I actually find that psychology is helpful in understanding this, but poetry does a much better job of capturing this sensation of being alive. Allen Ginsberg put this into words very well in a quote here

“I’m a stenographer of my mind. I write down what passes through it, not what goes on around me. I’m a poet” – Allen Ginsberg

Here is a favourite Ginsberg poem, as I am mentioning him. It is extraordinary to me that this poem is over 50 years old, it still seems so very modern.  Here is it being read by Ginsberg here on blip.fm and here is the text:

Allen Ginsberg A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955

This poem has no very obvious rhyme, though I think it has very subtle use of metre. The power of the words in the poem seems to be to contradict a pure objectivist view of language – that is a mechanical manipulation of formal symbols.

The scientific approach that does seem to offer a possible way of thinking about this poem and it affect is through embodied cognition, as written about by George Lakoff, for example in the fabulously titled and influential ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things‘. Within the ‘embodied cognition’ view the meaning of words can not be separated from the nature of human biological capacities. One cannot understand words without having had related experiences – perhaps indeed being human.

Lakoff does not directly talk about poetry (to my knowledge), though he talks a lot about Metaphor, a central part of all poetry. I think there is an opportunity to approach poetry from an embodied cognition perspective and learn about poetry and cognition in doing so.

The catalyst for me wanting to write a blog has been my starting to use Twitter, and its corporate version Yammer.   Their use as communcations tools is well documented.  Perhaps because of my background in cognitive science research, perhaps because I have always been interested (some would say obsessed ) by observing my own psychological reaction to the world, I have been interested from my first use in the psychological experience of using these tools.   And I think they have a possibly very powerful effect.

The starting point for my discussions on this was probably a discussion I had with Yishay Mor (@yishaym ) which he wrote up as Twitomania .   He wrote it very well – better than I would have, but since then I have become much more relaxed about the psychology of Twitter.

Other articles on Psychology and Twitte

There has been a lot of articles in convential media about perils of Twitter and Facebook, most of which are of little consequence. I do not follow refereed psychology journals enough to have come across formal psychology research on the issue – but would be very interested to hear of such articles. The nearest I have, and by far the best articles I have read on the subject are a series of articles for Psychology Today

1. Understanding the Psychology of Twitter from March 27, 2009.Talks about Twitters as narcissists, quite negative
2. More on the Psychology of Twitter Includes disussion of Susan Greenfieds attack on Twitter
3. Wrapping It Up: The Psychology of Twitter. The most interesting of the three articules as it disusses with read users,

Inaddition there are several popularly written articiles worth listing

• The Psychology Behind Twitter from April 2008

Twitter and Group Dynamics

The best analogy I have found from Psychology so far is of Group Psychotherapy – though I would want to stress it is an analogy.  I don’t mean that we should think of Twitter as actual psychotherapy.

There are many uses and features of Twitter that have nothing to do with groups – people use it as a personal journal, for list keeping, for communication between other computer programs and so forth – activities where arguably the group is unimportant.  These activities are not really of interest to me, as they are not using the most noticable thing about Twitter – the interaction between large groups of people.  Twitter without other people is not really Twitter.

Factors in Group Dynamics

Irvin Yalom in ‘The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy‘ in discussing group psychotherapy divides the group experience (from a therapeutic point of view) into 11 component processes, many of which have analogies for any group experience:  (quote from p3-4).

1. Instillation of hope
2. Universality
3. Imparting of information
4. Altruism
5. The corrective recapitulation of the primary family group
6. Development of socializing techniques
7. Imitative behaviour
8. Interpersonal learning
9. Group cohesiveness
10. Catharsis
11. Existential factors

I feel that these groups are not actually basic and mutually exclusive, but they do form some good starting points for discusision.