This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Erica Barris. Got a minute?

Exposure to the unusual, the jarring, the culturally shocking may be beneficial for your cognitive reasoning and

your waistline. That's according to a study in the journal Social Cognition.

Using events we all have some understanding of, holidays, weddings, and funerals, researchers

ran eight experiments to see how people respond to normative cultural situations

versus culturally disfluent situations. A normative situation would be a bride wearing white on her

wedding day. A disfluent one would be hanging St. Patrick's Day decorations on Christmas.

The first two experiments took place during 4th of July and Labor Day picnics.

For the July 4th party, white plates were randomly mixed into stacks of stars and

stripes plates. On Labor Day, Halloween adorn plates were mixed in with

patriotic plates. Then guests selected food from a buffet line. The result,

on Labor Day guests put less food on the Halloween themes than on the patriotic plates.

And on the 4th of July, they put less food on plain white plates than on stars and stripes plates.

In other parts of this study, researchers found that people who have been exposed to culturally

disfluent situations performed better on cognitive reasoning tests and were less likely to

succumb to impulse purchases and food consumption.

That situation was compared to when events met their expectations such as

seeing hearts on Valentine's Day.

Encountering the expected allowed subjects to behave more mindlessly.

So researchers reason that cultural fluency preserves associative reasoning while cultural

disfluency shifts to systematic reasoning.

These small tests reinforce the idea that routine makes the brain dull,

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