Why do we rhyme?

Like, why do we take the time? Rhymes require more work.

But they also come with a perk. And science is showing us why. Okay, in all seriousness, people love rhymes.

They help us remember things, make us feel emotional, and can even connect us to others. And scientists have discovered why rhymes have that unique hold on us. Researchers have found ways to quantify the joy, relatability, and memorability of rhymes for people across cultures and ages.

So you’ll leave this video knowing why rhymes fill so many… pages. [♫ INTRO] Rhymes can be found all over poetry and song lyrics. You know, the things we enjoy in our free time. So if we’re choosing to surround ourselves with rhymes at every opportunity, they must do something for us.

And, naturally, when researchers tried to figure out what that something is, they looked to our brains for the answers. By that I mean that a couple of neuroscientists in the UK took brain scans using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI, while participants in their study read stuff. The participants read rhyming poetry that they found particularly moving, some unfamiliar sonnets, the beginning of an emotionally-charged novel, and a heating system installation manual.

So, hey, at least they gained some practical knowledge during the study. The researchers wanted to know how people’s brains worked when reading these different texts. And it’s not surprising that when the participants read stuff, they used the parts of their brains devoted to visually processing words, like the occipital and temporal lobes.

But they didn’t use those reading parts of their brains nearly as much when reading their favorite poems. Which the authors suggested might have been because the participants already knew the poems by heart. So they might have entered the study with a connection to those words.

And that mental connection translates into an emotional and physical response. The emotionally resonant stuff was found to be more moving. Literally.

It activated motor centers in the brain, like the cerebellum and the premotor cortex, which also give you shivers when listening to powerful music. And between rhyming poems and the novel, the poetry was rated by the participants as more emotional to read. This was true even for poems that weren’t chosen by the participants for being especially emotional.

So there’s definitely something about rhymes that makes our brains react differently than it does with prose, even though in both cases, we’re just reading words on a page. And those brain scans make it look like the special sauce is introspection. Specific parts of the brain, like the hippocampus, cingulate gyrus, and temporal lobe, are more activated by rhyming poetry than prose.

Those parts have been linked to autobiographical memory and other forms of inward thinking and emotion. So we naturally relate more to rhymes. But we don’t just rhyme because we enjoy them.

They also have a purpose. Like, rhyming can help you grasp new information. One study published in 2020 found that rhymes make us more willing to re-read passages and actually comprehend what we’re reading.

In this study, researchers used software that tracks where participants’ eyes moved while they read rhymes laid out in verse and in prose format. So both formats contained some rhyming words, but they were only obvious in the verse format where they were at the end of lines. And the researchers found that we spend more time with rhymes when they’re presented like that, and they help us understand the text.

Now, it’s not clear whether re-reading passages was the reason participants were able to comprehend them. And this study didn’t test whether we re-read rhymes more because we see the value in them or because they’re more confusing. But the correlation was there either way.

So regardless of why or how it all works, we’re more willing to re-read rhymes in poetry than prose, and it helps us take in the material. And those findings would have been enough to make this a cool study. But it’s an even bigger deal because these participants were reading the famous French poem, “Les Chats.” They saw similar trends to what’s been observed when people read poetry in English.

So, while that doesn’t mean these principles are true for all languages, it’s definitely a cross-cultural or at least cross-linguistic thing. And the utilitarian use of rhymes doesn’t stop at putting information into our heads. It extends to helping us keep it there.

Rhymes can help us hold onto information, especially when they’re at the end of a statement. For example, several studies in English have found that children could remember the names of things like made up monsters better when they were rhymed at the end of a sentence. When they were rhymed at the beginning of the sentence or put somewhere they didn't rhyme at all, kids didn’t remember the monsters’ names as well.

So scientists looked for something to explain that result. And they noticed that putting the rhyme at the end of the sentence added emphasis to the monster’s name, which might be what helped the kids remember it. Now, these kids were 2-4 year olds, so they weren’t reading poetry all by themselves.

Instead, this study had caregivers read the poems to children. When their caregivers paused to add emphasis to the rhyme, its memory effect was stronger, probably because the child’s attention was more directed toward it. And that means that the power of rhyming poetry spans both reading and listening.

One paper, published in 2016, compared a reading adult, a listening kid, and a listening adult on their ability to remember rhymed words that were read out loud. And the kid remembered the rhymes better than everyone, including the person who read them. So children are particularly susceptible to rhymes.

But some reports suggest that adults can also use rhymes to help them remember. The implications of that would be huge for adult populations that have trouble holding onto memories, like people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. A report from The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tells the story of how their poetry workshop has affected people in a dementia care setting.

One participant seemed disconnected from what was going on around him until the workshop facilitator started reading a rhyming poem. That’s when the participant suddenly recited the next line from memory. If poetry can help people access their memories at a point in life when they often aren’t able to, poetry therapy could be life changing.

The authors of this report suggested that rhymes help people use neglected memory centers in their brains and re-engage socially. Right now, we can’t quite hang all of those hopes on rhymes alone. Without studies that follow up over time, we can’t draw too many conclusions yet.

But wouldn't it be cool if rhyming really did provide those benefits? There are practically no drawbacks to reading a poem. Because of the way our brains respond to rhymes, we just get them better than non-rhymes.

Which is awesome because we can tap into that to connect with our emotions, memories, and each other. So, I will leave you with that, Or should I say, “See you later, alligator?” But if you like rhymes, you might enjoy our biweekly podcast SciShow Tangents. In every episode, our hosts Hank Green, Ceri Riley, and Sam Schultz begin by sharing a little poem on some theme in science.

Then the group riffs and competes on topics ranging from lasers to slime. So lovers of science and lovers of rhyme, can both check it out in the links below. [♫ OUTRO]