Now I know why I'm so smart: for years I have been an avid reader of Franz Kafka:
As part of the study, one group of participants were given Kafka's short story Ein Landarzt to read, while another group was given a modified version that followed a standard narrative logic. The readers of the original Kafka outperformed their counterparts on a simple cognitive test:
"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."
A report in German on this study can be found on the Freitag Web site: Kafka macht klug.
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