In a nutshell

Poetry is deeply rooted in human cultures. Despite its universality, the neural mechanisms of poetry appreciation are rarely studied, probably because of its complex nature. Here, taking advantage of recent methodological developments in cognitive neuroscience, we combined artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, and crowdsourcing to investigate how the uniquely structured format of poetic genres facilitates poetry appreciation.

Our results reveal that the structured format renders poems predictable across multiple timescales and facilitates the perceptual and conceptual grouping of poetic contents. This finding further suggests that listeners can capitalize on forms of language contents to parse continuous speech streams. Our novel endeavor illustrates how topics in humanity such as aesthetics can be approached from interdisciplinary yet coherent perspectives in a scientific way.