Saw this at the New Pages blog this morning…
A story in Science Daily reports that reading Kafka or watching a David Lynch film can make you smarter:
“According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s ‘The Country Doctor’ or Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.”
And here’s a quote from one of the researchers:
“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. And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.”
“Meaning threat.” I like that.