Sunday, September 15, 2013

Neuroscience Haiku--Poetry in Psychology








Brain plaques and tangles
Memory loss, dementia
You are someone else.


This is but one of many haikus that Eric Chudler (from Neuroscience for Kids fame) wrote for his new book, The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku.  This book combines my love of the brain and love of words and poetry in such an enjoyable and informational manner.  You can use these Haikus as topic or class starters, as clarification, or as a lesson in itself about a term.  Each poem is accompanied by an explanation and cover a wide variety of neuroscience topics.  Chudler also uses humor, puns, and straight learning in his poems.  While I like them all, here are a few of my faves.









Fresh neurons arise
Call it neurogenesis
New tricks for old brains.



EEG awake
Muscles paralyzed, eyes move
Paradoxical.


Tyrannosaurus
A very large stressed reptile
You're a nervous rex.


Strange homunculus
Little man inside the brain
My, what large fingers.


Large, small nerve fibers
Melzack, Wall control theory
Closed gate, reduced pain.


Do get this book--it's a great addition to your arsenal of classroom teaching tools.



For some context, here is Wikipedia's entry on haikus in English:
Haiku in English is a short poem which uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.[1] It is a development of the Japanese haiku poetic form in the English language.
Some of the more common practices in English include:
  • use of a caesura or kire represented by punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break[1] to compare two images implicitly.

Posted by Chuck Schallhorn

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i'm a robot, so are you.
modern scientific view.
scientists have proved it's true.
and all the experts have concurred,
doubting it would be absurd.
other notions will not do.
i'm a robot, you are too.