art can make you smarter.

Reading a book by Franz Kafka (or watching a film by director David Lynch) could make you smarter.

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealist art in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.

“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 postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. “And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.”

Meaning, according to Proulx, is an expected association within one's environment. Fire, for example, is associated with extreme heat, and putting your hand in a flame and finding it icy cold would constitute a threat to that meaning. "It would be very disturbing to you because it wouldn't make sense," he said.

In the same vein researchers published ‘Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education’ published by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, finding that the visual arts classes did have broad indirect benefits, even if they were not directly related to quantifiable performance in other subjects. “Students who study the arts seriously are taught to see better, to envision, to persist, to be playful and learn from mistakes, to make critical judgments and justify such judgments,” the authors conclude.


In the end tis true: we are all smart.



c/o sciencedaily