Kafka's good

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 September 2009

Subjects who had just read Kafka's The Country Doctor were better at recognising patterns in grammar test, psychologists found

Forget Sudokus and crosswords: if you want to sharpen up your thinking, immerse yourself in Kafka's stories of the surreal.
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"...