Accusations of sexism have been levelled at the horror fiction industry after a new collection of interviews with 16 horror writers failed to include a single woman. Link: British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book
In news that is sure to annoy those “who needs the humanities or liberal arts” types, it unsurprisingly turns out that absurd literature does wonderful things to the brain.
Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
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This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
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To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.
Of course, this “meaning frameworks” talk calls to mind Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s work on conceptual schemas and metaphor theory for me, but this particular understanding of frames can be found in most disciplines within cognitive science. Claims about the existence of conceptual schemas seem relatively uncontroversial at this point, but the fact that non-sequiturs activate pattern-seeking schemas is, while completely reasonable as a hypothesis, new and exciting to see come through in the data.
Link to article. (H/T to Nuclear Dwight on twitter.)
“The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay… So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” Link to the Office of the Prime Minster’s Website.