reading kafka makes you smarter

Franz Kafka in 1905. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; picture source

Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism may sharpen your cognitive functions and make you better at recognizing patterns: Subjects who had just read Kafka's "The Country Doctor" were better at recognising patterns in a grammar test, compared to subjects who had read a more plausible version of the same story.

"The idea is that when you're exposed to a meaning threat –– something that fundamentally does not make sense –– your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment", said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author the article. "What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story. 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."

BUT: Thus far, the researchers have identified the beneficial effects of unusual experiences only in implicit pattern learning. It remains to be seen whether or not reading surreal literature would aid in the learning of explicily studied material (e.g. for exams) as well...

Thank you ecila for the link.

source1, source2

Here is the original paper

I shall now take advantage of this opportunity, and additionally post the award-winning wonderful animation "Kafka Inaka Isha" by Koji Yamamura, which is based on Kafka's "Ein Landarzt/ The Country Doctor" and is, in my opinion, equally disturbing and absurd as the original writing (caution: it might seem quite distressing and nonsensical to anyone not familiar with Kafka's deliberate effort to disorient). I love the animation technique and it somehow reminds me of Caroline Leaf's "Two Sisters" animation, as it manages to convey the impression of a dream (distorting images, as if they were constantly flowing and impossible to grasp).