The Surreal Improves Learning and Pattern Recognition

According to boingboing, "new research suggest that exposure to bizarre, surreal storylines such as Kafka's "The Country Doctor" can improve learning. Apparently, when your brain is presented with total absurdity or nonsense, it will work extra hard to find structure elsewhere. In the study by the University of British Columbia psychologists, subjects read The Country Doctor and then took a test where they had to identify patterns in strings of letters. They performed much better than the control group.



"In a second study, the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."


This study intrigues me and ties in with my thoughts about the use of surreal, magically-real, or dreamstate experiences both in art and reality. The way I tried to express it before is that non-real events create a category error in the way we perceive reality, thus requiring us to recheck our assumptions and patterns about what reality is. That being the case, the non- or supra-real can sometimes better get at what reality is like, because they sidestep the pitfalls and limitations of language and our basic assumption that the thing said is really the thing itself.

This also relates to all the current research on the link between creative genius and mental illness, in that people genetically predisposed towards perceiving the world as a fragmented and bizarre thing have to do that much more work to learn to put it together again, which, having schizophrenic and bipolar tendencies run in my family I can attest to seeing first hand.