Lawful systems dynamics in how poets choose their words

This paper presents a quantified study of the use of words by seven famous male poets. The key measures are the waiting times between the invocation of new words and the complexity or informational entropy of word usage as the poem unfolds. The main stochastic finding is that the emergence of new words is a Poisson process. Each poet thus has a distinctive rate constant reflecting his likelihood of introducing new words. In all cases cumulative entropy was a logarithmic function of 1+time (i.e., number of words) into a poem. Each poet is therefore also distinguished by the slope of his entropy curve and final entropy value. These findings and a series of statistical results were used to generate a mathematical profile of the creative qualities of each poet. The results bring an aspect of human language and creativity into two families of curves found throughout physical and mental nature and indicate adherence to stochastic and deterministic laws, including the second law of thermodynamics. These findings point to the existence of deep and lawful mental structures governing human cognitive and emotional functioning

Cognition · Creativity · Entropy (arrow of time · Linguistics · Logarithm · Mathematical analysis · Poetry · Poisson distribution · Statistics · Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics · Computer Science · Mathematics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Statistical Mechanics and Entropy

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