Nonsense is a very high order of cognition. People who play with words, with sounds, whose art has that element of energy and nonsense which we call play, are close to some basic truth, plugged into the universe. We are talking here about serious, engaged play, not fooling around.
This article says that studies have shown that people exposed to "nonsense", here defined as a Kafka story, when later tested, were better at pattern recognition. After reading Kafka,
…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.
It is as though the rousting of convention by the "nonsense" in Kafka's story allowed the mind a blessed freedom. That things became new. Zen mind, beginner's mind, was the way one book title described that state — a whole discipline devoted to achieving that freedom, which is what we all yearn for, whether we know it or not.
This book, something of a classic, also affirms, in a philosophical way, the "play element in culture"; the way play informs the fabric of society.
