by Dean Burnett
As far as we currently know, there is no specific “laughter center” in the brain; our sense of humor seems to arise from myriad connections and processes that are the result of our development, personal preferences and numerous experiences. This would explain why everyone has his or her own seemingly unique sense of humor.
Despite the apparent individuality of a person’s tastes in comedy and humor, we can prove that it is heavily influenced by the presence and reactions of others. That laughing has a strong social function is undeniable; humans can experience many emotions as suddenly and intensely as humor, but the majority of these emotions don’t result in loud uncontrolled (often incapacitating) spasms (i.e. laughter). There is benefit to making your amused state public knowledge, because people have evolved to do this whether they want to or not.
Studies such as those by Robert Provine of the University of Maryland suggest that you are thirty times as likely to laugh when you’re part of a group as when you’re alone.25 People laugh more often and freely when with friends, even if they’re not telling jokes; it can be observations, shared memories, or very mundane-sounding anecdotes about a mutual acquaintance. It’s a lot easier to laugh when part of a group, which is why stand-up comedy is rarely a one-to-one practice. Another interesting point about the social-interaction qualities of humor: the human brain appears to be very good at distinguishing between real laughter and fake laughter. Research by Sophie Scott has revealed people to be extremely accurate when it comes to identifying someone laughing genuinely and someone pretending, even if they sound very similar.26 Have you ever been inexplicably annoyed by obvious canned laughter on a cheesy sitcom? People respond to laughter very strongly, and they invariably object to this response being manipulated.
When an attempt to make you laugh fails, it fails hard.
When someone tells you a joke, they are making it clear that they are intending to make you laugh. They have concluded that they know your humor and are able to make you laugh, and are thereby asserting that they are able to control you, so are superior to you. If they’re doing this in front of people, then they’re really emphasizing their superiority. So it had better be worth it.
But then it’s not. The joke falls flat. This is basically a betrayal, one that offends on several (largely subconscious) levels. It’s no wonder people often get angry (for examples of this, just ask any aspiring comedian, anywhere, ever). But to appreciate this fully, you have to appreciate the extent to which interactions with others influence the workings of our brains. And that needs a chapter of its own to do it justice.
Only then can it really be grasped, as the actress said to the bishop.
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* As an aside, it’s worth noting that studies into anger report doing things like “presenting subjects with stimuli designed to raise levels of anger,” but a lot of the time this means they’re basically just insulting the volunteers. It’s understandable why they would not want to reveal this too openly; psychological experiments invariably rely on people volunteering to take part, and they’re less likely to do that if they find it involves being strapped to a scanner while a scientist uses colorful metaphors to tell you how fat your mother is.
† The same studies demonstrated that anger hinders performance on complex cognitive tasks, showing how anger means you can’t “think straight.” Not always helpful, but it would inevitably feed into the same system. You could calmly assess all the properties of the threat you encounter and decide that, overall, it’s too risky to deal with. But anger hinders this rational thinking, messing up the delicate analysis that leads to you avoid the issue and compels you to go right at it, fists flailing.
‡ Aggression can also happen without anger. Contact sports such as rugby or football often involve aggression, but no anger is required; it’s just the desire to win at the expense of the other team that motivates it.
§ Exactly why this “runner’s high” occurs is uncertain. Some say it’s using up the muscles’ oxygen supplies, triggering anaerobic respiration (oxygen-free cellular activity, which produces acid by-products that can cause pain, such as cramps or a “stitch”), which the brain responds to by releasing endorphins, the pain-killing pleasure-inducing transmitters. Others say it’s more to do with elevated body temperature, or constant rhythmic activity providing a sense of well-being that the brain wants to encourage. Marathon runners often report this runner’s high, which as a rewarding sensation seems to come second only to telling people, “I’m training for a marathon you know,” given how often they find excuses to do this.
¶ Freud still has a lot of influence and many adhere to his theories, even a century later. This may seem odd. Granted, he did largely usher in the whole concept of psychoanalysis and should be lauded for it, but this doesn’t mean his original theories are automatically correct. It is the diffuse and uncertain nature of psychology and psychiatry that means he still wields such influence today; it’s hard to disprove things conclusively. Yes, Freud founded the whole field, but the Wright brothers invented aeroplanes, and while they’ll always be remembered for this, we don’t still use aircraft that they designed for long-haul flights to South America. Times move on, and all that.
# It may seem wasteful or lazy, but repetition is a very important process in science because repeating an experiment and getting the same results helps make sure that the findings are reliable, not just due to luck or sneaky manipulation. This is a particularly big problem in psychology, given the unpredictability and unreliability of the human brain. It even thwarts attempts to study it, which is another annoying property of it.
7
Group hug!
How the brain is influenced by other people
Many claim to not care what anyone thinks of them. They will say this often, and loudly, going to great lengths to behave in ways that make it absolutely clear to anyone who’ll listen. Apparently, not caring what people think of you isn’t valid unless people, the ones you supposedly don’t care about, know about it. Those who shun “social norms” invariably just end up as part of a different recognizable group. From the mods and skinheads of the mid-twentieth century to goths and emos today, the first thing someone does when they don’t want to conform to normal standards is to find another group identity to conform to instead. Even biker gangs or the Mafia all tend to dress alike; they may have no respect for the law, but they want the respect of their peers.
If hardened criminals and outlaws can’t fight the urge to form groups, it must be quite deeply rooted in our brains. Placing a prisoner in solitary confinement for too long is considered a form of psychological torture,1 demonstrating that human contact is more a necessity than a desire. The truth is, odd as it may seem, much of the human brain is dedicated to and formed by interactions with other people, and we grow to depend on people as a result, to a surprising extent.
There’s the classic argument about what makes a person who they are—nature or nurture? Genes or environment? It’s a combination of both; genes obviously have a big impact on how we end up, but so do all the things that happen to us as we develop and, for the developing brain, one of if not the main source of information and experience is other humans. What people tell us, how they behave, what they do and think/suggest/create/believe, all of this has a direct impact on a still-forming brain. On top of this, much of our selves (self-worth, ego, motivation, ambition and so on) is derived from how others think and behave towards us.
When you consider that other people influence our brain’s development, and they are in turn being controlled by their brains, there’s only one possible conclusion: human brains are controlling their own development! Much apocalyptic sci-fi is based on the idea of computers doing exactly this, but it’s not as scary if it’s brains doing it because, as we’ve seen repeatedly, human brains are quite ridiculous. As a result, so are people. And thus we have large portions of our brains dedicated to engaging with others.
What follows are numerous examples of how
bizarre this arrangement can end up being.
Written all over your face
(Why it’s hard to hide what you’re really thinking)
People don’t like it when you have a miserable facial expression, even if there’s good reason for it, like having had a big fight with your partner, or realizing you’ve stepped in dog poop. But, whatever the cause, it’s often made worse by some random stranger telling you to smile.
Facial expressions mean other people can tell what someone is thinking or feeling. It’s mind reading, but via the face. It’s actually a useful form of communication, which shouldn’t come as a shock as the brain has a surprisingly extensive variety of processes dedicated to communicating with others.
You may have heard the claim that “90 percent of communication is non-verbal.” The “90 percent” claim varies considerably depending on who’s saying it, but in truth it varies because people communicate differently in different contexts; people trying to communicate in a crowded nightclub use different methods from those they’d opt for when trying to communicate while trapped in a cage with a sleeping tiger. The overall point is that much or most of our interpersonal communication is conducted via means other than spoken words.
We have several brain regions dedicated to language processing and speech, so the importance of verbal communication should go without saying (ironically). For many years, it was all attributed to two brain regions. Broca’s area, named for Pierre Paul Broca, at the rear of the frontal lobe, was believed to be integral to speech formation. Thinking of something to say and putting the relevant words in the correct order, that was Broca’s area at work.
The other region was Wernicke’s area, identified by Carl Wernicke, in the temporal lobe region. This was credited with language comprehension. When we understand words, their meanings and numerous interpretations, this was the doing of Wernicke’s area. This two-component set-up is a surprisingly straightforward arrangement for the brain, and indeed the language system of the brain is actually considerably more complex. But, for decades, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were credited with speech processing.
To understand why, consider that these areas were identified in the nineteenth century, via studies of people who had suffered damage localized to these brain regions. Without modern technology such as scanners and computers, aspiring neuroscientists were reduced to studying unfortunate individuals with just the right sort of head injury. Not the most efficient method, but at least they weren’t inflicting these injuries on people themselves (as far as we know).
Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were identified because damage to them caused aphasias, which are profound disruptions to speech and understanding. Broca’s aphasia, aka expressive aphasia, means someone cannot “produce” language. There’s nothing wrong with their mouth or tongue, they can still understand speech, they just can’t produce any fluid, coherent communication of their own. They may be able to utter a few relevant words, but long complex sentences are practically impossible.
Interestingly, this aphasia is often evident when speaking, or writing. This is important. Speech is aural and conveyed via the mouth; writing is visual and uses hands and fingers, but for both to be equally impaired means a common element is disrupted, which can be only the language processing, which must be handled separately by the brain.
Wernicke’s aphasia is essentially the opposite problem. Those afflicted don’t seem able to comprehend language. They can apparently recognize tone, inflection, timing and so on but the words themselves are meaningless. And they respond similarly, with long, complex-sounding sentences, but instead of “I went to the store, bought some bread,” it’s “I wendle to the do the store tore todayhayhay boughtage soughtage some read bread breed”; a combination of real and made-up words strung together with no recognizable linguistic meaning, because the brain is damaged in such a way that it cannot recognize language, so also can’t produce it.
This aphasia also often applies to written language, and the sufferers are generally unable to recognize any problem with their speech. They think they are speaking normally, which obviously leads to serious frustration.
These aphasias led to the theories about the importance of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas for language and speech. However, brain-scanning technology has changed matters. Broca’s area, a frontal lobe region, is still important for processing syntax and other crucial structural details, which makes sense; manipulating complex information in real-time describes much frontal lobe activity. Wernicke’s area, however, has been effectively demoted due to data that shows the involvement of much wider areas of the temporal lobe around it in processing speech.2
Areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and “deeper” areas of the brain including the putamen are all strongly implicated in speech processing, handling elements such as syntax, the semantic meaning of words, associated terms in memory, and so on. Many of these are near the auditory cortex, which processes how things sound, which makes sense (for once). Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas may not be as integral for language as first assumed, but they’re still involved. Damage to them still disrupts the many connections between language-processing regions, hence aphasias. But that language-processing centers are so widely spread throughout shows language to be a fundamental function of the brain, rather than something we pick up from our surroundings.
Some argue that language is even more neurologically important. The theory of linguistic relativity claims that the language a person speaks underlies their cognitive processing and ability to perceive the world.3 For instance, if people were raised to speak a language that had no words for “reliable,” then they would be unable to understand or demonstrate reliability, and thus be forced to find work as a real estate agent.
This is an obviously extreme example, and it’s hard to study because you’d need to find a culture that uses a language with some important concepts missing. (There have been numerous studies into more isolated cultures that have smaller ranges of labels for colors that argue they are less able to perceive familiar colors, but these are debatable.4). Still, there are many theories about linguistic relativity, the most famous of which is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.*
Some go further, claiming that changing the language someone uses can change how they think. The most prominent example of this is neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. NLP is a mishmash of psychotherapy, personal development and other behavioral approaches, and the basic premise is that language, behavior and neurological processes are all intertwined. By altering someone’s specific use and experience of language their thinking and behavior can be changed (hopefully for the better), like someone editing the code for a computer program to remove bugs and glitches.
Despite its popularity and appeal, there’s little evidence to suggest that NLP actually works, putting it in the realms of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. This book is filled with examples of how the human brain does its own thing despite everything the modern world can throw at it, so it’s hardly going to fall in line when faced with a carefully chosen turn of phrase.
However, NLP does often state that the non-verbal component of communication is very important, which is true. And non-verbal communication manifests in many different ways.
In Oliver Sacks’s seminal 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,5 he describes a group of aphasia patients who cannot understand spoken language, who are watching a speech by the president and finding it hilarious, which is clearly not the intent. The explanation is that the patients, robbed of their understanding of words, have become adept at recognizing non-verbal cues and signs that most people overlook, being distracted by the actual words. The president, to them, is constantly revealing that he is being dishonest via facial tics, body language, rhythm of speech, elaborate gestures and so on. These things, to an aphasia patient, are big red flags of dishonesty. When coming from the most powerful man in the world, it’s either laugh or cry.
Facial expressions are quite universal. Studies have been conducted where pictures of specific facial expressions have been shown to individuals from different cultures, some of which were very remote and largely untouched by Western civilization. There is some cultural variation, but by and large everyone is able to recognize the facial expressions, regardless of their origins. It seems our facial expressions are innate, rather than learned, “hard-wired” into the human brain. Someone who grew up in the deepest recesses of the Amazon jungle would pull the same expression if something surprised them as someone who’d lived their entire life in New York.
Our brains are very adept at recognizing and reading faces. Chapter 5 detailed how the visual cortex has subsections dedicated to processing faces, hence we tend to see them everywhere. So efficient is the brain in this regard that an expression can be deduced from minimal information, which is why it’s common to now use basic punctuation to convey happiness :-) sadness :-( anger >