Absurdly Smarter: Your Brain on David Lynch

Pretty soon I had my arm back again.  Now I can’t feel a damn thing in it.   All numb.  I’m afraid to cut it, you know?  Maybe tonight you’ll do it.  Sure, just cut them up like regular chickens.

The famous dinner scene in David Lynch‘s “Eraserhead” (quoted above) is a classic example of absurdist cinema.  But what does absurdist cinema and literature do for us?  Some people love it, some people hate it.  According to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, absurdism actually helps us identify patterns in real life.  I came across the McCune-Miller article This is Your Brain on Kafka at Arts & Letters Daily.

Those who had read the absurd story selected a higher number of strings as being consistent with the pattern. More importantly, they “demonstrated greater accuracy in identifying the genuinely pattern-congruent letter strings,” the researchers report. This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.

It might sound absurd, but this clip below might actually make you smarter.

Weird.  Judging by the above scene (and his many films and commercials), Lynch is certainly attracted to absurdity. At the website City of Absurdity, Lynch is quoted as saying: “…the concept of absurdity is something I’m attracted to.” I don’t know why, but I enjoy Lynch’s movies.  His recent “Inland Empire” is dazzlingly baffling and, most definitely, absurd.  But it’s the very mystery of non sequiturs and strange connections that makes for incredible stretches of the imagination.  Maybe it’s like working out the mind – all that diving into a gibberish and trying like crazy to make sense of it.  In the end, we want order and meaning. Even when it’s not apparent, we often create it.  The very act of creating sense and order is incredibly satisfying.  It’s what life’s all about.

Speaking of David Lynch, he’s on Twitter.  So if you need some absurd tweets, follow him.  And he currently has an art show (yes, he paints too) in Santa Monica.  Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend, now that I live here.

I’m going to append a list of excellent absurd films to this post soon. What’s your favorite absurd movie, and why?