Haiku for Parkinson’s: Haiku for the Brain—Hermann J. Müller

Haiku for Parkinson’s is a feature of The Haiku Foundation (THF): introducing haiku to those of us living with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), as well as introducing PD to those ‘living with haiku.’ You will find previous posts from this series here.

In Haiku for the Brain, Hermann J. Müller sketches some of the ways that haiku may be impacting the mind-brain, engaging a rich set of processes beneficial to cognitive functioning and health. He writes from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, drawing on some of the key results obtained by the Haiku & Brain Research Group.

Hermann J. Müller: While the neuro-cognitive study of poetry reading is still in its infancy, there is growing evidence that reading poetry engages a richer network of brain areas than reading prose. For instance, fMRI studies have revealed that poetry reading not only activates the network involved in processing language but also brain areas sensitive to a poem’s rhyme and rhythm, areas ‘contemplating’ and expanding its imagery and layered meanings, as well as areas associated with our emotional and aesthetic responses to it. The regions involved in reading poetry also overlap with those associated with autobiographical memory and self-referential processing: relating to the experiences or emotions expressed by the poet can trigger memories or emotions from our own lives, making poetry reading a deeply personal experience. Thus, by engaging a wide set of brain mechanisms, reading or listening to poetry can enhance cognitive functions we rely on in everyday life, such as flexible thinking and the capacity to understand complex, multiple meanings, in addition to rendering highly personal, emotional, and aesthetic experiences. [Note 1] There is also evidence that reading or writing poetry can be therapeutic for both, patients dealing with illness and adversity and their family or caregivers. In other words: reading poetry can be beneficial for both mental and brain health.

But does this mind- and brain-engaging effect apply equally to all kinds of poetry? Durs Grünbein, a well-known German poet, believes that effective poetry is poetry that involves “a giant leap across lexical gaps [i.e., a ‘leap of thought’ as opposed to a mere ‘associative step’]. It obeys its own paralogic, which calls together that which is conceivably distant, places next to each other that which is almost incompatible. The further and unexpected this leap, the greater the factor N400 in a line or a sequence of syllables, the roomier the verse …. In the ideal case, they encompass the whole experiential space captured by the sensorium of the … reader or listener” [Note 2].

The ” factor N400”, that Grünbein talks about here, reflects a real-time response of the brain upon encountering the unexpected in language (more on this below), requiring leaps of thought to resolve the meaning. In our “Haiku & Brain” research group, we hypothesized that haiku – the shortest form of poetry – is effective poetry in this sense, being rich in factor N400. To investigate this, we had people new to the genre of haiku read normative, three-line English-language haiku: poems juxtaposing two images – the ‘fragment’ image (in one line) and the ‘phrase’ image (extending over two lines) – across a ‘cut’: a disjunction between the two images, making the reader wonder how they can be brought together to form a coherent meaning. To gain insight into what this cut sets off in the readers’ minds, we recorded both their eye movements and their EEG.

As we read, our eyes make a sequence of rapid movements, so-called ‘saccades’, across the text, with ‘fixation’ pauses between them. Within each fixation, we take up a written word (or a part of a longer word) and try to access its meaning in our mental dictionary. However, we do not simply scan a sentence word by word and construct its meaning at the end. Rather, our mind constantly tries to predict which word comes next based on the preceding (i.e., already read) words and sentence context. This explains why we sometimes misread a word that is actually there in terms of some other, expected word: a prediction failure. Thus, while scanning through a piece of text word by word, we continually construct an idea, or ‘representation’, of its meaning. If we fail to understand or are puzzled by something, we interrupt forward scanning and go back to re-sample the relevant information in ‘regressive’ fixations.

Interestingly, we found our haiku readers to jump back and forth frequently (in fact, considerably more often than in standard texts) within and across lines of the poem. And they typically read the poem not only once, but two or more times. Nevertheless, their eye fixations showed a relatively stable, ‘signature’ pattern: the eye, and so the mind, dwells longer on words in the fragment line compared to the phrase lines. That is, the mental work to resolve the cut – i.e., to bridge the gap between the two juxtaposed images – is concentrated on the fragment. [Note 3]

Drawing on neuro-cognitive theory, we reasoned that encountering the cut is experienced as puzzling – a kind of prediction failure – generating ‘surprise’. Surprise induces ‘high energy’ in the mental system, triggering processes of search to reduce the energy towards an equilibrium state. In the reading of haiku, this is achieved by finding, or constructing, a bridge across the gap, enabling the juxtaposed images to be fused into a coherent ‘meaning Gestalt’ [Note 4]. Resolving the haiku’s meaning (i.e., settling on at least one of its multiple possible meanings) may be associated with an “aha!” moment, the experience of sudden insight. Motivationally, traversing this trajectory – from a high-arousal to an equilibrium mental state – is experienced as rewarding.

How does this relate to the “factor N400“ that Grünbein talks about? And what actually is the ‘N400’? Answering the latter question first: the ‘N400’ is one of the most investigated event-related components in psycholinguistic reading research: a negative (“N”) voltage deflection in the EEG, at centrally placed electrodes on the scalp, that occurs approximately half a second (around “400” milliseconds) after encountering a semantic incongruency in the reading of a sentence, such as hitting upon “dog” in “I take coffee with cream and dog”. Effectively, the N400 reflects a prediction failure (associated with puzzlement and surprise) in the ongoing process of meaning construction.

We hypothesized that we would observe a similar component sparked by the ‘cut’, the disjunction between the two images, in the reading of haiku. To look for such N400-type processes during haiku reading, we determined the lowest negative voltages ensuing in the readers’ EEG within half to one-and-half seconds after the eye had landed on a particular word, indicative of the ‘semantic processing load’ associated with this word. We then compared this load measure between words in the poems’ fragment and phrase lines. What we found was as expected from the signature eye-movement pattern: N400-type brain activity, reflecting the semantic processing load, was more marked while reading words in the fragment line compared to the phrase lines.

Of note, the psycholinguistic N400, in response to semantic anomalies (such as “dog” in the above example sentence) is classically observed over central scalp electrodes, which pick up underlying activity from a network of brain regions involved with the processing of words within the sentence context. However, the cut in haiku involves the juxtaposition of two – in themselves relatively complete – images, and so goes far beyond the semantic fit of individual words within the sentence context. For this reason, in addition to the more ‘local’, central N400, we also examined the N400 ‘globally’, averaged over all electrodes across the scalp, picking up activity across a widely distributed network of brain areas. Interestingly, this global N400 was modulated by the image order: it was higher for whatever image – fragment or phrase – came second in the poem read.

Thus, while the local N400 is more sensitive to the existence as such of a disjunction between the fragment and phrase images, the global N400 appears to reflect space of the search for meaning – beyond the mere registration of the break between the two images. We concluded that “encountering the second image, after the cut, opens up the brain-physiological ‘resonance space’, a distributed network of perceptual-sensory regions and association areas, evoking a multitude of (more or less concrete) representations of what is depicted in the images and as well as activating multiple linkages … between them. In terms of computational theories of brain function (…), the cut may be seen to spark a state of high ‘free energy’ in the system: the ‘semantic load’ imposed by the more or less incompatible and so ‘competing’ representations and possible bridging schemas. This load is then minimized by the system settling on one (or a few) solution(s), reaching an equilibrium stage that represents our ‘reading’ of how the two images go together, that is: our understanding of the haiku.” [Note 5]

Thus, our findings confirm that haiku is a genre of poetry rich in factor N400, opening up, in Grünbein’s terms, “the whole experiential space captured by the sensorium of the … reader or listener.” However, while we can trace how the reading of a haiku sparks rich search activity across the mental space, we do not know as yet what happens in the brain when its meaning is resolved – the sense of closure achieved and the “aha!” moment and the experience of reward associated with it.

While this remains a question for future research, what we can infer from our work thus far is that reading haiku activates and engages a rich set of brain networks and functions: from activating diverse (and at first seemingly disparate) mental-image representations from long-term memory and holding them in working memory through searching and trying out bridging schemas to eventually fusing the images into a coherent meaning representation. Given this, reading haiku is good for the brain: a good ‘mental exercise’ for maintaining brain health.

Also, achieving a sense of closure may be experienced as ‘rewarding’. In the brain, reward is associated with a phasic increase of the neurotransmitter dopamine in neural circuits involved in action control (e.g., prefrontal and posterior regions), particularly marked when the reward is unexpectedly high, and this may or may not be associated with a sense of ‘pleasure’. This dopamine increase supports reward learning: engaging in activities that are likely to yield such rewards in the future. [Note 6] Applied to the reading of haiku: the release of dopamine may be especially high when the insight achieved is particularly ‘striking’, and reward learning may support haiku reading – and writing – becoming a ‘practice’.

Interestingly in this context, we also found readers’ recognition memory to be associated with more explicit, conscious-recollective experience of having read a particular haiku if the poem was self-rated to be understood. [Note 7] This experience may involve the particular mental images and associations the reader generated while trying to make sense of the haiku. We took this to indicate that the realization of the haiku’s meaning Gestalt in the reader’s mind is important for long-term memory consolidation and remembering.

The research findings summarized above are based on a ‘neuro-cognitive’ approach that is inherently reductionist: its logic is to look at what goes on in the mind-brain during haiku reading from the ‘outside’, averaging across many readers and many poems read to isolate basic processes. As such, it glosses over the ‘inside’, first-person response of the individual reader to particular poems: the images and associations a given haiku conjures, the emotional and aesthetic reaction it engenders, and what it means to the reader personally.

Nevertheless, from a purely neuro-cognitive perspective, we can state: reading haiku (ideally as a ‘practice’) has the potential to be beneficial for every one of us: it may contribute to enhancing cognitive reserve and so mitigate some of the problems associated with neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease.

Notes

Note 1: For popular summaries, see, e.g. Patrick J. Kiger, The Human Brain is Hardwired for Poetry, or, William O’Connor, What Poetry Can Teach Us About The Brain.

Note 2: Translated from p. 57 in Grünbein, Durs, “Katze und Mond.” Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle, edited by Durs Grünbein, Suhrkamp, 1996, pp. 55–60.

Note 3: Geyer, Thomas, Franziska Günther, Hermann J. Müller, Jim Kacian, Heinrich R. Liesefeld, & Stella Pierides, “Reading English-language haiku: an eye-movement study of the ‘cut’ effect”, Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1–9. DOI: 10.16910/jemr.13.2.2

Note 4: A term introduced by Wolfgang Iser (Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Fink, 1976), in analogy to the perception of coherent wholes, or “Gestalten”, from fragmentary parts in visual perception. See, e.g., the ‘dalmatian dog’ picture here.

Note 5: Cited from p. 37 in Nasemann, Jan, Thomas Geyer, Heinrich R. Liesefeld, Jim Kacian, Stella Pierides, & Hermann J. Müller, “‘Factor N400’ in the Reading of English-language Haiku“, Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship, 9, 2023, pp. 13–43.

Note 6: Some interesting overview papers on the role of dopamine signaling in the mind-brain: Bromberg-Martin, Ethan S., Masayuki Matsumoto, & Okihide Hikosaka, “Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting”, Neuron, vol. 68, no. 5, pp. 815–834. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.022 or Cools, Roshan, “Chemistry of the Adaptive Mind: Lessons from Dopamine”, Neuron, vol. 104, no. 1, 2019, pp. 113–131. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.03

Note 7: Pierides, Stella, Hermann J. Müller, Jim Kacian, Franziska Günther, and Thomas Geyer (2017) „Haiku and the brain: an exploratory study“, Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship, 3, 2017, pp. 7–43.

Biography

Herman J. Müller is an emeritus Professor, having held the Chair of General & Experimental Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich from 2000-2022 (following appointments at the Universities of London and Leipzig). In 2014, he was awarded the Wilhelm Wundt Medal, as well as an Honorary Membership, of the German Psychology Society (DGPs) for his contributions to fundamental psychological science. He has co-/authored some 400 original research articles published in international journals of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.