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Benedict Carey discusses the brain's function while being amused. It appears that the brain is more able to learn or remember something when we are being amused or just laughed at comedy. The indication is that laughter and being amused are positive feelings and they allow the brain to reach a more reactive state.

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And that escape is all the more tantalizing for being incomplete. Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

"It's imagination, it's inference, it's guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously," said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of "The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life."

"It's all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos," Dr. Danesi said. "And once you have, you can sit back and say, 'Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.' "

For almost a century scientists have used puzzles to study what they call insight thinking, the leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis.

In one classic experiment, the German psychologist Karl Duncker presented people with a candle, a box of thumbtacks and the assignment of attaching the candle to a wall. About a quarter of the subjects in some studies thought to tack the box to the wall as a support - some immediately, and others after a few failed efforts to tack wax to drywall.

The creative leap may well be informed by subconscious cues. In another well-known experiment, psychologists challenged people to tie together two cords; the cords hung from the ceiling of a large room, too far apart to be grabbed at the same time.

A small percentage of people solved it without any help, by tying something like a pair of pliers to one cord and swinging it like a pendulum so that it could be caught while they held the other cord. In some experiments researchers gave hints to those who were stumped - for instance, by bumping into one of the strings so that it swung. Many of those who then solved the problem said they had no recollection of the hint, though it very likely registered subconsciously.

All along, researchers debated the definitions of insight and analysis, and some have doubted that the two are any more than sides of the same coin. Yet in an authoritative review of the research, the psychologists Jonathan W. Schooler and Joseph Melcher concluded that the abilities most strongly correlated with insight problem-solving "were not significantly correlated" with solving analytical problems.

Either way, creative problem-solving usually requires both analysis and sudden out-of-the-box insight.

"You really end up toggling between the two, but I think that they are truly different brain states," said Adam Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto.

At least, that is what brain-imaging studies are beginning to show. At first, such studies did little more than confirm that the process was happening as expected: brain areas that register reward spiked in activity when people came up with a solution, for instance..

Yet the "Aha!" moment of seeing a solution is only one step along a pathway. In a series of recent studies, Dr. Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, have imaged people's brains as they prepare to tackle a puzzle but before they've seen it. Those whose brains show a particular signature of preparatory activity, one that is strongly correlated with positive moods, turn out to be more likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight than with trial and error (the clues can be solved either way).

This signature includes strong activation in a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex. Previous research has found that cells in this area are active when people widen or narrow their attention - say, when they filter out distractions to concentrate on a difficult task, like listening for a voice in a noisy room. In this case of insight puzzle-solving, the brain seems to widen its attention, in effect making itself more open to distraction, to weaker connections..

"At this point we have strong circumstantial evidence that this resting state predicts how you solve problems later on," Dr. Kounios said, "and that it may in fact vary by individual."

The punch line is that a good joke can move the brain toward just this kind of state. In their humor study, Dr. Beeman and Dr. Subramaniam had college students solve word-association puzzles after watching a short video of a stand-up routine by Robin Williams. The students solved more of the puzzles over all, and significantly more by sudden insight, compared with when they'd seen a scary or boring video beforehand.

This diffuse brain state is not only an intellectual one, open to looser connections between words and concepts. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. "The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual," said Dr. Anderson. "You're not only thinking more broadly, you're literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel."

The idea that a distracted brain can be a more insightful one is still a work in progress. So, for that matter, is the notion that puzzle-solving helps the brain in any way to navigate the labyrinth of soured relationships, uncertain career options or hard choices that so often define the world outside.

But at the very least, acing the Saturday crossword or some mind-bending Sudoku suggests that some of the tools for the job are intact. And as any puzzle-head can attest, that buoyant, open state of mind isn't a bad one to try on for size once in a while. Whether you're working a puzzle or not.

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Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving

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And that escape is all the more tantalizing for being incomplete. Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

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Dr. Lyubansky discusses how laughter can be used as a shield from trauma. This will momentarily give relief from pain. He reminds us "that appearances can be deceiving...especially humor—can be used as a mask...from the pain."

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Robin Williams died last night. He was 63. There are multiple reports that he took his own life. If true, and there is no reason to doubt the reports, he succumbed to depression.

Williams was so multi-talented and so brilliantly funny that it is hard for most of us to imagine him sad, much less depressed.

Part of it, of course, is that he was a movie star, far removed from our "normal" lives. But it is not only his celebrity status that makes Williams's depression hard to imagine. It's also that his energy level always seemed higher than that of anyone else in the room. He was the maniacal DJ in Good Morning Vietnam. He was the irrepressible Genie in Aladdin. He was the David Letterman guest who, as Richard Corliss wrote in Time, left viewers "astonished, thrilled, and wearied." He was even a featured character in Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" video.

And by most accounts, it wasn't just an act. Many stars are known to be very different than their on-screen personas. Not Williams. He had a reputation for being kind and generous, as well as funny. (See, for example, this recollection from a one-time dinner companion.) Clearly, the humor was a core part of who Robin Williams really was.

But so was the depression.

The first-hand recollections of Williams appearing all over the internet today recall not only his humor but also his cocaine and alcohol addictions, as well as his pain and depression. In many ways, Williams is the modern-day, real-life Richard Cory, a tragic reminder that appearances can be deceiving and that even humor-especially humor-can be used as a mask that shields both the wearer and those around him, from the pain underneath.

For the past several years, I have had the privilege of spending a few hours each week with incarcerated youth in the county where I live. I'm there to introduce them to the values and practices of restorative justice, to the idea that there are more effective and productive ways to deal with conflict than with violence.

Sometimes, we do role-plays. Sometimes, I tell stories. Mostly, I try to listen, to really hear what is true and meaningful in their lives. I do this because it's the best way I know to build relationships, and also because if I'm not willing to listen to them, why should they bother listening to me?

Every week, the composition of the group changes a little. Over the years, I've met well over 100 kids. Some are so sad they are unable to utter more than a few words. Others are angry and resentful about being where they are, again. Another group tries to play it cool. Each type presents its own challenge, but there's another group that is harder to reach than any of the rest-the entertainers.

These are the kids who have learned how to make others laugh. They've also learned that, in that comedic moment, they can temporarily forget about their incarcerated fathers, their abusive uncles, their substance-dependent mothers, and all the other troubles in their life. In that comedic moment, they hurt just a bit less. And so they grasp every opportunity to entertain and, in doing so, cover up the pain.

And if I say to them, "You're a funny guy-I love how you make everyone around you laugh-but I can see that there is also a part of you that is sad," they say, "No, I ain't sad. It's all good. I'm good."

But they're not good. Because the pain never leaves for long.

I don't know anything about Robin Williams's inner life. I don't purport to know whether he was able and willing to confront his demons. Regardless, I have no negative judgment of him, for I trust that decent people do what they can to both live a good life and not cause others unnecessary pain-and Williams was clearly a decent man.

Despite their crimes, most of the kids I meet at the detention center are also decent, and most are also struggling. The ones who are silly, that tell non-stop stories and jokes? They may be struggling more than most.

So, when you see someone putting on a good show, go ahead and laugh. Robin Williams wouldn't have had it any other way; neither would the kids I've met.

But don't let the humor fool you.
For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, join the | Between The Lines | Facebook page and follow Mikhail on Twitter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

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Robin Williams died last night. He was 63. There are multiple reports that he took his own life. If true, and there is no reason to doubt the reports, he succumbed to depression. Williams was so multi-talented and so brilliantly funny that it is hard for most of us to imagine him sad, much less depressed.

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Eagleman seeks to answer the question of who is in charge regarding self and challenges the concept of free will. Showing the complexity of brain functions and how they occur before our actions, he shows that we live part of our lives on autopilot.  So why are we conscious? It works similarly to humor; both humor and consciousness are reactions to the unexpected.

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...

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They studied people's brain activity when engaged in laughter  and show there are clear signs of heightened activity in the reward centers of the brain. To me this is proof that laughing makes you feel better and can have positive affects on mind and body.

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Source: USC.
USC researchers pinpoint the regions of the brain that spark during the telling of a funny story.
What happens in your brain when you tell a joke? Well, that appears to depend on whether you do that for a living.

Researchers in USC's Image Understanding Laboratory studied professional improvisation comedians - many from the Los Angeles Groundlings comedy troupe - and amateur comics - in the act of coming up with a quip. Their aim: Gain a better understanding of the neural correlates of humor creativity - that is, see how the brain's physiology changes when a person tries to be funny.

For the study, both pro and amateur comedians, as well as a control group of non-comedians, viewed New Yorker cartoons without words and were asked to come up with two captions for them - one funny and one mundane.

Participants were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to track their brain activity as they created the captions. Each comic scanned and an outside panel of participants rated each of the captions for humor.
Free associations
The results showed that two regions of the brain were activated when the participants came up with jokes - the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporal association regions. However, the regions activated were different depending on the person's level of expertise.

"What we found is that the more experienced someone is at doing comedy, the more activation we saw in the temporal lobe," said USC doctoral student Ori Amir, who led the study with Irving Biederman, professor of psychology and computer science. The temporal lobe receives sensory information and is the region of the brain key to comprehending speech and visual cognition. It's also where abstract information, semantic information and remote associations meaningfully converge.

In contrast, the amateur comedians and non-comedians relied on their prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions like planning complex cognitive behavior and decision-making.

"The professional improv comedians let their free associations give them solutions," Biederman said.

To put it another way, "The more experience you have doing comedy, the less you need to engage in the top-down control and the more you rely on your spontaneous associations," Amir said.

The researchers also found that funniness ratings were higher for captions created while the participants had higher activity in the temporal regions of their brain during humor creation.

Amir noted that across different studies that seek to understand the neural correlates of creativity in the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex is the one region consistently connected to creativity.

"The question is what does it do exactly? It seems like it's not the source of creativity, but rather the cognitive control top-down director of the creative process," he said. "The creativity itself appears to occur elsewhere depending on the creative task."
Tickling the funny bone
In the past, scientists have studied the neural correlates of creativity with tasks such as writing a poem, improvising jazz or drawing a picture, but humor offered Amir and Biederman a unique pathway to study how the brain processes creation.

"Humor is an outstanding testbed for studying creativity," Biederman said. "It has a clear beginning, middle and end with a duration brief enough for neuroimaging. Also, the end product is easy to evaluate: Does it make you laugh? When someone creates an original composition or a poem, assessing the quality is not as clear-cut."
Visual recognition
The study builds on the research from Biederman's Image Understanding Laboratory, which studies the cortical basis of high-level visual recognition. The same temporal lobe regions that show high activation from humor are also activated by the aesthetic experience of appreciating a magnificent vista, for instance.

Biederman noted that the activation, and hence the pleasure, is greatly reduced by the repetition of any experience. The thrill is gone the second time we hear the joke, read the book or see a movie. Thus the pleasure isn't an end in and of itself, but it is what drives us to continually seek new and richly interpretable experiences. This then renders us, as Biederman has termed it, "infovores," meaning humans are hardwired to crave new information and experiences.

About this neuroscience research article

Biederman holds the Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Amir is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their findings were published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Source: Michelle Boston - USC
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the USC press release.
Original Research: Full open access research for "The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity" by Ori Amir and Irving Biederman in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Published online November 25 2016 doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00597

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

Abstract The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity
Unlike passive humor appreciation, the neural correlates of real-time humor creation have been unexplored. As a case study for creativity, humor generation uniquely affords a reliable assessment of a creative product's quality with a clear and relatively rapid beginning and end, rendering it amenable to neuroimaging that has the potential for reflecting individual differences in expertise. Professional and amateur "improv" comedians and controls viewed New Yorker cartoon drawings while being scanned. For each drawing, they were instructed to generate either a humorous or a mundane caption. Greater comedic experience was associated with decreased activation in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but increased activation in temporal association regions (TMP). Less experienced comedians manifested greater activation of mPFC, reflecting their deliberate search through TMP association space. Professionals, by contrast, tend to reap the fruits of their spontaneous associations with reduced reliance on top-down guided search.

"The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity" by Ori Amir and Irving Biederman in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Published online November 25 2016 doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00597

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How Being Funny Changes the Brain - Neuroscience News

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Source: USC. USC researchers pinpoint the regions of the brain that spark during the telling of a funny story. What happens in your brain when you tell a joke? Well, that appears to depend on whether you do that for a living.

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Taber discusses the origin and functions of laughter. They also see a positive correlation between the use of humor and healing in a medical setting. The authors argue “...humor can promote communication and strengthen relationships."

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This Ted Talk article discusses laughter. It states there isn't a lot of research done on laughter, because it is seen as a positive feeling and most people seem to research problems rather than positive aspects of life.

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If you search on the Web of Science database for papers on the emotion of fear, you'll get back 6,477 published papers. Search for papers on laughter and you'll get a paltry 175. Why the disparity? Well, one reason might be that laughter, like other positive emotions, feels less important than negative emotions. Sometimes people think that laughter is a ridiculous, trite, pointless topic to research - and somehow not the sort of topic we should study with Science with a capital S.

I'm a cognitive neuroscientist who works on vocal communication, and I (perhaps unsurprisingly) disagree. I have started to look into laughter in more detail, and I think it's a fascinating social behavior it is essential to study (here's an article I wrote for The Psychologist, a paper for The Journal of Neuroscience, and another for Cerebral Cortex). However, there is another reason why it is extremely hard to study laughter scientifically, and that's because it is exceptionally difficult to make people laugh in the lab.

This is partly because we normally laugh in social settings - social settings that can be extremely hard to re-create, for example, in a sterile anechoic chamber. But we need to use the anechoic chamber to make good, clear recordings of people laughing on their own, uncontaminated by the sounds of other people.

The anechoic chamber at University College London, where I work, is almost epically unamusing. It is claustrophobic and unpleasant. It's all I can do to spend two minutes in there, let alone start laughing there. But obviously our research calls for us to study people genuinely laughing. So over time we have learned the hard way how to make people laugh.

As with live TV shows and comedy clubs, we "warm people up" by spending time with them, watching stuff and laughing together, until we're ready to throw them into the chamber to start recording their mirth. There is some science behind this: Laughter is contagious, and it's much easier to make someone laugh again if they're already laughing. So we try and get groups of people to come in at once, and if possible, groups of people we know, and who know each other. We are thirty times more likely to laugh if we're with someone else than if we're on our own, and we're more likely to "catch" laughter from someone we know than someone we don't know.

We still need reasons for people to laugh when they're in the chamber, and here YouTube has been our greatest friend. Here are some of the videos we have used to make people laugh, roughly grouped into six categories.

1. Laugh and the world laughs with you

Here we use the contagion of laughter to make people laugh. So the Skype laughter chain is a great sequence of people laughing because other people are laughing. Meanwhile, another goldmine of giggles is the genre of TV or radio presenters trying not to laugh. There is something truly wonderful about people presenting live who have to try and keep talking through their laughter.

2. Schadenfreude

Empirically, if you ask German people what makes them laugh, they are most likely to talk about schadenfreude - which means "harm-joy," and which generally means laughter caused by someone else's misfortune, like this Dublin pedestrian falling on ice. English-speaking people don't have a good word for schadenfreude, but a fondness for slapstick humor and pratfalls suggests we are just as likely to laugh at it.

3. Schadenfreude AND laughter

I use this video to show how swiftly laughter changes a mood. Also, what a glorious pratfall, followed by helpless laughter.

4. Situation comedy

Although most laughter is found in social interactions, clips from sitcoms can be a very useful cue for laughter - especially some of the very rapid "best of" edits, such as Troy from Community or Dr. Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development.

5. Specialist interest

What we find funny can be intensely personal. Carolyn McGettigan, who used to work in my lab, has an extensive and thorough knowledge of the Eurovision Song Contest. This includes some of the more unusual performances, for example: Krassimir from Bulgaria in 2009. Starts oddly, then, stilts! It makes her cry with laughter.

6. Social priming

No matter what I did, I could not laugh on my own in the anechoic chamber. I would sit and watch things (or read things) and chuckle gently, at best. What made me laugh out loud was watching Carolyn listening to something that made her want to laugh. Then I laughed extremely hard.

It's worth noting that though some themes emerge, there is no one thing (video, clip, story) that everyone finds funny. When I give talks to the University of the Third Age (a university for retired and semi-retired people), for example, very few people find the clip of the Dublin pedestrian slipping and falling funny, because older people are more acutely aware of the realities of falling. This context-dependent effect in humor has probably never been better expressed than by The Onion in an article titled " That's not funny: my brother died that way." Which made me laugh.
Featured image via iStock.

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How scientists make people laugh to study humor

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If you search on the Web of Science database for papers on the emotion of fear, you'll get back 6,477 published papers. Search for papers on laughter and you'll get a paltry 175. Why the disparity? Well, one reason might be that laughter, like other positive emotions, feels less important than negative emotions.

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Discusses the importance of laughter. Also the different functions it has in society. She also states that a person in 30x more likely to laugh when in the company of others. This to me indicates that laughter and humor are indeed important social ques.

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Did you know that you're 30 times more likely to laugh if you're with somebody else than if you're alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of cracking up.

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Steve Mazan discusses his time doing a USO tour. He takes pride in making our service members laugh and is determined to break one hard shell. While he wasn't able to, his fellow comedian was able to make the stonefaced soldier laugh.

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The Power of Laughter--Steve Mazan TED Talk

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Robinson's study mostly confirmed the old adage, “Laughter is the best medicine.” Evidence shows laughter has a positive effect for patients of chronic and mental illnesses, as well as with pain management and other health benefits. Including: mental and physical health, building and maintaining relationships.

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Laughter is the Best Medicine - HelpGuide.org

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When it comes to keeping you healthy, laughter is up there with a nutritious diet and exercise. Learn how to harness its powerful health benefits.

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Lynn, Amanda. Personal interview. 14 Apr. 2019.

Amanda Lynn was raised in a small town with her 2 siblings. She says humor helped her get through a difficult childhood. She see's the joy laughter brings and wants to share that with as many people as she can. She started writing and preforming comedy as a teenager and currently pursues her dream of making it to the big stage to share laughter.

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Ellen discusses the benefits to laughter. She talks about the reward centers of the brain being activated by laughter. This can lower stress and make us feel better.