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You are here: Home / 2015 / Archives for March 2015

Archives for March 2015

What Can Bonobos Tell Us about Ourselves?

March 1, 2015 By Frans de Waal

When newspaper headlines recently screamed that both humans and chimpanzees are “natural born killers,” this was obviously hype. Not only were some articles accompanied by a picture of two playing chimps, with their mouths wide open the way apes laugh (which was mistaken for aggression), there was a much deeper flaw. The media frenzy was instigated by a Nature paper that reported 152 confirmed, inferred, or suspected killings among wild chimpanzees, mostly by males—and only one suspected killing among wild bonobos.

Why was the second data point ignored? Is the peacefulness of a close relative not worth reporting on?

Frans de Waal talks in Berkeley

The media were eager to follow Winston Churchill’s line, who long before he earned his reputation as a warrior wrote: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”

No one denies our warrior potential, but Churchill may have gotten the interludes wrong. Contemporary hunter-gatherer groups co-exist peacefully most of the time. This probably applied even more to our ancestors on a planet with extremely low population densities. We may need to turn Churchill’s dictum around and speculate that our lineage experienced long stretches of harmony interrupted by brief interludes of territorial confrontation.

We simply don’t know. This is what is so puzzling about the assumption that humans in a “state of nature” (as if such a thing ever existed) would be waging continuous war, and the accompanying assumption that human prehistory is best understood from the male perspective. Violent scenarios inevitably turn around males, with females being the prizes rather than the engines of evolution.

I call it Single Quadrant Anthropology (SQA), because even though every human evolutionary scenario has two genders to work with, and the behavior of two equally close extant ape relatives to consider, only one out of the four possible comparisons is favored. It is all about males and chimpanzees. The male focus has given us the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis, books about the adaptive value of rape, or how the human brain is first of all a male brain that advertises its fitness to females. The chimpanzee focus is recognizable in books with depressing titles such as Demonic Males, and uplifting ones such as The Better Angels of Our Nature, which promote this ape species as the only realistic model to understand where we come from.

Not only are bonobos ignored, they are actively pushed out of the picture. They are too peaceful, too female-dominated, too gentle for the taste of many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. They simply don’t fit.

In 2009, Kent State University came out with a press release under the shocking headline “Man Did Not Evolve from Apes.” Kent State had been involved in the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, also known as “Ardi,” a 4.4-million-year-old fossil from Ethiopia. Inevitably, creationists and intelligent-designers jumped on the misleading press release as a gift from God. The confusion arose because a scientist on the Ardi team, despite being blessed with the bonobo-like name of Owen Lovejoy, concluded that Ardi’s physique was too different to have come from a chimp-like forebear. Ardi’s less protruding mouth and relatively small, blunt teeth clearly set her apart from the chimpanzee in which males are equipped with long, sharp canines.

But what if we descend not from a blustering chimp-like ancestor but from an empathic bonobo-like ape? The bonobo’s body proportions—its long legs and narrow shoulders, even its grasping feet—seem to perfectly fit the descriptions of Ardi, as do its relatively small canines.

Why was the bonobo overlooked? What if the chimpanzee, instead of being an ancestral prototype, is in fact a violent outlier in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage? Ardi is telling us something, and there may exist little agreement about what she is saying, but why do I always hear the drums of war while listening to evolutionary scenarios. This has been going on unabated since Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey.

Bonobo are most of the time marginalized. The recent genome data confirm that bonobos and chimpanzees are equidistant to us, and genetically exactly equally similar to (or different from) us. Yet, most anthropology texts about our ape ancestry mention the species only to say how lovely and charming they are, immediately followed by how we can safely ignore them. They are not to be taken seriously. Even their endangered status has been held against them. Anthropologist Melvin Konner once advocated attention to chimpanzees rather than bonobos by saying “And in any case, chimps have done far better than bonobos, which are very close to extinction.”

I have no trouble with the conclusion of the authors of the Nature paper, led by Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota, according to which chimpanzee violence is a natural behavioral tendency that is not a product of human interference. The interference hypothesis perhaps made sense in the days when Jane Goodall maintained a banana camp for her apes, but those days are long gone. Most of the evidence for violence in the wild now comes from chimpanzee communities that never received any extra food from humans. I have witnessed enough chimpanzee violence first-hand to understand what they are capable of, and have little doubt that field workers are right that chimps use violence to achieve dominance or expand their territory.

No, my beef is rather with the exclusive focus on one ape species and one gender, and the highly speculative nature of the claim that we have continuously been at war since the split between ape and human lineages. Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) is entirely lacking from before the Agricultural Revolution of about 12,000 years ago. We have no data to make any claims about warfare before this time.

Consider a different scenario. Let’s say we descend from peaceful bonobo-like apes, which mingled at their borders without any violence, the way wild bonobos are known to do today. Instead of fighting, they have sex and groom each other. Like Ardipithecus, our ancestors were anatomically similar to bonobos and slowly developed more aggressive and territorial tendencies, which erupted into full-blown territorial combat only once we settled down and collected land and livestock. This was the main cause of warfare.

In the meantime, an offshoot of the ape branch, the chimpanzee, also became more violent, perhaps because of higher population densities or other reasons related to resources, but its behavior never resembled warfare in the human sense. It did not consist of one organized army meeting another, but was more like opportunistic raiding behavior, so that a comparison with warfare is problematic. The above scenario is equally compatible with the current knowledge about our history and prehistory as the bloody scenario reflected in the media headlines.

I for one would love to see science consider all options. This means inclusion of the female point of view—female reproduction, cooperation, competition, and care for offspring—as well as serious consideration of the make-love-not-war bonobo. The species may be embarrassing to some scholars the way 1960s hippies were to their parents, but it is time for us to explore all four quadrants of comparison rather than limiting ourselves for no good reason to just one of them.

 

Franciscus Bernardus Maria “Frans” de Waal, PhD is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. De Waal’s most recent book is The Bonobo and the Atheist.

This essay originally appeared in This View of Life, an online magazine that reports on evolution the way that Darwin imagined it—as a theory that applies to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life.

Filed Under: Science

How Stress Kills Our Ability To Feel Compassion

March 1, 2015 By Carolyn Gregoire

Stress isn’t just bad for our physical and mental health — it may also inhibit our ability to empathize with others, according to new McGill University research.

The study, recently published in the journal Current Biology, found that a drug that blocks stress hormones can increase the ability of both humans and mice to “feel” others’ pain.

The researchers studied the phenomenon known as “emotional contagion of pain,” a key component of empathy which has to do with our ability to experience the pain of strangers.

Previous research by the same team has shown that both mice and humans have this ability, particularly when the person in pain is somebody they know. That research also showed that stress levels rose in mice and humans when they were around strangers, inspiring the researchers to investigate a potential link between stress and empathy.

In the first part of the experiment, the researchers gave mice metyrapone, a stress hormone blocker, which caused the mice to react to strangers in pain the same as they responded to cagemates in pain — thereby suggesting a boost in empathy. Another test found that when the mice were put under stress, they showed less empathy towards their cagemates.

The researchers explained that biochemical changes related to stress seemed to be preventing emotional contagion in the mice.

“We found what in some sense might be thought of as the ‘secret’ to empathy; that is, what prevents it from occurring more often between strangers,” says Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal. “The secret is — quite simply — stress, and in particular the social stress of being in close proximity with a stranger.”

In a second test on humans, students were paired with either a friend or a stranger, as asked to evaluate the pain of their partner when holding their hand in ice water. When the undergraduates were then treated with the stress hormone blocker, they showed a greater empathy towards strangers — they both reported a greater experience of pain, and also showed more pained facial expressions and bodily movements when witnessing their partner’s pain.

The findings suggest that the stress response may play an important role in dictating how we respond to social situations.

“It is quite intriguing indeed that this phenomenon appears to be identical in mice and humans,” Mogil says. “First, it supports the notion that mice are capable of more complex social phenomena than is commonly believed. Second, it suggests that human social phenomena might actually be simpler than commonly believed, at least in terms of their organizing principles. This is an emerging theme of much research currently ongoing in my lab; when it comes to social behavior, ‘mice are people too.'”

However, while this study didn’t note any gender differences in empathic response, previous research has shown that stress has a different effect on empathy and prosocial behavior for men and women. Earlier this year, Italian researchers foundthat while stress undermines empathic abilities in men, but boosts these abilities in women. Namely, their research showed that stress rendered men more self-centered and less able to distinguish their own emotions from those of other people.

“To be truly empathic and behave prosocially it’s important to maintain the ability to distinguish between self and other, and stress appears to play an important role in this,” lead researcher Giorgia Silani said in a statement.

 

Carolyn Gregoire is a Senior Writer at the Huffington Post, where she reports on health and wellness, psychology and human behavior, and brain science. She has discussed her work on MSNBC, The TODAY Show, and The History Channel, and has spoken at TEDxYouth and the Harvard Public Health Forum. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the science of creativity, with psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, to be published by Penguin Random House in January 2016.

Reprinted from Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How Far Can and Should Your Compassion Go?

March 1, 2015 By Thomas Plante

We all want to live in a more compassionate world, don’t we? Who wouldn’t want more compassion, kindness, and graciousness in our community and world? And with such horrific stories reported daily in the press about terrible self-centeredness, aggression, brutality, and cruelty it is all the more reason to engage in an all-out effort to do whatever we can to support compassionate behavior. Right?

But what is our part in creating a more compassionate world? We might desire compassion and kindness from others but do we offer it ourselves? How far are we willing to go to be compassionate?

I was struck recently by the message of an engaging and very articulate homeless activist,Matthew Works(link is external), who spent about a month giving talks here at Santa Clara University. His message, in a nutshell, is that the faith community, most especially Christian churches from all of the various denominations, should routinely open their doors to the homeless for shelter. He complains that as a homeless person himself (from Boston which is certainly a challenging environment for living outdoors, especially this winter), too often Church communities open their doors to worshipers during scheduled services yet lock them tight when their services are over leaving those who truly need shelter and support, the homeless, out in the cold. He makes a good and perhaps prophetic point: faith communities who take their religious and spiritual beliefs and perspective seriously should do much more to help the homeless and let their church buildings be safe havens for those most in need. After all, regardless of your religious affiliation what do you think would please God more? Beautiful worship and liturgical services or caring for those who suffer such as the homeless?

It is a terrible tragedy when those who suffer the most and have no shelter are asked to fend for themselves while so many people of faith have so many (and perhaps too many) material resources. Of course, homelessness is a highly complex problem without simple solutions. But his point begs the question regarding what really is the purpose of religious communities when so many people are sadly at risk for violence, suffering, and death without adequate shelter in communities across the country.

It is very easy to talk a good line about compassion but it is very challenging to actually perform compassionate acts. While homelessness may be just one of numerous problems needing more compassion it well illustrates the startling contradictions of what we espouse and what we actually do. If we truly believe that we need more compassion and kindness in our communities what are we really willing to do to achieve this ideal? Think about it. I know it is hard to be more compassionate for a multiple set of reasons and certainly people have busy lives but if we stop and think about it carefully we may find ways to develop a more compassionate world that we all vitally need.

So what about you? How do you demonstrate compassion? Is it enough? How much is enough anyway? What do you think?

 

Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., ABPP is the Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor and professor of psychology at Santa Clara University and adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.

Filed Under: Opinion

Habits of Highly Compassionate Men

March 1, 2015 By Kozo Hattori

I remember being a very compassionate child. While watching “The Little House on the Prairie,” I cried my eyes out when Laura couldn’t give Pa a Christmas gift. But 12 years of physical abuse and being forced to the confines of the “act-like-a-man box” wrung most of that compassion out of me by the time I reached adulthood.

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

As a survivor of abuse, I had promised myself that I would never lay a hand on my children, but here I was abusing my beloved son.

Dr. Ted Zeff believes that only compassionate men can save the planet.

I knew I had to change. I started withempathy, which led me to compassion. I committed to a daily meditation practice, took the CCARE Cultivating Compassionclass at Stanford University, and completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I read and researched everything I could find on compassion.

I found that the more compassion I felt, the happier I became.

Convinced that I had found an essential ingredient to a happy and peaceful life, I started to interview scientific and spiritual experts on compassion, trying to find out what made a compassionate man. Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

From these interviews and research, I compiled a list of what makes a compassionate man.

1. Learn to see compassion as strength

Most events I attend that discuss compassion are predominately attended by women. When I asked Thich Nhat Hanh how we could make compassion more attractive to men, he answered, “There must be a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of compassion because compassion is very powerful … Compassion protects us more than guns, bombs, and money.”

Although many men in society see compassion and sympathy as feminine—which translates to a weakness in our patriarchal society—all of the compassionate men I interviewed view compassion as a strength.

Dr. Hanson noted how compassion makes one more courageous since compassion strengthens the heart—courage comes from the French word “coeur,” which means heart. Dacher Keltner argues that Darwin believed in “survival of the kindest,” not the fittest. Dr. Ted Zeff, author of the book Raise an Emotionally Healthy Boy, believes that only compassionate men can save the planet. Zeff argues that “the time has come to break the outdated, rigid male code that insists that all men should be aggressive, thick-skinned, and unemotional”—an excellent description of the act-like-a-man box that I tried to live in.

The compassionate men I interviewed agree with the Dalai Lama when he said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

2. Have compassionate role models

All of the compassionate men seemed to have role models that supported their compassion instinct. Marc Brackett gives credit to his uncle, Marvin Maurer, who was a social studies teacher trying to instill emotional intelligence in his students before the term “emotional intelligence” was coined. Over 30 years after teaching in middle school, Maurer’s “Feeling Words Curriculum” acts as a key component of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s RULER program. Similarly, Marshall Rosenberg, author of the book Nonviolent Communication, constantly mentions his compassionate uncle who cared for his dying grandmother.

A role model doesn’t necessarily have to be living, or even real. Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself, cites Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi as a role model for compassion. Dr. Rick Hanson posits Ender from the science-fiction novel Ender’s Gameas a compassionate role model. Certainly, Jesus and Buddha are obvious role models of compassion. The key is to treat them like role models.

Role models are not meant to be worshiped, deified, or prayed to. They are meant to be emulated. They pave the way for us to walk a similar path. Can we turn the other cheek and love our enemies like Jesus asked us? Can we transcend our ego and see all things as one, like the Buddha did?

In contrast are individuals who were not guided by positive role models. In his book From Wild Man to Wise Man, Franciscan friar Richard Rohr describes what he calls “father hunger”: “Thousands and thousands of men, young and old … grew up without a good man’s love, without a father’s understanding and affirmation.” Rohr, who was a jail chaplain for 14 years, claims that “the only universal pattern I found with men and women in jail was that they did not have a good father.”

Scott Kriens, former CEO of Juniper Networks and founder/director of the 1440 Foundation, concurs: “The most powerful thing we can do for our children is be the example we can hope for.”

3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes

All of the compassionate men interviewed broke out of the “act-like-a-man” box. At a certain point in his life, Dr. Rick Hanson realized that he was too left-brained, so he made a conscious effort to reconnect with his intuitive, emotional side. When Elad Levinson, program director for Spirit Rock Meditation Center, first encountered loving-kindness and compassion practices, his first reaction was one he claims is fairly typical for men: “Come on! You are being a wuss, Levinson. No way are you going to sit here and wish yourself well.” So the actual practice of compassion instigated his breaking free from gender stereotypes.

Ted Zeff cites a study that found infant boys are more emotionally reactive than infant girls, but by the time a boy reaches five or six years old “he’s learned to repress every emotion except anger, because anger is the only emotion society tells a boy he is allowed to have.” If society restricts men’s emotional spectrum to anger alone, then it is obvious men need to transcend this conditioning to become compassionate.

Dr. Doty points to artificially defined roles as a major problem in our society because they prevent men from showing their vulnerability. “If you can’t be vulnerable, you can’t love,” says Doty. Vulnerability is a key to freedom from the “act-like-a-man” box, for it allows men to remove the armor of masculinity and authentically connect with others.

Both Dr. Doty and Scott Kriens emphasize authenticity as a necessary pathway to compassion. Kriens defines authenticity as “when someone is sharing what they believe as opposed to what they want you to believe.” This opens the door to compassion and true connection with others.

4. Cultivate emotional intelligence

In his book Raising Cain, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson argue that most boys are raised to be emotionally ignorant: “Lacking an emotional education, a boy meets the pressure of adolescence and that singularly cruel peer culture with the only responses he has learned and practiced—and that he know are socially acceptable—the typical ‘manly’ responses of anger, aggression, and emotional withdrawal.”

In contrast, most of the men I interviewed were “emotionally literate.” They seemed to see and feel things with the sensitivity of a Geiger counter. Tears welled up in Doty’s eyes a number of times when he talked about compassion. Hanson explained how he landed in adulthood “from the neck up” then spent a large part of his 20s becoming wholeagain. Much of Chade-Meng Tan’s Search Inside Yourself training that he developed for the employees of Google is based on emotional intelligence developed through attention training, self-knowledge, and self-mastery.

Similarly, Father Richard Rohr leads initiation groups for young men that force initiates to face pain, loneliness, boredom, and suffering to expand their emotional and spiritual capacity. It is no coincidence that these initiations are held in nature. Nature seems to be an important liminal space that allows boys and men to reconnect with their inner world. Dr. Hanson is an avid mountain climber. Ted Zeff advocates spending time in nature with boys to allow their sensitivity to develop.

5. Practice silence

Almost all of the men I interviewed regularly spend some time in silence. They’d hit “pause” so that they can see themselves and others more clearly. When our interview approached two hours, Dr. Rick Hanson asked to wrap it up so he would have time for his morning meditation. Meng Tan had just returned from a week-long silent meditation retreat a few days before our interview. Scott Kriens started a daily sitting and journaling practice almost ten years ago that he rigorously practices to this day.

Father Richard Rohr practices Christian contemplative prayer, which he says leads to a state of “undefended knowing” that transcends dualistic, us versus them thinking. Rohr argues that true compassion can’t happen without transcending dualistic thinking. “Silence teaches us not to rush to judgment,” says Rohr.

Self-awareness through mindfulness practices like meditation, silent prayer, or being in nature allow compassionate men to embrace suffering without reacting, resisting, or repressing. Thich Nhat Hanh says that mindfulness holds suffering tenderly “like a mother holding a baby.” That poetic image is backed up by more and more research, which is finding that mindfulness can help foster compassion for others.

So the path to making more compassionate men is clear: Understand compassion as a strength, get to know yourself, transcend gender roles, look for positive role models—and become one yourself. If that sounds too complicated, 84-year-old Marvin Maurer sums up being a compassionate man in five easy words, “Be in love with love.”

Kozo Hattori is a writer and counselor at PeaceInRelationships.com. His current book project is titled Raising Compassionate Boys.

This article was originally written by Kozo Hattori, M.A., for Greater Good, where it first appeared.

Filed Under: Lifestyle, Personal Story, Practice

Reading Fiction Improves our Ethical Skills

March 1, 2015 By J. R. Thorpe

The book, and even the simple act of reading, sometimes seems under threat of extinction. After a study in 2006 revealed that people “reading” text on the Internet only actually read about 20 percent of the content — (they skimmed the content in an F-shape, looking at the beginning of each line and then checking for important words) — it’s been yelled from the rooftops: Reading is over! We’ve forgotten how to do it! Tablets are killing our ability to digest text! All books will soon be recycled into packaging for our new iWatches! But science remains resolute, pointing out the many different ways in which reading still influences our lives — and our brains. And there are many: from stress reduction to brain evolution to memory and empathy, reading is a pretty powerful tool. Careful where you point that novel.

We absorb text in huge amounts every day, and are only gradually discovering just how much its packaging affects how we understand it. Studies have shown, amongst other things, that red text makes us read and understand far slower (it makes us anxious), and that being exposed to fast food logos quickens our reading speed. Everything from font to placement on the page affects us. It’s not just a one-way transmission of information from page to brain; instead, we’re perpetually negotiating and shifting in how we react and what we retain.

Rest assured that reading is still a profoundly simple (and, it turns out, calming) act. Here’s a list of just seven of the amazing things that science has figured out about reading and the brain.

1. Reading reduces stress even more than music.

Your library is great for your mental health. In 2009, the University of Sussex did a study that showed that half an hour of dedicated reading is better for your stress levels than several other more traditional methods of relaxation, like having a cup of tea or listening to music. It reduced stress levels by up to 68 percent, which is pretty significant.

Scientists think the reason is partially escapism, partially physical focus: complete immersion in a book means the body is less focussed on its own tense muscles, and relaxes.

2. You don’t read more slowly on paper than you do on a screen — but you might remember more.

Before 1992, studies seemed to show that books were on the way out: readers looked as if they were comprehending text more slowly on a physical page than they did on a screen. Since then, however, studies have been a bit more diverse — largely because we’ve got so much more text and so many more types of screens — and scientists aren’t sure that’s actually the case.

You may, however, retain less information from the story if you’re reading a tablet than if you’re reading a physical book. Annoying for Kindle owners.

3. Reading might have evolved our brains.

Dr. Maryanne Wolf, in her bestselling book Proust And The Squid, has a theory: the invention of reading, several thousands of years ago, prompted our brains to evolve, allowing us to assimilate information differently. Reading, for Wolf, is one of the crucial elements in human genetic and intellectual history, and has a pretty huge role to play in how we think, work, record, and remember.

The theory is still debated — but either way,Stanislas Dehaene, in Reading In The Brain, points out how completely ridiculous it is that our brains, which first existed simply to survive on an African savannah, can now happily comprehend Shakespeare.

4. We actually react physically to metaphors in books.

 A study by Emory University revealed thatmetaphors are actually more physical than we think they are — at least the ones about texture. They compared peoples’ MRI scans when they heard metaphors that used texture (“She had a rough day” was the example they gave), to when they heard the same statement without a metaphor (“She had a bad day”).

The results? On hearing the texture metaphor, the part of the brain that activates when we actually touch something lit up. We’re genuinely feeling the metaphors we read.

5. Reading fiction improves our ethical and empathetic skills

Reading fiction — immersing yourself in the life of another and seeing the world through their eyes —  has always anecdotally been good for broadening one’s outlook. But now there’s hard science to say it actually makes us more empathetic.

To be fair, the study (done, again, at Emory, who are doing a lot of work on books and their interaction with the brain) focussed entirely on the kind of fiction that’s explicitly about character, from Anna Karenina to the steam-of-consciousness modernists like Virginia Woolf. But the results were pretty unequivocal: after reading them, subjects were more empathetic and emotionally intelligent, able to “feel” the movements of the characters in the movement areas of their own brains.

6. Reading intricate characters prompts the brain to ‘write’ them.

The brain has numerous ways of interpreting and remembering letter symbols; it develops a symbolic language to help it. But one of the most fascinating ways in which it copes happens when it’s reading something particularly complicated and unfamiliar, like kanji or calligraphy. It turns out that the brain actually “writes” the letter; the part of the brain associated with physically making text lights up, as if it’s physically moving a pen over the lines of the symbol.

7. Poetry boosts our memory.

Poetry, it turns out, stimulates our brains in much the same way that music does: it links to the right half of the brain, which regulates emotion. It’s also prone to send us into a self-reflective, memory-boosting state, particularly when reading well-known poems we love. Poetry also lights up the areas of the brain that concern memory and switch on when we’re relaxing. Call it the “poetry trance.”

 

J.R. Thorpe is a writer for bustle.com, where the article was originally published.

Filed Under: Books

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