The Hindu Business Line : Humour is no laughing matter

"WHAT'S common between a king and tennis?" Well, you want to say, balls, but then a more appropriate answer would be court, and if somebody were to engage you in such trivia, you share a laugh, ha-ha. "Humour is a vital aspect of social functioning," says Joseph M. Moran in a paper titled Neural correlates of humour detection and appreciation written along with his colleagues in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, US.

Their study shows that two things happen inside our brains — one is about `getting the joke,' while the other experiences the mirth. You can laugh it away, because "absence of a sense of humour can have distressing interpersonal consequences." Also, humour can be therapeutic, producing beneficial effects on the immune and central nervous system, and can provide coping mechanisms for life's tribulations, state the authors citing other authorities.

They divide humour into cognitive and affective elements; the former "attempts to comprehend disparities between punch lines and prior experience," while the latter enjoys the joke, say, clutching his belly. The paper begins with `a fundamental question' whether there are anatomically distinct brain pathways for these two jobs, and moves on to deploy fMRI (that is, functional magnetic resonance imaging) while getting volunteers to see TV sitcoms, The Simpsons and Seinfeld.

Humour detection involves two elements, viz. surprise and coherence. "Surprise occurs when an event is incongruous with expectations primed by prior events. Individuals must then re-establish coherence to `get the joke'." But the authors found that fMRI was of no help in splitting thus, because "there is no clear behavioural transition marker to delineate the two putative processes."

Among other findings of the experiment are that overt laughter is greatly diminished when individuals experience humour in isolation; that a cascade of neural events are required to understand and appreciate humour; and that mirth experience can only occur when a joke has been fully assimilated. When concluding the paper, the authors surmise that humour may have evolved from our separate abilities to understand language and respond emotionally.

"Curiously, the neural circuitry that permits mirth appears to be available to many animal species." Means, cats and dogs too have the wiring inside their heads to accommodate jokes. But what appears to be lacking in other species is "the functional architecture necessary to resolve incongruities," notes the paper.

That is, jokes get lost in animals because they cannot comprehend humour. "This critical dependence on circuitry involved in the semantic processing of language is perhaps what makes humour such a unique human characteristic."

That's something for animal-lovers to take up because we are making jokes too tough for buffaloes and donkeys.

But who knows, they may be sharing some secret jokes about us through their moos and brays. Only we don't get them.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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