Published by the Centre for Neuro Skills
Damage to the right frontal lobe affects how people respond to certain types of jokes. The study discussed in this article tested adults between the ages of 18 and 70, half with brain lesions and half without. They found that people with right anterior frontal lobe damage were most affected when it comes to appreciating humor, including written and verbal jokes and funny cartoons. Compared to the control group as well as people with lesions in other brain areas, they did not smile or laugh as much, and they chose the wrong punch lines for written jokes. The study also found that brain lesion patients of this type had a preference for slapstick humor, which is often inappropriate.
We have discussed in class and I have read about the frontal lobe’s role in emotions and personality. It makes sense that patients with brain lesions in the frontal lobe would respond to jokes (or not respond) in ways that contrast with the control groups or other lesion patients. I have known that emotions, personality, and humor are all interrelated, but I never thought about the causal relationships. At times I think humor is able to affect my emotions, but this article asserts that our brain, and the center for emotion, affects my ability to be affected by humor.
It's really cool how damage to different parts of the brain changes the way that people respond to particular types of jokes. You would think that there would be one humor center of the brain, that if lesioned, would result in a malfunction of the entire response to humor. But this is just another example of how the brain is really complicated and that function is not localized to one specific area. I also think it particularly interesting that lesioned patients responded well to slapstick humor. Perhaps because of the non-verbal nature of the jokes the response to slapstick is a "simpler" process that has a mechanism outside of the cognitive areas damaged in these patients.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing that the brain can play such a large role on what I would find funny and why. There definitely is a relationship between humor, personality, and emotions. I would love to see more research in this area to understand why and what inhibits a person with a right anterior frontal lobe lesion to have this issue of not identifying certain types of humor, and jokes.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading about humor and the brain; it's something I hadn't even thought much about as an aspect of social neuroscience. But I agree that it makes sense considering what we already know about emotions and the brain. I wonder how much of an individual's brain is already "set" for a certain degree or sense of humor, how much can be changed, and how easily it is changed. It would also be interesting to see further studies done investigating how differently humans are wired for humor than other animals, and perhaps why evolutionarily that would be beneficial. I'm not sure that this would have so many serious medical implications, but it is valuable research nonetheless.
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