According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.
They call it "meaning threat", and say it motivates us to reach outside our comfort zones to manufacture meaning and sense. It makes us work harder... which is, apparently, a good habit to get into.
