New York Times Oct. 6 2009
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 5, 2009
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises,
opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn.
The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow
from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The
philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a
profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one
who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,”
traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of
“something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to
light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may
prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in
mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for
meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead
author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science.
“We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to
improve some kinds of learning.”
Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases
more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own
inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less
tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more
loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia
test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning
teams.
In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor
of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these
findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or
coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying
patterns.
When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an
easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky —
the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may
retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also
turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a
pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find
a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael
Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning,
leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was
“plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think
they’re onto something.”
In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr.
Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story
based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the
title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He
makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The
horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family
becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after
all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical —
Kafkaesque.
After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9
letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the
letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from
a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very
subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.
The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit
learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea
what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter
strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a
comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story,
a coherent one.
“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more
letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for
patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they
were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns
they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”
Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out
unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior
cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is
recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct
errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we
may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-
author, “is very much worth investigating.”
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to
incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John
Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether
exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like
memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the
grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming
more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order
satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists,
habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at
least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 6, 2009, on
page D1 of the New York Times edition.
