Haikus and Landays in Science

Summer grass:
That's all that remains
Of warriors' dreams.

                 --Basho

My favorite scientific experiments are those which resemble a haiku: simple and beautiful with a revelatory twist. This is why the haiku is very well suited for expressing scientific ideas in a poetic form.  Contemporary haiku poets do not necessarily abide by the rules of traditional Japanese haiku, such as including a word which implies the season of the poem or the 17 (5-7-5) syllable structure of three verses. Especially when writing in a language other than Japanese, one can easily argue that the original 5-7-5 structure was based on Japanese equivalents of syllables and that there is no need to apply this syllable count to English-language haiku. Even the reference to seasons and nature may not apply to a modern-day English haiku about urban life or, as in my case, science.

Does this mean that contemporary haiku are not subject to any rules? In the introductory essay to an excellent anthology of English-language haiku, "Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years", the poet Billy Collins describes the benefit of retaining some degree of structure while writing a haiku:

Many poets, myself included, stick to the basic form of seventeen syllables, typically arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 order. This light harness is put on like any formal constraint in poetry so the poet can feel the comfort of its embrace while being pushed by those same limits into unexpected discoveries. Asked where he got his inspiration, Yeats answered, "in looking for the next rhyme word." To follow such rules, whether received as is the case with the sonnet or concocted on the spot, is to feel the form pushing back against one's self-expressive impulses. For the poet, this palpable resistance can be a vital part of the compositional experience. I count syllables not out of any allegiance to tradition but because I want the indifference and inflexibility of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings. With the form in place, the act of composition becomes a negotiation between one's subjective urges and the rules of order, which in this case could not be simpler or firmer.

The seventeen syllable limit – like any other limit or rule in poetic forms – provides the necessary constraints that channel our boundless creativity to create a finite poem. It is a daunting task to sit down with a pen and paper, and try to write a poem about a certain topic. Our minds and souls are flooded with a paralyzing plethora of images and ideas. But, as Collins suggests, if we are already aware of certain rules, it becomes much easier to start the process of poetic filtering and negotiation.


What is the essence of a haiku? In the same essay, Collins offers a very elegant answer:

Whether they are the counting or the non-counting type, poets are likely to agree that at the heart of the haiku lies something beyond counting, that is, its revelatory effect on the reader, that eye-opening moment of insight that occurs whenever a haiku succeeds in drawing us through the keyhole of its details into the infinite, or to put it more ineffably, into the "Void of the Whole." No one would argue that any tercet that mentions a cloud or a frog qualifies as a real haiku; it would be like calling an eleven-line poem about courtly love a sonnet. A true haiku contains a special uncountable feature, and every serious devotee of the form aims to achieve that with every attempt.

The revelatory surprise, the "Aha moment", is what characterizes a true haiku. I have experimented with the haiku form, trying to capture scientific concepts or the process of scientific discovery. Many poets do not give titles to their haiku, but I feel that the title can be very helpful to create a poetic tension and provide a context that may be difficult to incorporate within the haiku verses. A haiku – like every good poem – should not require explanatory lines by the poet, but I think that one can make some exceptions here in the context of experimenting with haiku.

Scientific images or phrases are not always self-evident, so I include brief annotations for the haiku I have written which may be helpful for people who are not routinely exposed to the scientific research.

Mitochondria
Grainy threads in cells,
powerhouses of life are
harbingers of death

I have been studying mitochondria for a number of years, but I still marvel at the Janus-like role of mitochondria. They are active sites of biosynthesis and produce the universal energy molecule of cells (ATP) thus ensuring the growth and survival of cells. At the same time, mitochondria can initiate a cell's suicide program (apoptosis), forcing a cell to die. You can read about some of our mitochondrial research on lung cancer here.


Pipette
Ceci n'est pas une
pipette, porting microdrops
for my macrodreams

Many of us have spent hours, days and months repetitively pipetting hundreds of samples for PCR reactions, ELISA assays or other tests, and sooner or later most of us wonder about the meaning of these Sisyphean tasks.

Progress
Most hypotheses
in science are tested only 
to be rejected

If I received a dollar for every wonderful scientific idea I have had that turned out to be wrong, I would not have to write any more grants to support my lab.

Haiku have become an integral part of English language poetry, but there is another poetic form that may soon be gaining popularity. The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold recently teamed up with the photographer Seamus Murphy, traveled to Afghanistan and collected landays that are commonly composed by Afghani women in their native language Pushto. Landays are a form of folk poetry, couplets consisting of a verse with nine syllables followed by one with thirteen syllables. Griswold worked with native Pushto speakers to translate the landays into English. In her brilliant essay published in the June 2013 issue of Poetry Magazine, Griswold provides us with glimpses into the lives of Afghani women, the hardships that they face on a daily basis. The essay also contains translations of landays, which have become a form of lyrical resistance for Afghani women, allowing them to voice their anger and frustration. Illiterate women compose, share and recite these poems, often anonymously and behind closed doors, in society that marginalizes women. The narratives about Afghani women and the translations of landays, which preserve their characteristic wit and sarcasm, are accompanied by haunting photographs that convey the beauty of war-torn Afghanistan and its people.

Here is a description of landays from Griswold's essay:

A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound "ma" or "na." Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love. Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Examples of landays collected by Griswold:

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

I tried to kiss you in secret but you're bald!
Your bare skull thumped against the wall.

I dream I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

In April of 2014, Griswold and Murphy will also release the book "I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan" which will contain a more comprehensive collection of landays.

Landays have not yet caught on as a poetic form in the English-language, but this landmark work by Griswold might change that. I think that landays might be a great opportunity for scientists to describe their experiences with the scientific enterprise.

My landays revolve around the work and lives of academic scientists:

A-Team
I work alone in the lab each night,
conducting all our experiments for your career.

Tenure Trek
Sirens of tenure captivate us,
chained to hallowed halls of academic freedom.

Glamour
Journals can make or break our careers,
careers can make or break us, we can make or break journals.

These landays attempt to approximate the 9-13 syllable count in the couplets but as with haiku, the nature, structure and themes of landays written in English will likely be different from the original Pushto landays.
It does not really matter what poetic form or structure scientists choose to express themselves, but my personal experience has been that poetry is a wonderful way to share science.  Writing haiku or landays about science has forced me to think about what aspects of my scientific work I really treasure. What started as a playful exercise with words has become a journey.

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Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

Image Credits: 1) Basho's Flowers (by Adam Shaw via Wikimedia Commons). 2) La trahison des images (by René Magritte via Wikimedia Commons). 3) Micropipettes - public domain image

Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the Brain

A child drops a chocolate chip cookie on the floor, immediately picks it up, looks quizzically at a parental eye-witness and proceeds to munch on it after receiving an approving nod. This is one of the versions of the "three second rule", which suggests that food can be safely consumed if it has had less than three seconds contact with the floor. There is really no scientific basis for this legend, because noxious chemicals or microbial flora do not bide their time, counting "One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand,…" before they latch on to a chocolate chip cookie. Food will likely accumulate more bacteria, the longer it is in contact with the floor, but I am not aware of any rigorous scientific study that has measured the impact of food-floor intercourse on a second-to-second basis and identified three seconds as a critical temporal threshold. Basketball connoisseurs occasionally argue about a very different version of the "three second rule", and the Urban Dictionary provides us with yet another set of definitions for the "three second rule", such as the time after which one loses a vacated seat in a public setting. I was not aware of any of these "three second rule" versions until I moved to the USA, but I had come across the elusive "three seconds" time interval in a rather different context when I worked at the Institute of Medical Psychology in Munich: Stimuli or signals that occur within an interval of up to three seconds are processed and integrated by our brain into a "subjective present".

I joined the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Munich as a research student in 1992 primarily because of my mentor Till Roenneberg. His intellect, charm and infectious enthusiasm were simply irresistible. I scrapped all my plans to work on HIV, cancer or cardiovascular disease and instead began researching the internal clock of marine algae in Till's laboratory – in an Institute of Medical Psychology. Within weeks of working at the institute, I realized how fortunate I was. Ernst Pöppel, one of Germany's leading neuroscientists and the director of the institute, had created a multidisciplinary research heaven. Ernst assembled a team of remarkably diverse researchers who studied neurobiology, psychology, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, endocrinology, cell physiology, marine biology, computer science, ecology – all on the same floor.   Since I left the institute nearly 20 years ago, I have worked in many academic departments at various institutions, each claiming to value multidisciplinary studies, but I have never again encountered any place that has been able to successfully integrate natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities in the same way as the Munich institute.

The central, unifying theme of the institute was time. Not physical time, but biological and psychological time. How does our brain perceive physical time? What is the structure of perceived time? What regulates biological oscillations in humans, animals and even algae? Can environmental cues modify temporal perception?   The close proximity of so many disciplines made for fascinating coffee-break discussions, forcing us to re-evaluate our own research findings in the light of the discoveries made in neighboring labs and inspired us to become more creative in our experimental design.

Some of the most interesting discussions I remember revolved around the concept of the subjective present, i.e. the question of what it is that we perceive as the "now". Our brain continuously receives input from our senses, such as images we see, sounds we hear or sensations of touch. For our brain to process these stimuli appropriately, it creates a temporal structure so that it can tell apart preceding stimuli from subsequent stimuli. But the brain not only assigns a temporal order to the stimuli, it also integrates them and conveys to us a sense of the subjective past and the subjective present. We often use vague phrases such as "living in the moment" and we all have a sense of what is the "now", but we do not always realize what time intervals we are referring to. If we just saw an image or heard a musical note one second ago, physical time would clearly place them in "the past". Decades of research performed by Ernst Pöppel and his colleagues at the institute, as well as several other laboratories around the world, suggest that our brain integrates our subjective temporal reality in chunks of approximately three second duration.

Temporal order can be assessed in a rather straightforward experimental manner. Research subjects can be provided sequential auditory clicks, one to each ear. If the clicks are one second apart, nearly all participants can correctly identify whether or not the click in the right ear came before the one in the left ear. It turns out that this holds true even if the clicks are only 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds) apart. The threshold for being able to correctly assign a temporal order to such brief stimuli lies around 30 milliseconds for young adults (up to 25 years old) and 60 milliseconds for older adults.

Temporal integration of stimuli, on the other hand, cannot be directly measured through experiments. It is not possible to ask research subjects "Are these two stimuli part of your now?" and expect a definitive answer, because everyone has a different concept and definition of what constitutes "now". Therefore, researchers such as Ernst Pöppel have had to resort to indirect assessments of temporal integration, and ascertain what interval of time is grasped as a perceptual unit by our brain. An excellent summary of the work can be found in the paper "A hierarchical model of temporal perception". Instead of reviewing the hundreds of experiments that have lead researchers to derive the three-second interval, I will just review two studies which I believe are among the most interesting.

In one of the studies, Pöppel partnered up with the American poet Frederick Turner. Turner and Pöppel recorded and measured hundreds of Latin, Greek, English, Chinese, Japanese, French and German poems, analyzing the length of each LINE. They used the expression LINE to describe a "fundamental unit of metered poetry". In many cases, a standard verse or line in a poem did indeed fit the Turner-Pöppel definition of a LINE, but they used the more generic LINE for their analysis because not all languages or orthographic traditions write or print a LINE in a separate space as is common in English or German poems. If a long line in a poem was divided by a caesura into two sections, Turner and Pöppel considered this to be two LINES.

The basic idea behind this analysis was that each unit of a poem (LINE) conveys one integrated idea or thought, and that the reader experiences each LINE as a "now" moment while reading the poem. Turner and Pöppel published their results in the classic essay "The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time" for which they also received the Levinson Prize in 1983. Their findings were quite remarkable. The peak duration of LINES in poems was between 2.5 seconds and 3.5 seconds, independent of what language the poems were written in. For example, 73% of German poems had a LINE duration between 2 and 3 seconds. Here are some their other specific findings:

Japanese
Epic meter (a seven-syllable line followed by a five-syllable one) (average)  3.25 secs.
Waka (average)  2.75 secs.
Tanka (recited much faster than the epic, as 3 LINES of 5, 12, and 14 syllables) (average)  2.70 secs.
Chinese
Four-syllable line   2.20 secs.
Five-syllable line    3.00 secs.
Seven-syllable line   3.80 secs.
English
Pentameter   3.30 secs.
Seven-syllable trochaic line   2.50 secs.
Stanzas using different line lengths    3.00 secs., 3.10 secs.
Ballad meter (octosyllabic)    2.40 secs.

Poets all around the world did not conspire to write three-second LINES. It is more likely that our brain may be attuned to processing poetic information in 3 second chunks and that poets are subconsciously aware of this. This was not a controlled, rigorous scientific study, but the results are nevertheless fascinating, not only because they points towards the three second interval that neuroscientists have established in recent decades for temporal integration in the brain, but also because they suggest that the rules for metered poetry may be universal. I strongly advise everyone to read the now classic essay by Turner and Pöppel, to then try reading aloud their own favorite poems and see if the LINES indeed approximate three seconds.

A second approach to glean into the inner workings of temporal integration process in our brain is the use of perceptual reversal experiments, such as those performed with the Necker cube. This cube is a 2-D line drawing, which our brain perceives as a cube – or actually two distinct cubes. Most people who stare at the drawing for a while will notice that their mind creates two distinct cube representations. Once the mind perceives the two different cubes, it becomes very difficult to cling to just one cube representation. Our brain starts flip-flopping between the two cubes; even when we try our best to just hang on to one of the cube representations in our mind. Interestingly, the average duration that it takes for our mind to automatically shift from one cube representation to the other one approximates three seconds.

Nicole von Steinbüchel, a colleague of Ernst Pöppel at the Institute of Medical Psychology, asked a fascinating question. If the oscillatory perceptual shift between the two cube representations is indeed indicative of the "subjective present" and the temporal integration capacity, would brain injury affect the oscillation? She studied patients who had brain lesions (usually due to a stroke) in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. She and her team of researchers were able to show that while healthy participants reported a three second interval between the automatic shifting of the cube representations in their brain, the average shift time was four seconds in patients with brain damage in the left brain hemisphere and up to six seconds if the damage had occurred in a certain part of the right brain hemisphere. Nicole von Steinbüchel's research demonstrates the clinical relevance of studying temporal integration, but it also suggests that the brain may have designated areas which specialize in creating a temporal structure.

The analysis of poetry and the Necker cube experiments are just two examples of cognitive studies indicating that our brain uses three second intervals to process information and generate the experience of the "now" or the "subjective present". Taken alone, none of these studies are a conclusive proof that our brain uses three second intervals, but one cannot help but notice a remarkable convergence of data pointing towards a cognitive three second rule.

References:
Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (1983) "The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time" Poetry 142(5): 277-309.

Ernst Pöppel (1997) "A hierarchical model of temporal perception" Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1(2): 56-61.

Nicole von Steinbüchel (1998) "Temporal ranges of central nervous processing: clinical evidence" Experimental Brain Research 123 (1-2): 220-233.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.


von Steinbüchel N (1998). Temporal ranges of central nervous processing: clinical evidence. Experimental brain research, 123 (1-2), 220-33 PMID: 9835412

"We used to sprint to pick and store blackberries, now we run to the Sprint store to pick Blackberries"

Marshall Soulful Jones, part of Team Nuyorican 2011, 2nd place finishers at the National Poetry Slam in Boston, performs "Touchscreen". The Bowery Poetry Club NY.

(h/t Peter Toth)

The Paris Review Interview with Octavio Paz

Wikimedia

The Paris Review interviewed the poet Octavio Paz:

Though small in stature and well into his seventies, Octavio Paz, with his piercing eyes, gives the impression of being a much younger man. In his poetry and his prose works, which are both erudite and intensely political, he recurrently takes up such themes as the experience of Mexican history, especially as seen through its Indian past, and the overcoming of profound human loneliness through erotic love. Paz has long been considered, along with César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, to be one of the great South American poets of the twentieth century; three days after this interview, which was conducted on Columbus Day 1990, he joined Neruda among the ranks of Nobel laureates in literature. Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City, the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a novelist. Both figures were important to the development of the young poet: he learned the value of social causes from his father, who served as counsel for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and was introduced to the world of letters by his grandfather. As a boy, Paz was allowed to roam freely through his grandfather’s expansive library, an experience that afforded him invaluable exposure to Spanish and Latin American literature. He studied literature at the University of Mexico, but moved on before earning a degree.

In this interview, Octavio Paz talks about how thinking about morality and politics affected him:

My political and intellectual beliefs were kindled by the idea of fraternity. We all talked a lot about it. For instance, the novels of André Malraux, which we all read, depicted the search for fraternity through revolutionary action. My Spanish experience did not strengthen my political beliefs, but it did give an unexpected twist to my idea of fraternity. One day—Stephen Spender was with me and might remember this episode—we went to the front in Madrid, which was in the university city. It was a battlefield. Sometimes in the same building the Loyalists would only be separated from the Fascists by a single wall. We could hear the soldiers on the other side talking. It was a strange feeling: those people facing me—I couldn't see them but only hear their voices—were my enemies. But they had human voices, like my own. They were like me.

Read the complete interview here.....

Do Not Write Love Poems

Let us have a look at some of the best advice on writing that has ever been given to an aspiring poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the greatest poets of the German language. He wrote a series of ten letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, an aspiring poet, that were later published as "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter", or in the English translation as "Letters to a Young Poet".

In these letters, Rilke initiates Kappus into the mysteries of writing poetry as well as into the art of living a meaningful life. The advice given by Rilke is just as valuable today, as it was more than a century ago. Perhaps, in a networked world in which solitude has become a rare luxury and treat, I feel that Rilke's advice has become even more valuable.

I will present some excerpts of the letters in the original German as well as a translation into English.

The letter dated February 17, 1903 contains the following passage:

Schreiben Sie nicht Liebesgedichte; weichen Sie zuerst denjenigen Formen aus, die zu geläufig und gewöhnlich sind: sie sind die schwersten, denn es gehört eine große, ausgereifte Kraft dazu, Eigenes zu geben, wo sich gute und zum Teil glänzende Überlieferungen in Menge einstellen.  

Darum retten Sie sich vor den allgemeinen Motiven zu denen, die Ihnen Ihr eigener Alltag bietet; schildern Sie Ihre Traurigkeiten und Wünsche, die vorübergehenden Gedanken und den Glauben an irgendeine Schönheit - schildern Sie das alles mit inniger, stiller, demütiger Aufrichtigkeit und gebrauchen Sie, um sich auszudrücken, die Dinge Ihrer Umgebung, die Bilder Ihrer Träume und die Gegenstände ihrer Erinnerung.

My translation of this passage is:

Do not write love poems; try to initially avoid those forms that are too commonplace and ordinary: they are the most challenging, because it takes great strength and maturity to create something of your own, when you have to compete with so many good and even great predecessors. 

 So save yourself from these general themes and instead write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, your fleeting thoughts and your belief in some form of beauty - describe all this with heartfelt, quite and humble sincerity. When you express yourself, use the everyday items around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects from your memories.

Why is Rilke's advice so important? And why does it apply to all writers, not just to poets?

Many of us who try to write run into the highly prevalent and painful condition known as "Writer's block". Here is what Professor Wikipedia says about "Writer's block":

Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked" writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.

There is no straightforward cure for this agonizing ailment, which can paralyze the mind and soul alike. In an aspiring writer, it awakens the desire to eat junk food, watch mind-numbing sitcoms and snap at all fellow primates that try to communicate with you.  Most of my Writer's block flare-ups occur when I try to right about lofty and grand themes, such as Love, Death or Justice. Whenever I sit down in front of my keyboard to start writing about such a profound theme, I think about all the wonderful poems, essays and novels that have been written about these topics in the past. My fingers are paralyzed, because I feel there is nothing I can add to what Goethe, Rilke, Eichendorff and Star Wars have already eloquently put in words.

But Rilke tells us that this is the wrong approach. We should focus on the tedious details of our lives. Let us face it, most of our lives are quite boring and ordinary, but these mundane and tedious details are what really define us and distinguish us from other writers. When I have to decide whether my sixth "How-to-be-a- Writer" self-help book should be either "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" or "Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing" or when I experience Schadenfreude that I made it onto the commuter train on time, but the person who pushed me aside earlier is left standing angrily at the platform. These mundane moments are much easier to describe, because they are truly my own experiences and when I write about them I am not burdened by the history of great writing. I do not know what self-help writing guides Shakespeare used, but I am pretty sure he did not read "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" and I am also pretty sure he did not experience the Schadenfreude of getting on the train.

Once I start writing about these seemingly mundane topics, my writing is more sincere. I also realize that extraordinary ideas are derived from ordinary details. 

The complete German text of the letter can be found on www.rilke.de.

An English translation of the complete letter is available here.