If appreciating humor
is good exercise for
the brain, then writing
a joke is exercise
on steroids.vertical ellipse.” The interpretive/
funny description: “Close-up of a pig
looking at book titles in a library.”
(Think about it, or look at the drawing
below.) For another drawing, “a pleth-
ora of dots surrounded concentrically
around a single dot” could be just
that, or it could be “germs
avoiding a friend who
caught antibiotics.”
The subjects were
asked to rate each
caption as “not
funny,” “a little
funny,” or “funny.”
As expected,
the interpretive
captions lit up more
areas of the brain
than their obvious
counterparts—in line with
the cognitive theory that insight in
and of itself is pleasurable. But the
scans revealed that humorous in-
sights activated the most regions of
all. The funnier the subjects rated a
caption, the more neurons were fired.
It is this extra burst of brain activation
at the moment we “get” a joke that
transforms “aha” into “haha,” Amir
and Biederman concluded. What’s
more, the opioid
receptors they were
studying are lo-
cated in the higher-
level processing
areas of the tempo-
ral lobes, a patch of
neural real estaterunning from roughly behind the ears
up to the eyes, where we store the
memories and associations we use to
make sense of the world. They also
have connections to neurons in the
basal ganglia, the reward center of the
brain.
“We had come to think of
these perceptual systems
as relatively mundane
structures meant
simply to passively
get us informa-
tion,” Biederman
says. “But it turns
out that getting
new information is
actually pleasurable.”
From there, the
researchers took their
analysis one step further. In a
follow-up study, Amir recruited people
to compose captions for a series of car-
toons while he scanned their brains.
When they came up with a joke, the
same regions of the brain that light up
when people appreciate humor were
activated. And, as in the first study,
the funnier the jokes (as rated by inde-
pendent observers), the more neurons
fired in the jokers’ brains.
But the firing
of the brain cells
occurred on a dif-
ferent timeline,
enhancing the
process and mak-
ing it all the more
powerful. When weIs this a picture of
three ovals, or is it a
pig looking at book
titles on a library
shelf? The funnier
caption activates
more of your brain.60 september 2019
Reader’s Digest