The development of neuroscience-based theories of mind-culture relations and the plasticity of the brain suggests an approach to the history of emotions that treats historical cultural artifacts, such as poems, songs, and images, as traces of the cultural patterning of neural pathways. Based on work by history of emotions theorists such as William Reddy and the Ottoman literature specialist Walter G. Andrews and cultural neuroscience theorists such as Shinobu Kitayama and Steve Tompson, the paper will examine the case of bonding, separation, and separation-related emotions reflected in Ottoman panegyric and love poetry and instantiated in Ottoman social structures. It will advance a hypothesis that Ottoman culture scripts not only social behaviors but shapes the internal architecture of the brain and consequent unmediated “emotional” reactions to real-world events. My argument will rest in part on visualizing computational data derived from the programmatic analysis of digital transcriptions of the divans of the late 15th and early 16th century master-poets Baki and Necati. Beyond demonstrating how Ottoman poetry may constitute a repeated brain-shaping “cultural task”, the paper will suggest that if brain-patterning behaviors and their consequences can be identified and linked, this opens up possibilities for evidence-based histories of emotions and emotional communities that would enhance fruitful exchanges among neuroscientists, psychologists, social scientists, and “humanities” scholars. Moreover, it will suggest that a humanistic approach to ‘brain science’ might be a useful theoretical platform for an emergent history of emotions field in Ottoman cultural studies.