By Kate Melville / Source: ScienceAGoGo
Psychologists at the University of California - Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia have found that exposure to surrealism, by say, reading a book by Franz Kafka or watching a film by director David Lynch, enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee the implicit learning functions in the brain. The research was reported in the journal Psychological Science.
"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 researcher Travis Proulx. "And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat."
Meaning, explains Proulx, is an expected association within one's environment. Fire, for example, is associated with extreme heat, and putting your hand in a flame and finding it icy cold would constitute a threat to that meaning.
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