This Is Your Brain on Goldbarth

I confess to being a serious Albert Goldbarth fan. His poetry is like no other, and it engages me both at the first crackle of brilliance and after repeated delving. So I ask myself a good question: What’s up with that?

What follows here makes no claims to truth; it merely offers some idle personal speculation that wanders off in search of clues to why I find Goldbarth’s offerings so consistently enticing. In short, it is a near-scientific answer to a non-scientific question.

In ceremonies before the first Boston Bruins’ hockey game following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the Boston Garden crowd famously and loudly commandeered the singing of the national anthem. The singer, Rene Rancourt, surrendered the microphone and his performance, simply joining the crowd to create an instant YouTube favorite. This went beyond patriotism — although there was a fair amount of jingoism involved in the bombings’ aftermath. They just wanted to sing together. They needed the comfort of something familiar, in this case some familiar music. Later in the week, Neil Diamond proved that any well-worn tune would do by uniting the Fenway Park crowd with, of course, “Sweet Caroline.”

The Boston Garden episode prompted an article in Smithsonian (24 April 2013), in which Randy Rieland laid out some new theories about how we react to the music we hold dear. Based on MRI scans, McGill University researchers Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre concluded that “when people listened to music they liked, the limbic and paralimbic regions of the brain became more active. They’re the areas linked to euphoric reward responses, the same ones that bring the dopamine rush associated with food, sex, and drugs.”

Since the Rieland article brought up sex and drugs, consider Axl Rose bumping aside Neil Diamond. For no other reason than the near rhyme involved, replace “Sweet Caroline” with “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Different audience but same result, because since any music familiar enough to enable us to predict what will come next will reward us when we’re proven correct. Rieland points out that “Some have suggested this has its roots in primitive times when guessing wrong about animal sounds was a matter of life or death. What was needed was a quick emotional response to save our skin, rather than taking time to think things through. And so, the theory goes, our response to sound became a gut reaction.”

However, a second theory draws us closer to Albert Goldbarth’s poetry and takes things beyond gut reactions, a familiar song, and the raw emotion of the Boston Garden event. What about unfamiliar music to which we have no emotional attachment? Valorie Salimpoor of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto played thirty-second snippets of songs that were new to a group of volunteers, and then asked them to place bids to buy each track. MRI scans of the subjects’ brains revealed that when the nucleus accumbens region — that part of the brain associated with pleasant surprises, or what neuroscientists call “positive prediction errors” — became active, the volunteers bid higher. In other words, we enter into the experience of listening to music with expectations; Salimpoor calls them “templates.” We create different templates for different types of music. When a piece fits the pattern (“Sweet Caroline”), our limbic (reptile) brain sends out dopamine and we are satisfied. When it exceeds our expectations by adding something original and new (which “Sweet Caroline” does not), the nucleus accumbens, a.k.a. the “pleasure center,” fires off.

Goldbarth’s poetry comforts me; in his apparent need to preserve all that is immanently precious in all his universes and multiverses, he makes poems that I find caring, often gentle. But that response is probably sited in yet another part of my brain. I’m writing here about a presumed outcome and comfort’s near allies — satisfaction, gratification, pleasure — in the patterns of a familiar poetic voice. If we’re going to allow Guns N’ Roses, why not the comfort of recognizing the zigzag rhythms, breathtaking language, and expansive riffs of a Goldbarth poem? We expect these, and he never disappoints. And somehow he manages to reach beyond the predictable, leaving Neil Diamond and Axl Rose far behind. We never know exactly where Goldbarth is going, but we know it will be a good ride. There he goes again.

I don’t propose that “euphoric reward responses” or “positive prediction errors” become critical terms for discussing tastes in poetry, but they seem to be working in this case. Here’s what I get when I combine these theories and offer a speculative answer to that question I posed in the lede. We read a fresh Goldbarth poem (start readers’ MRI brain scans now), we recognize the template, and our limbic and paralimbic regions shoot us a dopamine rush (is it sex, drugs, or a good poem; dopamine alone can’t be trusted). Then a whole host of surprises tickles our nucleus accumbens region — and we are in the best of both worlds.

The question of whether the relatively new science of neuroaesthetics will have any impact on literary rejection slips is one for another time — and one that ponders the growing belief that the solution to every problem can be found in a well-funded laboratory. I have to admit, though, that the image of editors sliding in and out of MRI scanners while electronically submitted manuscripts flash before them is nearly as practical as it is funny: “We’re sorry to report that the poems you sent several seconds ago did not activate the proper regions of our brains. The blood flow just wasn’t there.” Then comes a Goldbarth poem; the technician runs out from behind the little window, whooping, “Pulitzer! Pulitzer!”

. . . based on a piece first posted on The Georgia Review website.