Comments on: A poem is a dance with the other lobe

By: Art on the Brain by The Other Lobe of The Brain

Art on the Brain by The Other Lobe of The Brain — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 03:16:00 +0000

[...] kinds of experiences one has in art. A former student and I approached a similar topic writing a blog post about poetry. Now Katie discovers this piece from ”Psychology Today” published in January that [...]

By: Susan Salk

Susan Salk — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:50:50 +0000

Hi Jim,
I love this poem. I haven’t logged on as I’ve been so busy with my blog (updating it 3-4 times a week), but today stopped a minute to read this. What a treat.

- Sue

By: Jim Stellar

Jim Stellar — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:42:25 +0000

Eva, Bronwyn,
In a previous comment conversation on entrepreneurship we go into a nice conversation about risk in the comment section. I just wanted to point out here that perhaps risk and the “ability to run with ambiguity” are processed by the same limbic system brain circuits. For example, animals without much of our vaunted cerebral cortex follow the Matching Law of operant psychology in allocating time/effort to alternatives that produce different leves of reward. Coming to a conclusion about the value of something as represented in Damasio’ book, “Descartes’ Error” is part of what started this blog. I am tempted to see all of this as what we have been calling other lobe processing that is massively informed by the experience of a student in doing it … and maybe in the real world. Poetry slam anyone?
-Jim

By: Bronwyn Lommel

Bronwyn Lommel — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:38:03 +0000

@ E. Fernández:

Interesting point about the innate ability to run with ambiguity. It seems we do that merely by making educated (or at least conditioned) assumptions in the simpler situations you speak of. These sub- or semi-conscious snap judgements make it possible to parse the world around us and, as you say, cope.

If we had always to be dealing, on every front, with the more complex ambiguities that I find so tantalizing in poetry, the arts and even in science (which we humans love to call ‘concrete’ – and yet!) we might well be paralyzed by that.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment!
Bronwyn

By: E. Fernández

E. Fernández — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:48:16 +0000

Low-level processing of sentences copes with ambiguity extremely well, so well, in fact, that we hardly notice when a sentence could mean something else. It has to, because there are many ambiguities in sentences. Consider “the painting of the neck of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel” — on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is there a painting, or a neck?

The coping mechanism is built-in preferences for (generally) simpler structures. No wonder poetry is so hard and so stimulating. What a thought-provoking post!