Wired for Laughter

If we are wired for laughter, why?

Reading Laughter and the Brain this morning brought to mind autistic savant Daniel Tammet's observation at IdeaFestival 2010 that he learned the art of social navigation by watching his classmates on the playground and making predictions against which he would compare results.

So it is with laughter. Humor offers unique insight into the working of the human mind because, in part, we are all little scientists constantly comparing the world to scripts unfolding in our heads. And as with magic and illusion, comedy exposes the unconscious assumptions we make as we compress an external and largely unknown reality into lived experience.

Laughter and the Brain:

Recently, scientists have begun conducting research into the neurological processes underpinning mirth and laughter. I would not suggest that neuroscience can 'explain' humor or provide the reason why we laugh at certain jokes or cartoons and not at others. Trying to parse humor, in any case, can be a self-defeating exercise. As E. B. White once wrote, 'Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.' Still, neuroscience can provide some useful insights into what happens when we find a joke or cartoon funny. Ultimately, it isn’t just humor that we seek to better understand, but rather, that most complex and elusive of organs: the human brain.

Humor's power is associative. It depends on shrewd observation. Done skillfully, the well time joke or aside can take on subjects that are much too sensitive to be discussed otherwise. Former IdeaFestival attendee and speaker Baratunde Thurston's satirical self-help book, How to Be Black, effectively raises issues about race in America in a way that a purely historic or straightforward examination never could. In laughter, understanding.

And profit. Thurston's company, Cultivated Wit, will be glad to consult with you on your latest product or company strategy.

Joke telling can also be compared neurologically to the creative act because for both inhibition must be lowered. It is a kind of high wire walk because there is danger.

Indeed, when a comedian bombs on stage, it can take a personal toll on his or her mental health. In an interview with fellow comedian David Steinberg on Showtime’s Inside Comedy, Steven Wright described comedic performance as 'very dangerous, like walking a tightrope, or like running across a lake of ice where the ice is breaking behind you and it is going to take an hour to get to the other side.' Steve Martin told [comedian David] Steinberg of the comedian’s need to steel himself against the pain aroused when no one laughs at a joke or, worse yet, when you get booed off the stage. 'Stand-up comedy is the ego’s last stand,' according to Martin. This proved true for the late Jonathan Winters, who suffered a serious nervous breakdown during a performance in San Francisco in 1959. After spending time in a psychiatric hospital, Winters returned to stand-up only to suffer another nervous collapse two years later, after which he quit nightclub performances altogether and turned his attention to making records.

There really is no "humor center" in our wetware, just a collaborative effort between brain and body, between sense and sense making, to bring order to experience. If there is a deep association in the mind between logic and laugher, perhaps the "why" of humor is to demonstrate just how much there is left to know of the world.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by f_mafra

Interesting things come from people interested in things

Lightly edited and re-posted, this blog entry and video are great reminders that IdeaFestival 2013 is fast approaching! Festival passes may be purchased here, but don't wait too long. Sales are well ahead of last year's pace.

Stay curious!

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The most interesting things come from people interested in things - artist Hasan Elahi

Here are some of the reasons why I think curiosity is important.

Genuinely curious questions open us to new information. And a comfort with novel information and new experiences in general are traits all creative people share.

There are strong links between curiosity and personal satisfaction, curiosity and good health, and curiosity and successful business. About the latter: studying a field other than your own is linked to insight, problem solving and, if the new understanding is skillfully brought to market, to profit. So yes, interesting things come from people interested in things.

When questions and a desire for novelty are preferred over answers and rigid certainty, hope and optimism grow. Fear diminishes.

We know from a number of studies that curiosity is a predictor of intelligence.

Curiosity is a social skill. It tends to diminish over time. But it's a skill that can be learned. One of the founders of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, is quoted as saying, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Experience creates meaning. Curiosity informed by experience shows us the difference that can make a difference.

And as individuals, curiosity clarifies. Given permission to explore the world around us, the world around us will eventually tell us who we really are. 

Wayne

Being the Octopus

Grabbing my attention because of an audio interview I did years ago with University of Louisville professor and evolutionary biologist Dr. Lee Dugatkin on Octopus cognition and perspective-taking (wait for the slider to load), the following paragraph describes why an understanding of the first-person experience is so easy to have and difficult to pin down.

On Being an Octopus

How do we approach questions about 'what it’s like' to be something or someone? One way of asking these questions makes them impossible to answer regardless of what minds might be made of. In this interpretation, to ask what it’s like to be a bat or an octopus is to ask for a description, given from a third-person point of view, that encapsulates the animal’s experience itself. But having an experience will always be different from having a description of it. This will be true if we are biochemical machines and true also if there is a soul-like extra ingredient in the world. A gap between a first-person and a third-person point of view arises either way.

Descriptions are not completely powerless, though, in helping us get a grip on what the experience of another might be like....

Getting a sense of what it feels like to be another animal—bat, octopus, or next-door neighbor—must involve the use of memory and imagination to produce what we think might be faint analogues of that other animal’s experiences.

What is being described is the "hard problem" of concioussness. It may be answerable to science, or it may not. But as I read the piece it occurred to me that the first-person experience, followed by a theory of mind - or the belief that other creatures like you are similarly endowed - would not only have required the imagination, but in some ancient and distant past virtually discovered it.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by maureen lunn

Postponing the verdict on life

Two quotes struck a chord with me yesterday while scanning material to post to Twitter and Facebook - you do follow us there, right? - because they go to the heart of the IdeaFestival.

"The Essayification of Everything:"

What is behind our attraction to it? Is it the essay’s therapeutic properties? Because it brings miniature joys to its writer and its reader? Because it is small enough to fit in our pocket, portable like our own experiences? I believe that the essay owes its longevity today mainly to this fact: the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America. In fact, I would advocate a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay’s spirit in all aspects of life as a resistance against the zealous closed-endedness of the rigid mind. I’ll call this deployment 'the essayification of everything.'

'The essay, like this one, is a form for trying out the heretofore untried. Its spirit resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the world’s inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.'

The other is this quote from a brief question and answer exchange between science journalist and author Jennifer Ouelette and astrophysicist Mario Livio posted at Scientific American. Livio, on risk taking and thinking outside-the-box as a critical component of progress:

There are many modern discoveries that were at some level the consequence of serendipity, or initial blunders. Some of the better known examples are penicillin, and post-it notes. In general, a large fraction of the discoveries of new medications is the result of serendipity or, to some extent, 'brilliant' blunders.

One can easily image a public official today outraged over the funding of mold studies. And sadly, "knowing" has always been far darker and more harmful in the hands of the sure. Thank goodness we don't know because change, as it were, is not only ever present but if this research is correct, our willingness to explore and its concomitant call to embrace doubt and uncertainty plays an enormous role in our sense of ourselves. Channeled through exploratory science and intrepid art, through business risk and honest personal reflection, change might just be the key variable in full lives.

So postpone the verdict on life.

Posted recently by Maria Popova, Joss Whedon's recent commencement address at Wesleyan University is chock full of insight into the human condition, including the advice to embrace our contradictions - the urge to love and despise, to embrace and condemn, to make both trouble and meaning. But the observation that "you do not pass through this life, it passes through you" is especially poignant to me. There are as you read this uncounted particles issued from ancient furnaces hot and bright passing through the Earth and your body toward futures and destinations that you and I cannot comprehend. The stuff of life does pass through all of us, and fittingly it's the stuff we can't see. An "elasticity of mind" does not mean minimizing what is known, but acknowledging and becoming comfortable with the thought that what can be known is more than we can imagine, if we first start humbled.

For a few hours and days in September, the festival brings that dazzling variety of life to bear. It is humbling. It is about this too. Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by ferax

Overlooking the nail in your head

Always displayed on Andrew Sullivan's web site, Orwell's "to see what's in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" is advice any creative, entrepreneur or scientist will find valuable. There are of course things that confound simple observation - the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and the many cognitive biases to which each of us are prone come to mind - but having a good look around may be humanity's oldest discovery technique.

That's especially true when it comes to personal discovery. Facilitator, business coach and improv aficionado Johnnie Moore uses this very funny video as a reminder "not to fall in love with your schtick," to be open, in other words, to further personal growth or to consider the idea that a nail in your head might just be a nail in your head.

So stay curious! And don't forget to buy your festival pass for IdeaFestival 2013.

Good grief, it hurts just looking at that video.

Wayne