Shifting how we see:

An Interview with Dr. Guillaume Thierry

Linguistic relativity—the hypothesis that language can change how we understand our worlds—is a theory that Dr. Guillaume Thierry extends to poetry. A neuroscience researcher for leading studies on poetry’s detection in the brain, Dr. Thierry defines poetry as “music with meaning.” As he says in this interview, “The incredible thing with poetry is it’s such a condensed form of power, of information, of imagery, of music, it’s so concentrated and pure that it’s like a jewel. It's like looking straight at the diamond rather than going around the landscape, and that concentration means through reading one poem, you can change.” What can this capacity for change say about our societal—and individual—trajectories? How can interdisciplinary communion help us find which questions we should to ask?

When we first began our review around the idea that poetry’s impact on the brain was distinct from that of other linguistic forms, your work was one of our primary inspirations. “TS Eliot argued that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” begins your research article “Implicit Detection of Poetic Harmony by the Naïve Brain,” and we would love to learn more about what drew you to explore this statement.

I started researching writing and poetry through more technical studies surrounding Shakespearean grammar with Phil Davis, a Liverpool professor of English literature. He's one of the leading Shakespeare scholars in UK, and we were put in touch by a neuroimaging professor. This first meeting was extraordinary because we immediately felt that we could talk to one another, we were interested in what each other was doing even though we were from different worlds. But there was also this clash because I was fundamentally interested in making sense of the world and understanding reality and the process of the mind. But very soon after we met, he said I want to know how Shakespeare moves the mind. To me, that sounded amazingly wonderful, a great inspiration, but I was already thinking “how are we going to do this? How am I going to measure, how am I going to quantify how Shakespeare moves the mind?

From there, we started an extraordinary adventure where we had to make many concessions to try and convert ideas into experimentation: commonalities that made sense for him as a scholar, but that would also fulfill the criteria of rigor and scientific value that I would abide by. In the end, we managed to reach the point where we had a story and a test that would be interesting. When you talked to him, he must have mentioned this study’s subject, the “functional shift.” In Elizabethan times, this was a stylistic effect to change the status of words from adjectives to nouns, verbs to nouns, and nouns to verbs which was believed to create a dramatic or rhetorical effect. We found exactly that: we demonstrated that the brain has a space of interest or fascination or surprise linked to these manipulations of language. That the brain can cope with the meaning of the word that's been transformed by this functional shift was extraordinary.

This research was the origin of my incursion into poetry. As you know, it's not a very common theme for research. The main reason is that, first of all, you need to know something about literature if you want to study these phenomena, you need to know what questions to ask. But then the other problem is rigor: you need to have an experiment that is well-built and follows the rules of conduct. I think serendipity has been the perfect excuse to study these untraditional things, it's always a matter of luck when meeting people with questions that fascinate you. If you’re not fascinated, probably nothing will come out of it, but if you get hooked by the topic, by the potential of these questions, then you just go for it.

The Cynghanedd story you cited started with scholars from Bangor University which is a traditional Welsh university. Cynghanedd is an ancient form of poetry which is deeply anchored in history. It's also a very difficult form of poetry because it combines phonology, rhythm, and musical rules. I was immediately fascinated by the idea of testing the brain’s ability to detect these rules because they are quite complex. If the brain showed sensitivity to these patterns, it would probably license or justify the reason why Cynghanedd ever existed. That was the starting point: I was wondering if there was any natural basis for such complex rules. And so, we started off with a very simple experiment to determine the possibilities of the brain latching on to these patterns. If the brain can see the difference between things, you're going to see a completely predictable measurable response: you would know exactly when this detection happens and how it happens.

Lo and behold, we found exactly the response that you would expect if the brain were able to pick out of four different poetic conditions the one that was correct by the rules of Cynghanedd. What's extraordinary is that it takes hours and hours for people to craft Cynghanedd verse that follows the rules–only scholars can tell immediately if a verse is not legal or not, because it is not an easy thing to do. For the paper, we also asked the participants which of the poems they thought sounded “good.” It was the simplest possible wording: we couldn’t say, “What do you think sounds like Cynghanedd” because they didn’t know what Cynghanedd was.

When I saw these results on the screen, I was completely blown away. I was hoping for something interesting, but I wasn't thinking we would have such a clear, sharp contrast between responses of the brain to correct and incorrect poetic forms. It was very exciting.

 How do you see the intersection of poetry and science relating to humankind’s trajectory?

I believe that the only way we can go forward with this weird humanity in which we find ourselves (and hopefully it's going to last long enough) is to show what we're capable of. We are capable of magnificent things, but unfortunately, we also have a very strong tendency towards self-destruction. Hopefully, the creativity and the instinct towards survival and socialization’s power will prevail. This is my sincere hope, and I'm sure it's yours too.

One of the things that characterizes us, humans, is our fascination with information—our trying to understand the world, trying to understand where we are and why we are here, what's going on, trying to understand the diversity, and you cannot do this if you're absolutely focused on a single tunnel vision of life or a reality. I have very diverse interests. I'm not a musician but I'm passionate about music. I'm interested in games and theater and immersive experiences, illusions, communication, scientific discoveries, all these things which are only remotely connected to my teaching and research. But they are all important to complete the picture of life—I can't just renounce any of them. I think it's really important to connect in different ways, and this is how we can hope to survive and communicate with a broad range of people. We can't become isolationists or completely focused on ourselves as society is becoming more and more selfish and ego-centered and selective. It's absolutely terrifying, so we need to find a way forward by reviving curiosity, interest, and diversity.

You write that your core research question is “how the human brain crystallises knowledge and builds up a meaningful representation of the world around it.” This question reminds us of the simultaneous pith and magnitude found in good poetry. What was your path towards cognitive neuroscience and this question in particular?

This is the game that I've been engaged in for 20 years—I just can't stop. A problem that I have is that, instead of having a very incremental, focused, single-track research, every time I see a question that I think has got potential, that's interesting from a theoretical, global point of view, I am going to pursue it just to try to understand what's going on. That's why my portfolio of research is very unusual—I'm a bit crazy and I'm not going to change. If anything, I'm going to get more crazy researchwise. I've used brain imaging and eye tracking to explore very different questions. I wouldn't say that I just jump on whatever passes through my field of vision–I'm very selective about the questions that I choose. My point is that I don't want to become a world expert in any particular field, I don't care about that: I'm only interested in questions which I think have good value. There are lots of questions, of course, that have good value so the trick is to be selective enough that you don't go mad because the potential is quite high, I can tell you that!

One of the core topics that I've become profoundly interested in is bilingualism. The management of two different languages by one brain is a very complex problem. Another topic of interest is linguistic relativity—I don't know if you've heard about this, linguistic relativity is the idea that language can change your thought patterns and the way you perceive the world and how you function. This theory is very controversial, and if it’s controversial it interests me.

Now you can imagine that linguistic relativity is very, very relevant for poetry. I hope you would agree that sometimes when you read a poem, you feel that somehow something has changed. It's a bit like a crack in the ice, like Okay, this is a change of paradigm, there was a before and an after to when I've read this. And now I see the world differently. This could be true of books, of course, but books are hundreds of pages. The incredible thing with poetry is it’s such a condensed form of power, of information, of imagery, of music, it’s so concentrated and pure that it’s like a jewel. It's like looking straight at the diamond rather than going around the landscape. That concentration means that through reading one poem, you can change. There are some poems that I've read where I thought I had been smacked in the face–in a beautiful way, but smacked in the face nonetheless.

I think that feeling relates to the concept of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can change your perception and conceptualization of the world. This is an old idea formulated quite famously in the 1940s by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The irony, and this is what's fun, is that originally I didn't believe that theory at all, I thought it was complete rubbish when I first encountered this idea. But I finally agreed with friends and colleagues to put it to the test and, to my great surprise, I discovered that there is very strong science supporting that language can change the way you think and feel and perceive the world. Anyway, I'm not going to give you a summary of all the research surrounding this topic because then we'll be here for the next 25 hours! But it’s been great to be a part of that adventure.

Researchers have noted a genetic influence on our musical tastes, and we wonder if the same is true for poetry. Having introduced Cynghanedd, a traditional form of Welsh poetry, to Welsh speakers with no prior knowledge of Cynghanedd, do you feel that the results would have been different had you introduced this form to participants from a different culture?

I think it's possible that you would find some similar responses in non-Welsh speakers. For example, some might say that the Cynghanedd poetry sounds more harmonious, or perhaps their brain detects a different response for the Cynghanedd than the other poems. But I think not knowing the language is probably going to confuse the signal. Still, what was amazing is the complete lack of knowledge in our Welsh participants—they had no idea what we were testing.

What are some of the benefits or difficulties you’ve encountered when applying traditional neuroscientific research approaches such as EEG (electroencephalogram) analysis to how we perceive art?

The way many people perceive neuroimaging and neuroscience from the outside world is that, Oh, you can see activity in the brain where it happens. The first thing I’d like to say is that EEG doesn't show you where in the brain things are happening at all. With EEG, you put electrodes on the head and you measure the scalp activities that are produced by the brain. What I'm interested in is the kind of motivation and the appearance of particular markers, particular waves that tell us what's going on in the brain in response to a stimulus at a single point in time. So, EEG is in fact a mind reading machine and—I'm not kidding here, this is how fancy this is—even though people struggle to understand how it works, we really are reading the mind.

Just for an example, in the Cynghanedd study, we were able to see that the brain detects that formally perfect condition out of the others with absolute certitude; it tells you. I know this is special, this is something I can pull out from the others when I hear it, it's different from all the others. The participant doesn't have a clue if you ask them, so it's the brain talking to you instead. This machine doesn't tell you where it happens the brain, which is the obsession of neuroimaging researchers who put people in scanners and look at areas of the brain that change in their blood flow or oxygen activity. But theirs is a completely different question: where in the brain does the stimulus provoke activation and how much does it activate when I'm exposed? With EEG, we don't care where it happens. Instead, I only want to know that the brain is responding in a way that tells me what's going on and when.

In response to your question about the difficulties one may encounter and how can one use this information to study the brain in relation to art or the processes of poetry, I think the answer to this question is the following: there is no difference between studying poetry, cognition, attention, perception, memory, language, you name it. It's all just a phenomenon, it's a process. The important consideration is, how are you getting to get an answer to your question? There are no particular difficulties in studying topics like art and poetry once you discover how to formulate the question in a way that the method can answer it.

Are there any gaps in our understandings of poetry’s effects on the brain that you hope future research might explore?

The next step would be the reformulation of the question. One thing I think is a very important question, which is still unresolved, relates to poetry's music. It’s not just music, it's music with meaning–that would be my definition of poetry. Of course, music without words can convey meaning but on a very low level of accuracy and in a very vague fashion. The meaning conveyed by poetry, on the other hand, is very, very sharp. I think that deserves to be tested, that deserves to be analyzed and we have some good evidence of some good correlates between poetry and music processing in the brain. We also have a great library of findings about language processing of semantics, grammar, sentences and so forth. Now, one of the future developments will be to demonstrate the particular status of poetry as an extraordinary hybrid between music and language: it’s not just meaning, it's meaning with extra power; it's not just music, it's music with profound and intricate meaning.