This experiment is connected with the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics, which over the last decade or so has attempted to uncover the neural underpinnings of our experience of music and visual art, using brain imaging technology. Slowly, a small but growing number of researchers have also begun using similar tools to scrutinize the perhaps more elusive, and perhaps endangered, experience of literary reading.

Last year, researchers at Stanford University drew headlines with the results of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) experiment showing that different regions of the brain were activated when subjects switched from reading Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” for pleasure to reading it analytically. And this fall, a study out of the New School for Social Research showed that readers of literary fiction scored higher on tests of empathy than readers of commercial fiction, a finding greeted with satisfied told-you-sos from many readers and writers alike.

Mr. Grunberg, however, seems to be the first novelist to submit not just his work, but also his own creative processes to direct scientific scrutiny. And he claims no investment in the idea that his darkly satirical and piety-poking books — including the recently translated “Tirza,” praised in The New York Times Book Review as “never less than enthralling,” if “not always enjoyable” — will be shown to be socially or morally edifying.

“I don’t think this experiment needs to prove that literature can be good for you,” he said. “Sometimes, literature can actually be dangerous, if you take it seriously.”

Mr. Grunberg, the son of German-born Holocaust survivors, has become a celebrity in the Netherlands precisely by treating the business of being a writer as a bit of a lark, his admirers say.

His first novel, “Blue Mondays” — written after he had dropped out of high school, failed as an actor and then gone bankrupt as a publisher — became a best seller and won a prestigious Dutch prize for the best first novel of 1994. Six years later, a minor scandal ensued after he won the prize again with “The Story of My Baldness,” written as Marek van der Jagt, a fictional author who had taken some public whacks at Arnon Grunberg for good measure.