1/6/2023 0 Comments Parts of thebrain joke![]() ![]() As Amir states, “The professional improv comedians let their free associations give them solutions. Non-comedians and amateur comedians saw less activity in the temporal lobe and more activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area that deals with executive functions such as complex planning and decision-making. It also seems to be the area where semantic and abstract information converges with remote associations. The temporal lobe is where the brain receives sensory information and plays a pivotal role in understanding speech and imagery. According to Amir, “What we found is that the more experienced someone is at doing comedy, the more activation we saw in the temporal lobe.” Interestingly, the activation in these particular regions was different depending on the participant’s comedic expertise. Temporal association regions – part of the temporal lobe thought to be involved in the recognition and identification of complex stimuli.This helps us respond correctly in social interactions. Medial prefrontal cortex – an area at the front of the brain thought to be involved in learning associations between locations and events and the appropriate emotional responses. ![]() Once the data had been analyzed, it was revealed that two parts of the brain were particularly active during the creation of the humorous captions. After this, a panel assessed each caption the participants wrote for its level of humor. Each participant viewed a cartoon from the New Yorker without any text and were prompted to come up with their own captions one version was to be mundane and the other funny.Īs they completed their tasks, their brains were scanned using magnetic reasoning imaging (fMRI). This makes it very convenient for brain imaging, and the end product is easy to assess, “Does it make you laugh?” Subsequently, jokes are much easier to rate than the quality of a doodle, haiku or musical piece, which is arguably more subjective.įor this study, professional and amateur comedians were studied as well as a control group of non-comedians. Humor has a clear beginning, middle and end, and takes place over a relatively short period of time. Previous studies have taken photos of the brain as it writes poetry, improvises jazz and even draws pictures, but humor is a very unique field. However, it’s perhaps this very mystery that entices researchers to unpick the processes underlying creativity. The study was led by USC doctoral student Ori Amir and Irving Biederman, a professor of psychology and computer science.Ĭreativity is esoteric by nature. Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles recently undertook a rather ambitious, if not amusing project: discovering the neurological processes involved in making a joke. A new study has taken a closer look inside the brains of professional comedians to see how neuroscience corresponds with creativity. ![]()
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