Humour is so clearly central to the human advanture that is surprising how little attention science has paid it until recently. Neuroscientist, psychologist and others have forged bravely ahead, to the occasional consternation of their earnest colleagues, probing minds and brains to find human funny bones. And they're finding them deep in our grey matter.
Humour, it turns out, is a whole-brain experience, with networks of brain parts - call them "humour muscles" - passing signals quickly and efficiently to help us get a joke. We need relatively few of these muscles to comprehend simple slapsticks like in The Three Stooges, which requre us to chortle. But complex humour, such as jokes, cartoons and funny stories puts more of our brain to work.
Today, using tools of science (functional MRI machines, PET scans and statistics) and psychology, researchers are beginning to understand how our brain's humour muscles figure out what's funny and how exercising them may sharpen our mind and suggest that humour can tune our minds to help us learn, and keep us mentally loose, limber and creative.
Other brain-scan results are painting a new picture of the brain's humour system. Here's how scientist thinks it works: When you hear a joke, a language centre on the left side of the brain make sense of the words, then sends the message across to the right side of the brain. There, the right frontal cortex delves into regions including those that store emotions and social memories, then shuffles the information until it clicks and you get the joke. Next, a structure deep in the brain pumps out depomine, a "reward system" chemical that makes you feel good, and a primitive region near the base of your skull makes you laugh.
On the funny side, humour can improve memory. We remembered the funny sentences and words from these sentences, better than we can recall the unfunny ones. Humour can also loosen up our minds, allowing us to be more creative and make people think more flesxibility and try more novel alternatives when solving a problem.
All these suggest that enjoying humour, playing and exploring, we can better understand ourselves, others and the world we live in. What's more, those changes last and help us during the hard times.
Humorous speech contest is coming up in August 2010, so limber up your mind and wise up by having a laugh!
Aiyooooo.....this is too technical to be funny....lah
ReplyDeleteYes and our brains are receptive to jokes and humour become so spontaneous that technicality.. become invisible. Rosa
ReplyDeleteWow, PDTMC decided to go green, the backgrown is refreshing.
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