Fame. Abby Wambach joins us to talk about how to do hard things and why it's worth showing up even when it's tough. 

ABBY WAMBACH: A couple months after I retired, I got a DUI and my mug shot was on the ESPN ticker for like, a week straight. That was very hard. I was writing a memoir about my life, and I was trying to decide if I should include the DUI in the memoir, and as soon as I included that, I got to start living in the real world.

SHUKA KALNTARI: Thank you for listening to the Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Dacher Keltner is our host. I'm Shuka Kalantari, the executive producer. Have a beautiful day.