Original source: SimoleonSense.com .
H/T Phil Hartman
Click Here To Read: The comedy circuit: When your brain gets the joke (Psychology of Humor)
Introduction (Via NS)
TWO polar bears are perched on a block of floating ice. One says to the other: “Do you know, I keep thinking it’s Thursday…”
To some, this kind of surreal humour is side-splitting. Others are baffled by it and can’t even raise a smile. Yet despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold.
So what is a joke, exactly? Most theories agree that one condition is essential: there must be some kind of incongruity between two elements within the joke, which can be resolved in a playful or unexpected way.
Additional Excerpts (via NS)
But which parts of the brain carry out these processes? To find out, Joseph Moran, then at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, used functional MRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they watched popular TV sitcoms. The experiments revealed a distinct pattern of neural activity that occurs in response to a funny joke, with the left posterior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus seeing the most activity. These regions are normally linked to language comprehension and the ability to adjust the focus of our attention, which would seem to correspond to the process of incongruity-resolution at the heart of a good joke (NeuroImage, vol 21, p 1055).
Further research, conducted by Dean Mobbs, then at Stanford University in California, uncovered a second spike of activity in the brain’s limbic system – associated with dopamine release and reward processing – which may explain the pleasure felt once you “get” the joke (Neuron, vol 40, p 1041).
Click Here To Read: The comedy circuit: When your brain gets the joke (Psychology of Humor)
Alphaverse.com uses this content with author’s permission purely for educational purposes. Go to the feed source of this article
