According to a new study, laughter lightens up our faces and the neurons in our brains
According to a new study, laughter lightens up our faces and the neurons in our brains. The funnier a joke is, the more activity is seen in the reward centres or specific neurons, which create feelings of pleasure.u00a0
A team of Medical Research Council scientists scanned the brains of 12 volunteers to compare what happened when they heard ordinary sentences and jokes.
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They found that the reward centres 'lit up' much more in response to humour than ordinary sentences.
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Furthermore, the strength of the response depended on how funny each of the 12 patients found these jokes.
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"We found a characteristic pattern of brain activity when the jokes used were puns," the Daily Mail quoted Dr Matt Davis, from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge as saying.
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"For example, jokes like 'Why don't cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny!' involved brain areas for language processing more than jokes that didn't involve wordplay," he added.
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"This response differed again from non-humorous sentences that also contained words with more than one meaning. Mapping how the brain processes jokes and sentences shows how language contributes to the pleasure of getting a joke," explained the researchers.
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The researchers suggested that the findings could be used as a benchmark for understanding how people who cannot communicate normally react to jokes.
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The research has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
