Blue – A Blue Health Poetry Book
10th October, 2025
The Neuroscience of Poetry and Water
Did you know I wrote and photographed a book with nearly 150 poems, reflections and meditations.. and that my friend and fellow blue health coach Emma Childs kindly created some order to my scattered collection? I am super proud of this book and would love for you to enjoy reading it.
I thought I would share some of the neuroscience of poetry and water, so let’s dive into how rhythm, surprise, and place shape the creative mind. If after reading about how AMAZING poetry is for your mind, you would like to buy a copy of this book (a great gift for any water lover)… Please visit HERE.
When you spend time near water, your brain begins to slow and reorganise. The default mode network, responsible for reflection and imagination, becomes more active — the same network that comes alive when you read or write poetry. Both states invite inwardness: a shift from doing to noticing.
The Brain by the Water’s Edge
Natural sounds: like waves and rain, engage brain regions linked with calm attention and emotional balance and whilst these patterns are irregular they are not chaotic… and that gentle unpredictability helps loosen tight focus.
Poetry, too, holds this quality. Its rhythm draws you in, yet leaves enough space for interpretation. You attend, but without strain – something that us applied psychologists call “soft fascination” (a form of engagement that restores rather than depletes). Soft fascination is one of the superpowers the coast offers when out coaching in partnership with blue space.
Rhythm and Cadence
Poetry moves the body as much as t does the mind. Rhythm, repetition, and pause activate the auditory cortex, motor planning regions, and basal ganglia and your pulse and breath often fall into step with the line.
But the moments that strike most deeply are often those that break the pattern — when a rhythm falters or a thought takes an unexpected turn. This is something found in comedy too… something I talked about with Curly Steve during a recent podcast (found here) – when a punchline is not as expected. Variations in cadence activate the anterior cingulate cortex and dopamine pathways that respond to novelty and reward. In neural terms, surprise is a spark: it wakes attention, sharpens emotion, and invites reflection.
This is why poems that resist symmetry feel alive. Like natural soundscapes, they keep the brain alert but not alarmed — a state known to foster creativity and insight.
Metaphor and Embodied Thought
Metaphor draws language back into the body. When a poem describes something felt or seen, sensory regions of the brain respond as if the experience were real.
Read beside moving water, and that sensory overlap becomes richer: sound, rhythm, and image converge. The insula, which integrates internal and external sensation, helps the mind register both the literal and the imagined at once.
Pleasure and meaning follow through the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex, the areas that process aesthetic experience. Poetry doesn’t simply communicate; it creates a bodily echo of understanding.
Flow and Dissolution
When you enter a writing or reading flow, activity in the prefrontal cortex decreases and the self-conscious part of the brain loosens its grip. Time expands. Associations form freely.
The consistency of natural movement such as a shoreline, a current, the small pulse of sound, supports that state. The nervous system steadies and imagination starts to drift.
In essence
Both poetry and water invite rhythm without rigidity, focus without effort, beauty that lives in variation.
They remind the brain that creativity isn’t about control, but about noticing what happens when you let a pattern shift.
So the next time you take yourself to water channel your inner poet and sea what emerges. Don’t be surprised if you are out coaching with me at the shoreline if we arm up our creative minds with a blue haiku.
References (Harvard style)
Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1989). The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
O’Sullivan, J., Reilly, R. B. & Lalor, E. C. (2019). Visual cortical entrainment to motion and rhythmic stimulation in poetry perception. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 401. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00401
van Praag, C. D. G., Garforth, J., Hines, L. & Lawton, R. (2017). The psychological benefits of greenspace and blue space: A systematic review of experimental evidence. Environmental Research, 158, 350–364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2017.06.014
