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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), author: SF

When you think a joke is funny, what happens in your head? Psychologists have studied many "puns" jokes and found that there is a specific system in the brain that recognizes humor.

Jokes and humor are often regarded as insignificant. To some extent, this is understandable because they are not serious by definition-it is difficult to clearly define what is a joke and what is humor. Just imagine, what would the judge think of a defense lawyer if he kept making witty remarks in court?

But it is also inappropriate to think of humor as an ordinary mood fluctuation that does not matter. Humor, jokes and laughter all play an important role in social communication.

Humor is an important part of social relationships: we are 30 times more likely to laugh when we are with others than when we are alone. Humor is a way for the brain to show its ability, which is equivalent to the antlers of a stag. In addition, humor and laughter can relieve stress and have real health benefits.

But what happens in our brains that causes us to respond so strongly to things that are objectively meaningless?

Puns are the most basic jokes scientists have spent years studying the problem, analyzing all kinds of jokes that can cause humorous effects, and collecting a lot of data about how humor works in the brain.

There are many kinds of jokes, such as semantic jokes, language jokes, static and dynamic visual jokes and so on. As expected, it is accepted that the most basic joke is still a pun.

Puns are the most common jokes, which mean that specific language elements convey different meanings at the same time. For example, Ford, the 38th president of the United States, once said, "I am Ford, not Lincoln." Lincoln was the former president of the United States and was also a luxury car brand, while Ford was a popular car brand. When Ford said this, it simply meant that he was not another person, and at the same time expressed his humility.

Therefore, when scientists explore humor, the main types of jokes they study are puns. Maybe we are familiar with some puns, and sometimes saying them doesn't make us laugh, but their simplicity just means that most people can understand the humor in puns. So it can be argued that even if we don't laugh, the process of perceiving humor is still going on in the brain.

Humor recognition system in the brain so, which part of the brain produces humor? In a sense, humor is related to all the structures of the brain. This is because jokes and other forms of humorous stimuli usually include a variety of sensory information, as well as language, memory, emotion, analysis, inference and other brain functions, which require the participation of many neural networks.

However, a large number of studies have shown that in the brain, everything related to jokes comes together to form a specific system for recognizing humor-made up of the connecting areas between the temporal lobe, the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe.

Scientists believe that the system may be able to detect and solve uncoordinated problems. Our brains know exactly how words and actions are supposed to work, but in the real world, many things don't live up to our expectations. As a result, in the process of evolution, our brains have formed a system that can identify anomalies when these "incongruous" situations occur.

If things don't go according to normal, it means we don't know what's going to happen, and we feel nervous. A specific system that recognizes humor can identify incongruous situations and overcome them by providing explanations, or at least confirming that incongruous situations do not have negative consequences. This process eliminates uncertainty and distracts tension.

Our brains love this state, which means that the potential danger has been eliminated. At the same time, we learn new things and expand our mode of thinking, so we also have a sense of harvest.

The more we listen to the music, the more memorable the jokes become, because we have these complex systems in our brains, so our brains can also sense humor in the face of something surprising, unexpected or wrong, as long as the brain handles things in this way without negative consequences.

On the other hand, if the uncoordinated situation is not resolved, humor is out of the question. It is not funny to use "Ford's father's last name is Ford rather than Lincoln" to answer "Why Ford is not Lincoln", because there is still a sense of incongruity in this explanation. This also makes us understand why surrealist humor is often unacceptable to many people, because surrealism itself has too much sense of incoordination.

This is why jokes are different from music, and it is difficult for jokes to have the same effect when repeated. One of the great functions of humor is to resolve incongruity. If we hear a joke over and over again, we have a psychological expectation of an incongruous situation, then it is not incongruous in our eyes, and there is no sense of humor.

Humor is a unique phenomenon in human society, which is affected by many complex sociological factors, such as identity, emotion, motivation, social cognition, memory and so on. However, new research shows that the process of identifying and resolving inconsistencies is based on the nervous system. The essence of humor is that our brains say, "this is not usually the case." but I think it's okay! "

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