Remember in high school, when you had to read the entire Divine Comedy — and said to yourself, “I’ll never major in literature?" 

Unsurprisingly, brain recordings from experts in a particular discipline — be it literature, painting or music — show that experts value the types of art that interest them more positively than do people with little background on it. 

But, just because you didn’t major in literature doesn’t mean that you can’t be moved by a poem. In a recent study conducted in Italy and published in the journal Brain Sciences, non-literature students showed higher emotional reaction to excerpts from the Divine Comedy than did literature students, despite the fact that the literature students were able to appreciate and recall it better. The researchers attribute this to 'emotional attenuation' in the literature students. 

So if you are reading a poem and wishing you knew more, think again: it might be more emotionally impactful on you, the less you know about it.