“Great poetry is felt thought” – Javed Akhtar

But why is there a huge variance in how much each of us can feel that thought?

Someone hears a line of poetry and can barely control their tears.
Another says, “I don’t get it. Boring!”

A crowd of people from the world over stand in front of a painting.
Some are mesmerised & feel something shift internally. Others check their phone.

Even across art forms there is contrast. I’ve personally been deeply impacted by poetry and lyrics but hardly ever made sense of any painting.

In short – It’s not the art. It’s the person meeting it. The long version is more interesting….

1. The Big 5 Personality Traits (and the Big One that matters)

Psychology breaks personality into the Big Five traits – Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness & Neuroticism. But when it comes to art, one trait keeps showing up in research: Openness to Experience.

Openness is your brain’s comfort with emotions, imagination and ambiguity. Studies consistently show that people high in openness:

• Engage more deeply with art
• Report stronger emotional reactions
• Experience aesthetic “chills” more often

Openness predicts how intensely people feel aesthetic emotions — things like awe, being moved, or feeling absorbed in an artwork. Some people are just more psychologically receptive to art.

They are not necessarily more intelligent or cultured. Just wired to feel it more.

2. Art as a Mirror

This is where it gets even more human & individualized. Art hits hardest when it reflects your own life.

A love song feels sacred if you’ve accumulated enough memories to attach to it. A hip hop anthem about winning against your struggles could feel deeply personal to some but noise to others. 

In other words, art doesn’t always move you because it’s objectively powerful (while there could of course be great art & mediocre art as per critics). It moves you because it intersects with your story.

3. Need for Cognition

While simple is good, as we evolve our desire for complexity increases. Our threshold levels to feel intellectually stimulated rise. Think why gamers play in “Expert” mode, why we like complex mystery shows or something like Game of Thrones with hundreds of characters and storylines. The same goes true for art and poetry. Eventually we have an urge to understand things that are tough to understand, and get a kick out of it.

Psychologists call this Need for Cognition — how much you enjoy effortful thinking. If you enjoy mental complexity, you may derive pleasure from art that requires interpretation. If you prefer clarity and structure, abstract art might feel frustrating instead of profound. Neither is right or wrong. It’s just how your brain prefers to work.

I’ve personally always enjoyed finding hidden meanings or stories behing song lyrics. Was recently blown away by how each line of Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar is hip-hop diss track royalty! No wonder it got multiple Grammies 🙂

4. Different Art Forms, Different Wiring

The variance across art forms is mainly because each activate different parts of your personality & brain:

Poetry activates:

• Language processing
• Narrative imagination
• Internal dialogue

Paintings activate:

• Visual pattern recognition
• Spatial reasoning
• Color and form perception

Music engages emotional and reward circuits more directly.

So sometimes it’s not that you “don’t like art.” You just prefer a different interface.

Let me end with a quote from one of the first art & poetry related content that had a permanent impact on me – Dead Poets Society

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”