Sometimes, I was wondering how human brain works when a person get excited when they heard some jokes, whilst start laughing? In fact, humour is an important understanding to human psychology, especially when jokes require a tremendous amount of brain power and mental activities where a human can never fully understand how joke usually works. Many neuroscientists have used numerous methods to pin down how the brain react when a joke tickled us. However, why some jokes are extremely humorous to some people, but the same joke leave others cold.


Caption: laughter


Caption: brain regions

So, what is joke? The Cambridge dictionary dictated joke as : "something, such as a funny story or trick, that is said or done in order to make people laugh ". Since jokes are meant to be funny, if so, how can we explain cold jokes? A researcher from Durham University (North Carolina) also suggests that jokes will aim at human ability to make rapid judgements about a situation. The question here is which section of human brain deals with these processes.


Caption: fMRI machine


Caption: fMRI detector

Some neuroscientists from New Hampshire utilises the functional Magnetic Resonance Imagine (fMRI: is a system to monitor the blood flow the human brain), monitoring human brain when watching movies. They revealed that our left posterior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus in human brain handle jokes. That is also the brain region that linked to language and attention. On the other hand, this section of the brain has some relation with the motor output (movement of limbs), associating with the reward processing. This explains the pleasure you attain, moving your limbs etc. when you get a joke. The correspondence level of limb movement also depends on the humour level of that particular joke.


Caption: ventral striatum


Caption: prefrontal cortex


Caption: cingulate cortex of the brain

The ventral striatum is a section of our brain that deals with rewarding. By the way, there were 4 major senses in a human: (1) eye - vision (2) ear - auditory (3) touch - tactile and (4) nose - olfaction. This ventral striatum controls the olfaction (also known as olfactory), the sense of smell. Recent research indicated that the olfactory strongly involved in tongue activities. It means that our tongue may stimulate the olfactory senses. Different rewards such as drug, sex and other entertainments (i.e. music, movies) are involved in this region of the brain. Though humour (or joke) is way more complex compared to other primeval rewards such as sex and food. Why? Mainly because activities such as sex only involve circulation of information within small sections of brain regions (such as the ventral striatum) but jokes usually involve other brain regions also, such as the frontal and cingulate cortex. Things are usually more complex and complicated when it involve circulation of information within many brain regions! The brain sciences unit at Cambridge (UK) indicated that jokes are basic reward for a person, but are strictly important to a person's survival.


Caption: the left prefrontal cortex

Senior research Watson suggests that the process of a particular joke may circulate differently to a men and women. This means that both men and women may perceive a joke differently. There are research that focuses at this topic, stating that women will show greater activity in their left prefrontal cortex than men. This means that you require more effort to make a women laugh than a men. In fact, women show greater response in their limb movement than men. This suggests that women do feel a greater sense of reward. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol. 102) suggests that a person's personality is also important in the contribution of jokes. It was stated that there were more reward responses in an average person (average by mean of extrovert and emotionally stable). By the way, the left prefrontal cortex handle different cognitive abilities such as language, memory processing and other more significant activities dealing with stress and other more complex mental processes (also known as the executive function).

Many future research are aiming at the rewarding system as they do believe that the reward system is disrupted in depression, and could be interesting to see if this deficit extends to more complex processing such as humour. They are also looking forward on similar research dealing with austism since people with autism have difficulty understanding comedy.