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Science's Funniest Subject
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.
The scientific hunt for the brain's humor muscles begins with (what else?) an academic hypothesis of humor. It's called incongruity, and it's a widely accepted idea about how humor works. For example, take this joke (please): Why won't sharks attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.
The punch line makes no sense at first and briefly trips us up. That's incongruity. To get the joke, we rifle through our mental files on language, syntax and social know-how. Then, in a flash, we mentally shift gears and see the story in a new light. We delight in the surprising logic, especially if it reveals a rarely spoken truth about human nature. Then we laugh. We do all that in a fraction of a second -- no mean feat, even by the high standards of the human brain.
Neuroscientists suspect that separate humor muscles are responsible for each of these mental tasks. By exercising them, we learn and develop. "Each humor event you experience makes you grow a little bit -- as the brain has expanded and taken on new connections," explains William Fry, MD, a pioneering humor researcher and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
In studying patients with brain injuries, neurologists came to suspect that the right frontal lobe was critical for appreciating what's comical. In 1999, Donald Stuss, PhD, and Prathiba Shammi, PhD, two neuropsychologists at Baycrest, a hospital and research institute in Toronto, tested that idea. They identified 21 patients with damage limited to either their right frontal lobes or another brain region; then they had the patients read humorous statements. (Example: A sign in a Hong Kong tailor's shop read "Please have a fit upstairs." Another example: A sign in a Tokyo hotel read "Guests are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.")
Only patients with a damaged right prefrontal cortex didn't get the humor at all. The patients still appreciated the slapstick, though. All this means is that the right frontal humor muscle is exercised only during so-called thoughtful forms of humor.
To locate other humor muscles, neuroscientists like Allman have recently begun placing healthy people in functional MRI scanners, then showing them cartoons or television sitcoms. The scans reveal blood flow to several different brain regions, which shows how hard they're working.
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