BrainBlog

From The Guardian : Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study Subjects who had just read Kafka's The Country Doctor were better at recognising patterns in grammar test, psychologists found Alison Flood guardian.co.uk Thursday 17 September 2009 14.59 BST [snip] Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale in which a doctor travels by "unearthly horses" to an ill patient, only to climb into bed naked with him and then escape through the window "naked, exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages". A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial g...

Are you interested in reading disorders or, generally, in learning disorders. If so, the new issue of JINS (Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society) has an excellent article by Dr. Jack Fletcher on this topic. Unless you subscribe or have a Cambridge University Press account, you would likely need to track it down at your nearest academic library, but it is a worthwhile read on the topic