A new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience investigates the neural basis of humour: Why Clowns Taste Funny.The authors note that some things are funny because of ambiguous words. For example:
Q: Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?Previous studies, apparently, have shown that these kinds of jokes lead to activation in the lIFG (left inferior frontal gyrus), although it's also involved in processing ambiguity that's not funny, and indeed, language in general.
A: Because they taste funny!
In this study they gave people fMRI and played them audio clips of sentences that were either funny or not, and that either contained ambiguity or not. Examples of non-funny ambiguity included crackers like this:
Q: What happened to the post?
A: As usual, it was given to the best-qualified applicant.
They found that, relative to straightforward ones, ambiguous sentences led to increased activation in two areas, the lIFG and also the left ITG. That fits with previous work.
By contrast, funny stimuli, whether ambiguous or not, sent the brain into overdrive, with humour causing activation all over a wide range of hilarious areas such as the amygdala, ventral striatum, hypothalamus, temporal lobes and more.Many of these areas are known to be involved in emotion and pleasure, although some are fairly random such as visual area BA19.
There were strong associations between BOLD signal change and funniness in the midbrain, the left ventral striatum, and the left anterior and posterior IFG.The problem is, like so many neuroimaging studies, it's not clear what this adds to our understanding of the topic. All this really shows is that linguistic ambiguity activates language areas, and enjoyable stimuli activate pleasure areas (amongst many others); it doesn't tell us why some things are funny.
So more research is needed, and future neuro-humour studies will need a new set of neuro-jokes in order to maximize the laughs. Here's a few I came up with:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A :Because of activation in the motor cortex, causing muscle contractions in his legs.
Q: What neuroimaging methodology is most useful for studying the brains of cats and dogs?
A: PET scanning.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
John.
I doubt that. The 'self' is an illusion. The concept of 'John' as an individual is incompatible with modern neuroscience.
Bekinschtein TA, Davis MH, Rodd JM, & Owen AM (2011). Why Clowns Taste Funny: The Relationship between Humor and Semantic Ambiguity. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 31 (26), 9665-71 PMID: 21715632
9 comments:
Q: What neuroscience methodology is most useful for studying insomnia in Seattle?
A: MEG scanning
Knock knock
Who's there?
Sarah.
Sarah who?
Cerebellum.
Chickens do not have motorcortex.
Q: Why did the cannibal eat the trapeze artist?
A: He wanted a balance meal.
Q: What did the cannibal get when he arrived late to the party?
A: The cold shoulder.
Thanks for writing about our study – and for the neuro-jokes. We did include a couple of psychiatry jokes that might go down well with a neuroskeptic. We ensured good stimulus matching by including these in both the ambiguous and non-ambiguous joke conditions :-)
A guy walked into a psychiatrist's office wearing only cling-film underpants. The psychiatrist said: “Well, I can clearly see your nuts.”
"Doctor, I keep thinking I'm a moth" "You don't need me, you need a psychiatrist" "Yes, I know. I was going to see him but I saw your light was on"
At the risk of ruining the fun, though, I disagree with the following statement about our study:
The problem is, like so many neuroimaging studies, it's not clear what this adds to our understanding of the topic… it doesn't tell us why some things are funny.
I think we did add something to the existing literature on jokes – in particular our demonstration that ambiguous jokes activates anterior LIFG more than ambiguous sentences, or non-ambiguous jokes (i.e. a joke x ambiguity interaction, green in figure 3c/d). From this we argue for:
… a more precise account of how IFG involvement in incongruity resolution contributes to the appreciation of jokes that depend on semantic ambiguity. It is not the frame shift or resolution of incongruity that creates humor (since this is present in non-joke semantic ambiguity resolution), but rather a continuing process of ambiguity resolution that is unique to the ambiguous jokes. A critical difference is that in puns such as “Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny!”, the critical word (funny) activates multiple meanings (e.g., odd/bad and amusing). Crucially, both possible meanings are relevant and remain plausible given the overall meaning of the punchline.
In simple terms: (1) What makes a pun funny is having both meanings of an ambiguous words be relevant at the same time. Normal sentences use only one meaning of an ambiguous word and aren’t funny. (2) Simultaneous activation of two meanings in a pun is associated with activity in anterior LIFG compared to: (i) ambiguity resolution that’s not funny, (ii) jokes that don’t use ambiguity resolution. We’ve other studies that build on this in exploring cognitive and neural processes involved in humour. Hopefully we can tell you more about this work soon.
More generally, although I agree that showing where the brain lights up for jokes doesn’t by itself answer the most interesting ‘why’ question, I do believe that cognitive precision (the joke x ambiguity interaction) and regional neural measures (fMRI in this case), together provide information to constrain theorising. At present, I have more developed examples of this in other domains (e.g. speech perception, and word learning), but I hope that the same arguments will in time be apparent for theories of ambiguity resolution and humour appreciation.
Hi Matt, thanks for the comment.
Those jokes are much better than mine. Especially the first one, I'm going to borrow that for future use.
Re: your findings, I agree with your interpretation of why such puns are funny. And I agree that your fMRI findings could help in future theorizing.
I'm just a purist who wants such theorizing to come before any imaging happens :)
Hi,
I feel compel to start with a couple of jokes we could not include in our study:
How can you tell if two truck drivers are gay?
They exchange loads.
What is the best way to make a bull sweat?
Give him a tight Jersey.
JOkes aside I must say that the motivation of the study was twofold, a twist on previous semantic ambiguity research and in that sense it had a theoretical aim: to try to explain what it special about ambiguity in puns that it is not in ambiguous sentences. But also we wanted to have good fMRI markers to apply this to vegetative patients (a clinical aim) to test three things: emotion processing, complex language, and conscious processing (getting a joke).
We are now analysing a prediction error study with jokes, heavily grounded in that theoretical framework, and with clear hyps on expectancy and surprise in ventral striatum and IFG derived from cognitive and computational models. It may satisfy purist... maybe not, but it will be closer!
http://sccn.ucsd.edu/~ywu/downloads/paper-JokeComprehension-ywu.pdf
I have read that what is funny to people in one country is not necessarily to people in other countries and that is not just an issue of translation. Have any of these studies been done using languages other than English and on subjects that are not from this country? It would be interesting to me to see if the same results were obtained using humor and subjects from other countries as well.
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