http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...174455.htm
"Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter...
... '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 of the article. 'And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.'
... As part of their research, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the article's second co-author, asked a group of subjects to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "The 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 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."
Research paper .pdf: http://www.psych.ubc.ca/%7Eheine/docs/Kafkagrammar.pdf
"Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter...
... '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 of the article. 'And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.'
... As part of their research, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the article's second co-author, asked a group of subjects to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "The 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 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."
Research paper .pdf: http://www.psych.ubc.ca/%7Eheine/docs/Kafkagrammar.pdf
Edited: 2009-09-16, 4:00 pm
