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This Is Your Brain on Kafka
- carterschonwald 17y agoIn other news, scientists discover the human brain's learning algorithm performs better on new problem instances when measures are taken to prevent over fitting on the initial learning examples. That aside, I feel like any act which exposes your mind to ideas and experiences which are wholly new would have the same effect, eg I would be genuinely surprised if there wasn't a similar effect after someone read the Sandman comics that Neil Gaiman authored for the first time.
- DannoHung 17y agoWell, presumably the first experiment was constructed to help control for that. Though I've never been terribly sure how effective these sorts of high level psychological experiments are. I'm much more at ease when someone talks about millisecond response times and sacchades.
- tarkin2 17y agoSimply put, absurdity exercises your brain when you seek meaning in such. Such exercise increases your ability to find meaning and patterns.
- petercooper 17y agoMy wife is a big The Mighty Boosh fan and reads a lot of Lewis Carroll, and the other night, doing a crossword, asked: "Is there a word spelled.. i-n-t-o? In-toe?"
- IsaacL 17y agoNow we need only wait until some enterprising person releases 'Baby Kafka' for expectant mothers.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoSee also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826628
- hegemonicon 17y agoGiven that our brains are hard-wired to find patterns, I'll bet this also makes us more likely to "find" them where none exist. See: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/its_one_of_the_more.php http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/its_one_of_the_more.p...
- olliesaunders 17y agoCan anyone suggest some good absurdist literature then?