Now I know why I'm so smart: for years I have been an avid reader of Franz Kafka:
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. The
researchers' findings appear in an article published in the September
issue of the journal Psychological Science.
As part of the study, one group of participants were given Kafka's short story Ein Landarzt to read, while another group was given a modified version that followed a standard narrative logic. The readers of the original Kafka outperformed their counterparts on a simple cognitive test:
learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in letter
strings. They were asked to copy the individual letter strings and then
to put a mark next to those that followed a similar pattern.
"People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter
strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx.
"But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate
than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really
did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."
A report in German on this study can be found on the Freitag Web site: Kafka macht klug.
