Brits dichteres Helen Mort doet voor haar PhD aan Sheffield University onderzoek naar de wijze waarop neurowetenschap en poëzie elkaar kunnen complementeren. Zij heeft deze maand een blog opgericht om hierover met anderen van gedachten te wisselen:

Poetry, mysterious enough to those who write it, remains still more mysterious to neuroscience (discussing synaesthesia, Ramachandran concedes ‘we don’t have the foggiest idea of how metaphors work or how they are represented in the brain’). Experimental processes seem very distant from the intuitive, contextual acts of reading and writing. I don’t believe we’d benefit from attempting fMRI scans on poets absorbed in scribbling a masterpiece any more than we’d gain from using a sonnet to explain a brain lesion. But that doesn’t mean that poetry and neuroscience can’t have an interesting dialogue.

In 2007, Jonah Lehrer published a great book called ‘Proust was a Neuroscientist’, about the ways in which artists from Whitman to Woolf have artistically anticipated or pre-empted key discoveries in neuroscience. His contention is that real insight comes from combining different ways of exploring the world: ‘the reductionist methods of science must be allied with an artistic investigation of our experience…the experiment and the poem compliment each other. The mind is made whole’.

Lees meer op Poetry on the Brain.