On Arts & Letters Daily I came across a link to an article titled “This Is Your Brain on Kafka.” The author summarizes the experimental data and has a concluding sentence that reads: “Man is perpetually in search of meaning, and if a Kafkaesque work of literature seems strange on the surface, our brains amp up to dig deeper and discover its underlying design.” So, yes. The absurd pushes us to think harder.

While I find that interesting, it made me think of Behaviourism, specifically schedules of reinforcement.  When chaos is introduced into the rewards given for certain behaviours (i.e. food pellets for pigeons pecking a spot on the wall or the burst of pleasure we get for “getting” the meaning of something), it makes the learned behaviour harder to destroy, makes it more resilient. You might even say it makes us learn better.  In other words, for us finding meaning is our reward just as the seed is for the bird; our learning is enhanced by a little chaos just as surely as the pigeon’s is.

That I find really, really interesting.