Where does the sense of humor come from?

Where does humor come from? To find out, the research team scanned the brains of professional comedians to determine the brain activities involved in telling jokes.

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The 44th Society of Neuroscience was held from 5438 June 2005 to 5438 June 2009.

A study at the annual meeting of Neuroscience (SFN) pointed out that compared with ordinary people or amateurs, professional comedians have more brain activity in humorous areas, but in humorous areas.

There is less brain activity in areas related to fun and enjoyment.

Ori Amir, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California (USC), said that many studies have investigated the brain regions of humor perception, and only a few studies have investigated the regions involved in humor production.

Amir said: "There are many professional comedians in Los Angeles (where the University of Southern California is located) who can improvise according to the prompts." For this research, Amir and his colleagues recruited some professional comedians, amateur comedians and ordinary people (as control group).

The researchers put volunteers in magnetic resonance imaging machines and showed them cartoon pictures without comments. Then, each participant will be asked to write a humorous note, a neutral and not funny note, or not to write a note.

Brain scans show that there are differences in the "pleasure centers" of the brain, which is considered to be related to the sense of humor-especially the ventral striatum. The control group showed the most activities in these areas, followed by amateur comedians and professional comedians, among which professional comedians showed the least activities in these parts of the brain.

In addition, the activities of these happiness centers disappear faster in the brains of professional comedians than in the brains of other participants. Strangely, the decline in activity is also related to depression, so the inherent view of "sad clown" may be reasonable, or it may be that people who specialize in telling jokes are tired of funny things "aesthetic".

Researchers say that professional comedians show the most activity in the temporal lobe of the brain, which is considered by scientists as the birthplace of humor. The control group has the least brain activity in this area.

Scientists also set up an independent group to evaluate the humor of jokes. They found that the more interesting the subjects' jokes were, the more active the brain regions that created humor were. That is, Amir said that the more brain activity, the stronger the sense of humor.