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:

A 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 three lines of up to 17 syllables,^[1] traditionally in "5–7–5" form.^[a][2][3]

• allusion to nature or the seasons.^[4]

• 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

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