There’s even some scientific evidence that poetry changes the way we think. The arrangement of poetry, even the clearest, has different conventions to continuous prose. This presents enough of a challenge to get our brains working differently. Research by Philip Davis and the neuroscience department of Liverpool University discovered that readers of Shakespeare, when they came across an unusual but totally comprehensible grammatical construction, would show a spike in neural activity. Even though the readers understood what was being said, their brains were shocked into activity. The requirement to concentrate in the moment helped me stop regretting the past and fearing the future in the negative mental spiral characteristic of depression.