If you want to get your point across then it is best not to tell it straight, claim scientists who discovered a touch of the surreal helps people absorb information.

Psychologists found that bizarre juxtapositions force people to engage their brain more and so increases the amount they learn.

Being simple, straightforward and to the point could actually lead to less engagement than jumbling up your facts and time frames, it is claimed.

Researchers at the University of California and the University of British Columbia claimed to have shown that exposure to surrealism enhances the "cognitive mechanism" that leads to learning.

Travis Proulx, lead researcher, said that when people are confronted by something that fundamentally does not make sense they try harder to understand it.

As an illustration he said normally a person would associate fire with extreme heat.

But if that person puts his hand into the fire and discovers it is icy cold, they would find it disturbing because common sense has been turned upside down.

For the study, Mr Proulx and colleagues gave one group an abridged and slightly edited version of Franz Kafka's story The Country Doctor which involved a nonsensical and disturbing series of events.

A second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense.

Questioned later, the first group learnt more because they were motivated to find structure.

Mr Proulx said: "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story.

"They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did.

"People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings.

"That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviours, but either way, people want to get rid of it.

"So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

But researchers pointed out more work needed to be done and it remains to be seen whether or not reading surreal literature would aid in the learning of studied material.

Mr Proulx said: "It's important to note that sitting down with a Kafka story before exam time probably wouldn't boost your performance on a test.

"What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story.

"If you expect that you'll encounter something strange or out of the ordinary, you won't experience the same sense of alienation.

"You may be disturbed by it, but you won't show the same learning ability. The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them.

"Hence, they strived to make sense of something else."

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.