From the June 2004 Scientific American Magazine | 0 comments

Sitcoms on the Brain ( Preview )

Different brain areas "get it" and find it funny

By Marina Krakovsky

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June
2004 Issue
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What do you get when you cross a television comedy with a brain scanner? A team led by Joseph Moran and William Kelley at Dartmouth College's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience tried to find out. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on subjects watching episodes of either Seinfeld or The Simpsons. The resulting scans showed that "getting" a joke occurs in specific brain regions different from those involved in finding it funny.

This dissociation between the cognitive and emotional parts of humor supports

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