WTF FTW (Why absurdity is good for you.)

Why was this ad so effective? Taken significantly farther, why do we have insanity like every freaking Skittles commercial floating around? Do we just love being fucked with or do disconnections actually make stronger connections? And how can those of us who love Skittles commercials justify our ideas that even we know make no fucking sense to the people who need to make a flowchart just to get a latte?

The New York Times weighed in yesterday with an article titled "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect". Here's an excerpt:

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Here's how I understood it: evolution has given us a handy mechanism for dealing with shit we don't understand, by distracting us with a sudden understanding of other things. Basically:

Life: "Hey, here's a purple squirrelephant eating popsicles on the bus."

You: "Wait a second..."

Your Brain: "Hey look! There seem to be more white cars on the road these days than any other color! It's probably because the we're all so sick of the clutter of the modern world, that we enjoy the peaceful retreat of a clean white surface. ...Cars. White. ...Yeah ok you can go back to whatever you were doing now."

The distraction keeps you from going insane, and as an extra benefit you've made a new observation about the world that you can now contribute to the global knowledge base via Twitter.

So the next time you need to explain to the client why one of these is a good idea, refer them to my General Theory of WTF: The less sense something makes, the more your brain looks for things that do make sense. The more you find things that do make sense, the smarter you feel. The smarter an ad makes you feel, the more positive associations you have with that brand, and positive associations = brand loyalty = $$$$. Convoluted? Yes. But that's evolution for you, baby.