The Crab Ate the Rainbow

READING THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER. According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers' findings appear in an article published in the September 2009 issue of 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...
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READING THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER. According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers' findings appear in an article published in the September 2009 issue of 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 Travis Proulx, a 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. "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." 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." The key to the study is that the participants had no way to make sense of the reading material. Hence, they strived to make sense of something else. This book has been scientifically crafted to maximize the beneficial effects of reading surreal literature on learning. Read this book an hour a day for maximum benefits. It is important, while reading the material, to try to make sense of it (and fail). After a few days of reading its contents you will begin to experience increases in your rate of learning and in how much you learn in other arenas of life. This increase in learning may manifest itself in a variety of unexpected ways. For a variety of reading experiences, be sure to check out other titles written by Blort the Lawnmower.