Reading Surreal Fiction Makes You Smarter

Reading Surreal Fiction Makes You Smarter: "Alison Flood, Guardian: Forget Sudokus and crosswords: if you want to sharpen up your thinking, immerse yourself in Kafka's stories of the surreal.Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale in which a doctor travels by "unearthly horses" to an ill patient, only to climb into bed naked with him and then escape through the window "naked, exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages".A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial grammar learning task which saw them exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings, and then asked to copy the strings and mark those which followed a similar pattern."People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings - clearly they were motivated to find structure,"..."


I'm a really big fan of altered/augmented reality stuff - so i endorse this!