"Haiku & Brain" Study

Dear participants,

Many thanks for your interest in finding out more about our “Haiku & Brain” study.
We are a team of haiku poets (from The Haiku Foundation) and experimental psychologists (from LMU Munich) interested in exploring how readers understand haiku.

Haiku – the briefest form of poetry – attempts to capture the poet’s experience of a ‘moment’ in very few, concrete and unadorned words (17 syllables or less) and share it with the reader. Originating in Japan, haiku are now written in many languages, and there is a rich scene of English-language haiku.

English-language haiku are constructed in a particular way. Typically, they consist of two – at first glance unrelated – images, and the reader may wonder feel puzzled at first how they fit together. Understanding the haiku requires the reader to fuse the images into a coherent whole, thus recreating the moment the poet meant to convey. Achieving this is sometimes accompanied by an ‘aha’ experience, the sudden experience of insight. This trajectory makes the reader an inherent part of the poetic process.

What we, in the “Haiku & Brain” research group, wish to understand is how this process of understanding evolves in the reader’s mind and brain. To this end, participants in our experiments read a series of haiku, and we record their eye movements while they scan the poems and have them rate their reading in various ways. In addition, we record the ongoing brain-electrical activity (the EEG) during reading and image the brain areas involved in achieving understanding (using a magnetic-resonance tomography, MRT, scanner). These study methods are not dangerous (they are ‘non-invasive’), and the study complies with all relevant safety and ethics regulations (it has been approved by the Ethics Board of the LMU Psychology Department).

The study will be conducted in the Neuroimaging Laboratory on LMU’s Central Munich Campus (NICUM). The study consists of an EEG and an fMRT part, which take about 3 hours to complete. During both parts, participants will read about 40 haiku and provide simple ratings after each poem. While this takes only some 30 minutes per part, more time is needed to prepare participants for the respective brain-recording procedure. In addition, in advance of the study, participants will be provided (by email) with a short introductory course of what are haiku and how to read them, including example poems. This way, they can approach the haiku they read in the study with a good understanding of what the genre of haiku is all about.

For their service, participants will receive € 60 after completing the experiment.

So, if you are interested in taking part, please contact Mr. Jan Nasemann at Jan.Nasemann@psy.lmu.de to arrange an appointment for the experiment and receive your introductory “How to read haiku”.

Many thanks and kind regards,

The Haiku & Brain research group