| Surrealism Makes You Smarter, Psychology Study Finds |
| Written by Keith Slasher | |||
 According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to surrealism like e.g. Franz Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. When you're exposed to something that fundamentally does not make sense your brain responds by looking for some other things within your environment to make sense of.A group of subjects were given to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "A Country Doctor," which involves a nonsensical and in some ways disturbing series of events. A second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense. The subjects were then asked to complete an artificial-grammar learning task in which they had to search for hidden patterns in letter strings. People who read the nonsensical story found more hidden patterns in the letter strings and were more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story, as they were more motivated to find structure. A second study among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves by considering how their past actions were often contradictory brought the same results. Travis Proulx, postdoctoral researcher at UCSB said: "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity. People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns." "What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story," he continued. "If you expect that you'll encounter something strange or out of the ordinary, you won't experience the same sense of alienation. You may be disturbed by it, but you won't show the same learning ability. The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them. Hence, they strived to make sense of something else." ScienceDaily - Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests Psychology Study Check out this Japanese anime short film based on Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor": Link (via Dangerous Minds)
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