Many people may have the feeling that the beautiful rhymes in ancient poems, especially those with very regular rhymes, can make people’s mouths water even if they don’t understand the meaning behind the lines.
Rhyme generally refers to the arrangement of rhymes so that syllables with the same or similar vowels are repeated at regular intervals in order to achieve a harmonious flow of sound.
For example, Li Shangyin’s “Untitled”.
When we meet, it is hard to part, but when we meet, it is also hard to part, the eastern wind is powerless and the hundred flowers are withered.
The spring silkworm is dying before the end of the silk, the wax torch turns to ashes before the tears dry.
The mirror in the dawn is saddened by the change in the temples of the clouds, and the chanting at night should feel the cold moonlight.
The bluebird is eager to visit the Peng Mountain.
The end of each line has a common rhyme of “an”, and following the rhyme, you can’t help but want to finish the poem. If read aloud, the rhyme seems to instantly sublimate the mood of the poem, and the pleasure of reading it aloud comes to life.
The rhyme of popular lyrics has a similar effect, such as the lyrics of Jay Chou’s “Unspeakable Secrets”: “The most beautiful thing is not a rainy day, but the eaves where I have escaped the rain with you”, which also rhymes with “an”, rendering the subtle mood of love in a perfect way, sounding particularly beautiful and relaxing.
Have you ever wondered why rhyming words can make us feel comfortable?
Rhyming phrases will make us feel good about our experience – Tu Bugs Creative
Rhyming reduces the strangeness of information processing
From a cognitive science perspective, rhyming is an efficient strategy for chunking information – chunking is the processing of bits of information into small wholes that are easy to remember. Rhyming between poetic stanzas associates content with sound, enabling us to remember sentences by sound, reducing the unfamiliarity of written information, reducing cognitive difficulty, and reducing the burden on short-term memory. Cognitive neuroscience refers to the ease with which the brain processes information as “processing fluency,” and clever rhyming is a great way to improve this fluency.
For example, in the aforementioned “Untitled”, “an” appears at the end of the first sentence, and similar syllables appear in the following sentences, creating a “familiarity” that makes processing information easier and less cognitively demanding.
It’s easy to understand why nursery rhymes and primer poems always rhyme, because clever rhyming makes them catchy to read, and improves memory and learning.
Handling fluency brings aesthetic pleasure
Processing fluency theory suggests that the brain’s smooth processing of external information also affects our aesthetic experience.
A relatively new sub-discipline of cognitive neuroscience is called neuroaesthetics, which is an experimental science that combines neuropsychology and aesthetics with neuroscientific methods to explore why art, music, and other works of art can make us experience things in a pleasurable way.
Cognitive neuroscientist Christian Obermeier, who works at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany, systematically studied in 2013 how the rhythm of poetry can affect people’s aesthetic and emotional experiences. In the experiment, the scientists had their subjects listen carefully to carefully designed poems and then had them give these poems quantitative scores on a number of dimensions, such as how much they liked the poems and the level of pleasure they experienced. After statistical analysis, they found that people can’t help but enjoy poems that rhyme more than those that don’t rhyme, and experience more pleasure from the rhythm of the poems.
To further confirm the results of the experiment, in 2016, they designed a similar experiment again. In the end, they were not only able to fully repeat the main experimental findings from 3 years ago, but they further found that the effect of rhyming on how much people like poetry and how pleasurable they feel is not wife-related to the length of the rhythm itself. In other words, as long as it rhymes, it creates a positive emotional experience.
You may feel that these subjects’ personal feelings are too subjective. For this reason, Christian also introduced an additional, more objective experimental test, the event-related potential (ERP). They found that specific brain regions were less responsive to the electrical stimulation of rhyming versus non-rhyming poetry, i.e., rhyming poetry was less “brainy”.
The beauty of rhyming is something our brains enjoy – Tu Bu Creations
These studies, in part, show that rhyme can leverage phonetic similarities or consistency into a harmonious and consistent sound message, an aesthetic that puts our brains into a relaxed state of immersion and enjoyment.
Rhyme can increase the expressive and communicative effects of language
Walter J. Ong, an American communication scientist, wrote a book called Oral Culture and Written Culture, which focuses on the study of “colloquialisms”, or what we colloquially call “smooth talk”. In his book, he argues that colloquialisms are the main containers in which humans stored, remembered and passed on knowledge before the advent of writing. Every time we use a word, a phrase, a symbol, we are creating a container of information.
Walter Weng also made an interesting discovery: people have a natural trust in colloquialisms, which means that they can bypass their psychological defenses and slip right into their heads.
For example, “If you walk a hundred steps after dinner, you’ll live to be ninety-nine.” At first glance, when you hear such a pithy, rhyming phrase, do you wonder if it’s a lie, or do you believe it? I’m sure most of us have already written it down without thinking and without any effort at the same time, before we even have the chance to question it.
The jargon slipped straight into our brains | Picture Bug Creative
Why does the smooth talk produce such amazing results? This is because, for one thing, the catchy tone of words can make it easy to ignore the logical issues of textual content, and so simply relate things before and after; for another, rhyming phrases are particularly easy to remember, and can be remembered after hearing them once; for another, jingles are particularly easy to spread, and the repetition of a phrase more often makes it easier for people to deepen their knowledge, and familiarity is more pleasing.
Then, too, we may wish to use a few jingles or limericks in our daily lives to make our words and language more expressive and reach more people.
For example.
Like, in the look, add follow.
Science, awareness, and not getting lost.
Recent Comments