Ha! (15 page)

A.K. started laughing again. Again, the doctor asked why.

“You guys are just so funny, standing around.”

Assistants took note of each interaction as the test continued. Meanwhile, A.K.'s body continued to make unexpected motions. One moment her right leg tingled, the next her arms twitched. Several times she found herself unable to speak and answer the doctor's questions, and she had no idea why. Then, of course, there was the laughing.

The area of A.K.'s brain being probed was the supplementary motor cortex, and the doctors' goal was to map its functions down to the millimeter. They found that the seizures were originating in the medial frontal region of her brain, not far from the part controlling speech and motor movements—as well as laughter. Although A.K. had never experienced
laughter during her seizures, her brain apparently had lumped these behaviors together anatomically, with the motor areas affected by the seizures located right next to the areas controlling her laughter.

In this respect, A.K. was lucky; many patients do laugh during seizures, and the results are never funny. One stroke patient from India suddenly found herself laughing, then fifteen minutes later lost sensation in the right side of her body and the ability to speak. Another patient, a forty-seven-year-old man, began laughing following surgery to repair a ruptured aneurysm and didn't stop for twenty years. And then there's Jenna, a twenty-four-year-old patient from Great Britain who has laughed uncontrollably all her life, up to fifteen times a day. “The laughter is like an explosion,” she says, describing the condition that has only recently come under control using medication. “One minute all is normal and then I'm just laughing. It's totally natural, but overwhelming too. Very erratic.”

The names for pathological laughter are almost as varied as the condition itself, all sounding like evil Harry Potter spells:
enuresis risosa
(Latin for “giggle incontinence”),
fou rire prodromique
(French for “sudden mad laughter”),
risus sardonicus
(Latin again, this time for “devil's smile”). But the most common name is
gelastic epilepsy,
a term adapted from the Greek words for “laughter” and “seizure,” which neurologists agree is the most accurate way of describing the event. That's what a seizure is—uncontrolled and excessive activity in the brain. For patients like Jenna, that activity manifests as laughter.

Pathological laughter tells us a lot about the brain because it shows how humor involves the interaction of many different parts. As discussed earlier, laughter is related to humor the same way a symptom is related to underlying disease: it's an external manifestation of inner conflict. Although that conflict often comes in the form of jokes, it doesn't have to. It can be caused by stress, anxiety, or, in cases of pathological laughter, excessive brain activity due to neural insult. The immense number of different modules in the brain, and the many connections between them, allows us to be highly adaptable as a species, but we're also more susceptible to unusual behaviors, such as
uncontrollable laughter, because there are so many ways for the brain to break down.

This might be why the symptoms associated with pathological laughter are so varied. For Jenna, the outbursts don't include any feelings of mirth, only laughter. Other patients feel euphoria during spontaneous laughter episodes, and still others confuse pleasure and pain, an unfortunate condition called pain asymblosia. In some cases, pathological laughter is accompanied by cognitive deficits such as reduced intelligence or memory. In others, there are no additional impacts. There are seemingly a hundred different ways to trick our brains into laughing inappropriately, but no way to guess what will happen from one person to the next.

Possessing such a modular and interconnected brain has both advantages and disadvantages. Species tend to be divided into two groups: specialists and generalists. Specialists thrive only in the environments for which they are highly adapted. A good example of a specialist is the Costa Rican katydid, which avoids predators by camouflaging itself as a leaf from the local flora. Take a Costa Rican katydid from its home and pretty soon you have a dead katydid. Specialists aren't limited to insects and other simple organisms; the koala, for instance, is a specialist too. Its diet consists solely of eucalyptus leaves, and so it's found only in eastern and southern Australia. Unless you visit a zoo, you won't find a koala in Europe, or even a short distance away in Tasmania, because the eucalyptus tree is a specialist too.

The fact that humans live in Europe, Tasmania, and even Antarctica shows how we are extreme generalists. Our specialty is intelligence, developed over generations as an ability to adapt to our surroundings. Our brains are the tools of our survival, allowing us to outsmart our environments instead of merely conforming to them. But they also do strange things when broken, such as causing us to laugh inappropriately—an unfortunate consequence of possessing so many working parts.

To liken these survival strategies to cutlery—which I'm sure is the analogy you were thinking of too—if a koala is a bread knife, then a human is the Swiss Army Fieldmaster. The Fieldmaster not only cuts bread,
it opens bottles, pops corks, and saws twigs. It's not perfectly suited for any of those tasks, but it does the job, whatever it's asked to do.

Which also explains our extreme variability. With so many features, and so many parts interacting to give us this adaptive intelligence, there's a lot of room for people to differ. To continue with the cutlery example, an unscientific review of the Williams and Sonoma website shows that they offer twenty-four kinds of bread knives. That may seem like a lot, but you can find that many varieties of Swiss Army Knives just within their “flash collection.” Those are knives containing USB drives inside. Their total number of options is well in the hundreds.

I'm not trying to sell you a Swiss Army Knife, but it's worth recognizing that complexity has a price—namely, unpredictability. It means that we have more parts to break, and even when our brains work perfectly, they do so in idiosyncratic ways. This chapter explores one consequence of that unpredictability—individual differences. Nowhere are those differences more apparent than in our sense of humor, which is why it remains one of the best ways for examining who we really are.

S
TATES AND
T
RAITS

Humor is notably short on quantitative formulas. Sure, surprise and internal conflict are important, but how can we possibly measure these things? It's impossible. Still, this hasn't stopped some people from trying—for example, Peter Derks, who came up with this quite clever formula:

        
Humor = salience (trait + state) x incongruity + resolution

At first this looks like a jumbled mess of words. Salience? What's that? But further examination suggests that Derks is actually onto something.

Let's start with the second half of the formula: incongruity and resolution. As we've already discussed, we laugh at things that surprise us (incongruity) and that force us to look at things differently
(resolution). These concepts parallel the stages of
reckoning
and
resolving
described earlier. Granted, I would have given resolution a more important role, perhaps making everything else depend on it exponentially, but regardless, from incongruity and resolution we see that we find things funny that catch us off-guard and change our view of the world.

Now let's consider the first half of the formula, which says that humor also depends on salience. Salience has two components: trait and state. When we understand these elements, we should see how all the humor ingredients come together. Right?

I'm 5'9”, roughly 180 pounds, and whenever I eat mints I always sneeze at least three times. These details have accurately described me since turning an adult, thus making them traits. They don't change, at least not quickly, and so for practical purposes they can be described as fixed. Contrast these traits with the fact that right now, as I write this paragraph, I'm experiencing a dull pain in my left ankle. This morning, as I let my three dogs outside, my five-year-old rescue mutt Maynard tripped me by running between my legs. As a result, I'm in a bit of a surly mood and trying hard not to blame Maynard for his enthusiasm. That's a state, and it will surely change soon, either when my ankle stops hurting or when Maynard does something funny like roll on his back and purr, as he sometimes does when he forgets he's a dog.

This is a roundabout way of saying that our moods vary from moment to moment, but we possess general dispositions too, and both have a big impact on humor. For example, many religious people have a poor sense of humor. This may seem an unfair generalization, but at least it's a scientifically based one. I'm referring to a study by the Belgian psychologist Vassilis Saroglou from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He gave nearly four hundred subjects a variety of sense-of-humor tests, having previously assessed their self-reported religiosity. He found that strength of religious beliefs was inversely proportionate to social humor, and also that religious men tend to tell self-defeating jokes, perhaps due to their discomfort over the lighthearted nature of humor, given their spiritual convictions.

As you might expect, countless studies have looked at the relationship between personality characteristics and sense of humor. I won't go into most of them because they aren't very informative—how surprising is it, really, that cheerful people tell more jokes than sad people? However, one experiment in particular says something important about how we think, beyond the positive influence of being in a good mood. I'm referring to a study conducted by Paul Pearson, who is both a psychologist and a member of the Cartoonist Club of Great Britain. He administered a personality test—specifically, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)—to sixty professional cartoonists and found that sometimes the least likely people to tell a joke are the funniest.

The EPQ is perhaps the most widely used psychological assessment there is, so it's worth addressing here. Developed by the psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, with help from his wife Sybil, the test was designed to measure three key aspects of our temperament believed to be set at birth. Though no one, including the Eysencks, believe these three characteristics never change, it's widely accepted that they remain relatively stable over our lifetimes. As such, they're very useful to measure.

The first is extraversion. It exists on a continuum, ranging from introversion to extraversion, and it describes how much energy we seek from our environment, as contrasted with how much we like to be alone. It's also closely linked with arousal—extraverts tend to seek arousal from their surroundings as a means of overcoming boredom, while introverts seek quieter environments due to their jittery natures. If you feel a constant need to be around people and to experience stimulating environments, you're probably an extravert. If that sounds like a lot of work, consider yourself on the other end of the spectrum.

The second is neuroticism, which exists on a continuum ranging from stability to neuroticism. This measures how much anxiety we typically feel and how influenced we are by depression, tension, and feelings of guilt. Neuroticism is closely linked to the fight-or-flight response, a response that is activated relatively quickly in neurotic people,
because they're so easily stressed or made anxious. By contrast, people with higher levels of stability tend to be cool under pressure.

The final characteristic is psychoticism, which contrasts with socialization. Psychotic individuals are assertive, manipulative, and dogmatic. This makes them inflexible with their environment, and pushy about it too. They can also be tough-minded, along with reckless and hostile. Testosterone is often identified as the culprit for this behavior, which might explain why studies conducted in more than thirty countries have found that men, on average, exhibit higher levels of psychoticism than women.

It's important to note that these characteristics do not imply any sort of pathology. Psychoticism can be a diagnosis, or it can simply describe someone's position on a much broader continuum. Which is good, because the cartoonists in Eysenck's study scored much higher than the normal population on both neuroticism and psychoticism. So, apparently these artists were a bit “on edge” with respect to anxiety and aggression. What's more surprising is that the cartoonists didn't differ from the rest of the population in terms of extraversion—a surprising finding because if there's one personality characteristic we'd expect to see linked with humor, it's how outgoing we are. Numerous studies have shown that outgoing people tell more jokes, and also appreciate good jokes more. So, what gives—are cartoonists just special?

Apparently not. It turns out that creative people in general show similar results. Professional musicians typically score higher than amateurs on both neuroticism and psychoticism. Painters and sculptors do too, especially on psychoticism, with the most successful artists often scoring highest on this measure. A huge meta-study, examining creative professionals ranging from professional dancers to Nigerian veterinary surgeons, found that one factor best characterized successful scientists and artists alike. That factor was a high degree of psychoticism.

One problem with generalizing on the basis of scientific studies like these is that they often measure different things. Some researchers study professional artists; others, students; and still others, mixtures of both. Some scientists give their subjects questionnaires to assess
personality traits, others measure things like laughter. As a result, it's difficult making comparisons without performing years of in-depth analytical work. Thankfully there are scientists like Willibald Ruch willing to do that for us.