Dear All,
Good News!!! Evidence has shown that humor is essential in human's life.
Please read the following article.
Cheers,
Anwar Hasim
Brain damage linked to challenged humor
By MICHAEL SMITH
TORONTO, March 31 (UPI) - For the first time, scientists have pinned down
the ability to get a joke. People with damage to a small area on the top of
the right frontal lobe of the brain find it difficult to understand or
respond appropriately to jokes or cartoons, says psychologist Prabitha
Shammi of Toronto's Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care. Instead, people with
damaged right frontal lobes, she said, showed a preference for slapstick
humor, which doesn't rely on a punch line.
But even patients who understood jokes didn't really "get" them the way
normal people do, she said: "Even when they knew it was funny, and could
explain why it was funny, they didn't laugh or smile." Shammi said the
research, published Thursday in the journal Brain, may help scientists
understand the role of the right frontal lobes, which have long been thought
to be a "silent" part of the brain.
Boston College psychologist Hiram Brownell, who co-authored several papers
in the mid-1980s on humor and brain damage, said Shammi's work is a "clear,
striking advance over what had been done." Working with Harvard University
psychologist Howard Gardner, Brownell showed that people with damage to the
right side of the brain had difficulty with humor. But he said his work was
not as conclusive as Shammi's because he didn't include patients with other
kinds of brain damage.
During her three-year study, Shammi tested 31 people, of whom 10 were normal
and 21 had brain damage resulting from strokes or surgery to remove tumors.
Not all the patients had damage to right frontal lobe. Shammi concluded that
only people with damage to the top part of the right frontal lobe - just
under the skull at the top of the forehead - were unable to understand
jokes. In one test, she said, the subjects were asked to study a list of
statements. Among them were 21 that had been previously tested on normal
people and found to be funny. The normal subjects and those with damage to
other parts of the brain had no trouble picking out the funny statements,
but those with right frontal lobe damage were wrong most of the time, she
said.
In another test, the subjects were asked to complete a joke by choosing from
among possible endings. One of the endings was the original punch line, one
was logical but unfunny and one was surprising but not logical - what Shammi
calls "slapstick." "The patients with right frontal lobe damage," she said,
"seemed to have a preference for the slapstick answers." Shammi said the
test jokes were similar to this one (which wasn't used): A teenager is
applying for a job. "You'll start at $50 a week and after a month you'll get
a raise to $75 a week," says the boss. The possible endings were:
-"I'd like to take the job. When can I start?"
-"That's great! I'll come back in a month."
-"Hey, boss, your nose is too big for your face!"
The original punchline is the second choice; the patients with right frontal
lobe damage preferred the third, Shammi said. Shammi said understanding and
responding to jokes requires integrating several types of information from
different areas of the brain - something that may prove to be the main
function of the right frontal lobes.
Patients with damaged lobes know that a joke is meant to be surprising, she
said, so they choose the slapstick ending. But most people also know the
punch line should make sense, when the joke is viewed differently. "The
normal subjects also laugh when they see the slapstick answer, but they know
it's not the right answer," she said. "They actually go beyond the surprise
element and look for an ending that makes more sophisticated sense."
Brownell said research into the role of the right frontal lobes is just
starting, while research into the left frontal lobes - which govern
language, among other things - has been going on for many years. One key
finding may be that people with damaged right frontal lobes have an impaired
social sense that may cause severe problems in families and jobs, he said.
Such people may also have difficulty following arguments or instructions, he
said, because they have difficulty putting together different types of
information.
"In a joke," he said, "the punch line is incongruous, but a person has to be
able to figure out how the punch line could fit with what came before.
"Understanding logical arguments, he said, requires the same sort of
process. "Putting things together is a problem for patients with these right
hemisphere lesions," he said.
The article above was obtained from :
http://www.medserv.dk/health/1999/04/06/story01.htm