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Two worms sit on a couch at a party. The male worm smiles suggestively and chats up the female. Nearby, two other male worms cast the couple a sidelong glance. "You gotta check this out, Stuart," one says. "Vinnie's over on the couch, putting the moves on Zelda Schwartz -- but he's talkin' to the wrong end."John Allman, PhD, laughs quietly as he reads the caption of this Far Side cartoon. The neuroscientist from California Institute of Technology is lying inside a dark, clanking metal cylinder, watching Gary Larson's drawing on a screen. His legs protrude from the machine into a windowless basement laboratory on the Caltech campus. In the control room next door, Karli Watson, a graduate student, sits at the console, which controls the MRI scanner into which Allman is inserted. As Allman gets the joke, Watson is taking readings of his brain. Welcome to humor research, circa 2006.
What's So Funny?
Humor is so clearly central to the human adventure that it's surprising how little attention science has paid it until recently, preferring instead to tackle weightier subjects like global warming, earth-menacing asteroids and the dangers of trans fats in Girl Scout cookies. "No one takes humor seriously," jokes Ed Dunkelblau, PhD, a psychologist, humor consultant and former president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. Nonetheless, Allman and a smattering of other scientists have forged bravely ahead, to the occasional consternation of their more earnest colleagues, probing minds and brains to find our funny bones.
And they're finding them, buried deep in our gray matter. Humor, it turns out, is a whole-brain experience, with networks of brain parts -- call them "humor muscles" -- passing signals quickly and efficiently to help us get a joke. We need relatively few of those muscles to comprehend simple slapstick like that in The Three Stooges, which requires us only to chortle when Moe pokes Curly in the eye. But complex humor, such as the jokes, cartoons and funny stories in Reader's Digest, puts more of our brains to work.
Today, using the tools of neuroscience (functional MRI machines, PET scans and statistics) and psychology (questionnaires, psychology students and more statistics), researchers like Allman are beginning to understand exactly how our brain's humor muscles figure out what's funny, and how exercising them may sharpen our minds. They aren't saying that regular helpings of jokes or Adam Sandler movies will qualify us all for Mensa. But a growing body of research suggests that humor can tune our minds, help us learn, and keep us mentally loose, limber and creative.
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