A neuroscientific stance on poetry and its clinical application

Neuroscientific research has increasingly explored the brain’s engagement in artistic activities. Poetry, a dynamic integration of sensations, imagination, memory, language, and sensorimotor enactment, presents a unique challenge in this emerging field. Beyond mere stylistic embellishments, its phonological structures, metrical patterns, and rhetorical figures are crucial to aesthetic experience. This paper reviews recent neuroscientific findings to elucidate how poetry distinctly engages the human mind, focusing on the interplay between non-conscious cognitive processes and conscious awareness. Building on this evidence, we propose a neuroscience-informed poetry therapy framework that integrates cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology with the receptive, expressive and symbolic (RES) model, providing a theoretically grounded rationale for structuring therapeutic interventions according to progressively engaged cognitive, emotional, and self-reflective processes. We argue that rather than activating entirely unique brain dynamics, poetry orchestrates common cognitive processes in distinctive ways, producing a state of aesthetic consciousness that is transformative for both poet and reader.