Fans of the surreal, take heart. Recent research suggests that reading stories involving bizarre events that don’t necessarily make sense can temporarily enhance your ability to identify patterns that help you learn new material. Researchers did two studies to investigate the effects of exposure to a “meaning threat,” something that didn’t make sense or that upset typical notions.
In the first study, subjects read either a Kafka short story (The Country Doctor) pretty much as he wrote it, with its strange and inexplicable series of events, or a tidied-up version that was edited into a more conventional story line. In the second study, people were asked to think about aspects of their own past behavior that are contradictory—in other words, to consider the ways that identity is not as unified as we typically assume it is. After this, participants in both studies were shown strings of letters arranged in a strict but subtle pattern. Then they were given new letter strings and asked to identify the ones that conformed to the pattern.
In both cases, the people who were exposed to the meaning threat (the original Kafka story, the idea of a somewhat fragmented identity) not only selected more strings as adhering to the pattern, but were also correct more often than the respective control group. The researchers explain this by suggesting that it’s uncomfortable to have our common-sense expectations violated, and to compensate when that happens, people are more motivated to make sense of what’s going on around them.
It would be interesting to know if this extends to other media such as music or visual art. It’s also kind of interesting to me that one of the problems with the human cognitive apparatus is that we often make connections too easily, through various cognitive biases such as confirmation bias. Finding associations between seemingly unrelated things or events is a source of creativity, and uniting disparate phenomena under a single comprehensive explanation is often a goal of science. On the other hand, finding patterns where none exist (the supposed face on Mars is a classic example) is a less agreeable manifestation of our hunger for meaning. Like so many things about human thought, perhaps pattern-seeking deserves a “Handle with care” label. Goo goo g’joob.
This article from ScienceDaily describes the research in more detail. Or you can look up the paper: Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar, Travis Proulx and Steven J. Heine. Psychological Science, 20 (9), 1125–1131.
Very interesting. Like you, I’m also very curious about “meaning threats” in music or other media, particularly since much of the music I listen to might fall into this category (other people might say “unlistenable”, but “meaning threat” sounds better, eh?). Movies by the Coen brothers perhaps also fit into this category; they don’t tend to explain themselves to nearly the same extent as most popular media.
Anyways, it’s not every day that you hear the good side of bafflement. I’ll try to be baffled more often.
A related thought I was having earlier today: In the past, our awareness of mystery in the world was associated with ignorance (and cognizance of that ignorance, of course); now, unawareness of mystery in the world is associated with ignorance (as we know more, the burden of pre-existing knowledge we need to understand to get to the point of figuring out which things we don’t understand increases). Perhaps we’re moving towards a world in which most things are explained, but the explanations, rather than the phenomena themselves, are the more immediate source of bafflement.
The Coen brothers probably also pop into my head due to the occurrence of “I am the walrus!” in The Big Lebowski.