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Everyone knows David Lynch can give you nightmares, who knew he can make you smarter?

Being exposed to surrealism, whether it's through Mr. Lynch's film Blue Velvet or a Kafka short story, can improve learning by compelling the brain to seek out structure, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science.

“We rely on structure to make sense of the world,” says Steven J. Heine, co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “If you encounter something that you can't relate [to other things], that you don't know what to do with it, this sort of puts you off your game and you need to search for a reference point again to again find some structure.”

In the study, one group of subjects read a Kafka short story that involves a disturbing and nonsensical series of events. Another group read a version of the story rewritten to resemble a conventional narrative. Both groups were then shown a series of letter strings containing hidden patterns. They were asked to copy each series and then put a mark next to those that followed a similar pattern.

People who read the weirdness of Kafka's bent tale were able to identify more patterns in letter strings than those who read the ordinary version.

The mind makes an extra effort to discover structure when it's exposed to what Prof. Heine calls “meaning threats,” things that “they can't make sense of, they can't incorporate into their understandings of the world.”

If reading The Metamorphosis isn't your bag, the films of David Lynch have the same effect, Prof. Heine says, noting the head-scratcher that is Mulholland Dr. might actually be good for your brain.

“There's this one point where the whole plot falls apart,” he says. “I would bet at that point you would have been better at learning.”