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Your Brain on Ha-Ha
Other brain-scan results are painting a new picture of the brain's humor system. Here's how scientists think it works: When you hear a joke, a language center on the left side of your brain makes sense of the words, then sends the message across to the right side of the brain. There, the right frontal cortex delves into regions including those that store emotions and social memories, then shuffles the information until it clicks and you get the joke. Next, a structure deep in the brain pumps out dopamine, a "reward system" chemical that makes you feel good, and a primitive region near the base of your skull makes you laugh.At Caltech, Allman and Watson discovered an important new humor muscle by scanning Allman's brain, as well as those of 19 other people. Inside the scanner, each subject viewed 47 Far Side cartoons and 53 New Yorker cartoons, while pushing buttons on a handheld device to rate how funny each was. The results suggested for the first time how humor might change our brain to sharpen our intuition. Allman and Watson had already focused on two parts of the frontal lobe that work when we react intuitively. The results of the experiment, which were published in March in the journal Cerebral Cortex, showed that the funnier the subjects rated the cartoon, the harder those two brain parts worked.
But the same two regions also activate when we experience complex emotions, such as love, lust and guilt. Since both intuition and emotions come into play when we make social decisions, Allman suspects that the two new humor muscles play a role in the fast, intuitive (and sometimes wrong) judgments we routinely make about others.
Allman believes that complex humor may actually recalibrate our intuition, allowing us to make better social decisions. "I think we've hit upon the mechanism of that," he says. If so, then lightening up could keep our hunches on target.
Don't Forget This!
Meanwhile, psychologists have come up with other reasons to look for the lighter side of life. For starters, humor can improve memory. That's what advertisers have long suspected. "Otherwise, you would never have a lizard selling insurance or a dog selling beer," Dunkelblau says.
But there was little hard evidence until 1994, when psychologist Stephen Schmidt, PhD, of Middle Tennessee State University had 38 psychology undergraduates read sentences like this one: "There are three ways a man can wear his hair: parted, unparted and departed." He also had them read straight versions of the same sentences: "Men can wear their hair with or without a part, unless they are bald." The students remembered the funny sentences, and words from those sentences, better than they recalled the unfunny ones.
Ron Berk, PhD, a psychologist who taught statistics at Johns Hopkins University, has put such knowledge to work in the classroom, using jokes, funny examples, sight gags and skits. Each semester he'd untuck his shirt, put a cigar in his mouth and a baseball cap on his head, and show up to his statistics class with an impeccably dressed, somewhat formal female colleague. "I'm Oscar and this is Felice, and we're going to talk about relationships," he said, as the theme from The Odd Couple played. The students laughed because their professors looked ridiculous. But as they listed the couple's similarities and differences, the humor helped them learn an important statistical concept.
Berk has published a series of studies showing that sharing a laugh helps students learn more. Even funny test directions helped students do significantly better on an otherwise identical exam, according to a study Berk did that will be published later this year. He also detailed his unorthodox teaching methods in a book, Humor as an Instructional Defibrillator.
Humor can also loosen up our minds, allowing us to play around with ideas and be more creative. That's according to years of psychological studies, many of which got people to laugh, then asked them to come up with creative things to do with a brick. After years of brick studies, psychologists were still skeptical, so in 1987, Alice Isen, PhD, a professor of psychology and management at Cornell University, began using what she says is a better measure of creativity: She challenged undergraduates to nail a burning candle to a corkboard.
More specifically, Isen and her co-workers gave subjects a candle, a book of matches, a box of tacks and ten minutes, and told them to attach the candle to the wall without dripping any wax. People who were not amused spent most of their time trying repeatedly to tack the candle to the corkboard. "That won't work because the candle is too thick," Isen says. "Besides, the wall would catch fire."
But subjects who had just watched funny outtakes from old TV shows were more than three times as likely to find the correct, and creative, answer: Dump the tacks from the box, tack the box to the corkboard, and use the attached box as a candle holder.
Last year, Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found similar results when she showed subjects either videos of comical waddling penguins or neutral videos of sticks. The amused penguin watchers were more likely to think broadly. These results have convinced psychologists that amusement and other positive feelings make people think more flexibly and try more novel alternatives when solving a problem.
All this suggests that by enjoying humor, playing and exploring, we can better understand ourselves, others and the world we live in. What's more, those changes last, and help us during hard times. So limber up your mind and wise up by having a laugh. Hey, did you hear the one about the two worms at a party?
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