Playing brain games aren’t the only way a person can get smarter these days. It turns out reading Kafka can also pump up your brain muscles. In a recent study, University of British Columbia researchers asked volunteers to read a shortened version of Kafka’s nonsensical story, The Country Doctor. Another group of participants read a version that had been rewritten so the events made more sense. After reading the story, the volunteers took a grammar test that asked them to identify the structure of letter strings in the text—and those who read the first story scored higher. The scientists think their results show that when a person is exposed to unusual circumstances, he or she is motivated to learn new patterns.
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According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or ...
