Ha! (7 page)

Consider, for example, a study conducted by the psychologist Sascha Topolinski at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany. Topolinski showed his subjects word triads similar to our earlier examples, except that he included sets with no solution at all (for example,
dream, ball,
and
book
—good luck!). Rather than monitoring subjects' brains using an MRI, he closely examined their facial muscles, looking for responses that might give indications of their thought processes. Without informing his subjects that some word sets had shared associates, he found that triads sharing a single word in common elicited a very interesting reaction. Specifically, when subjects read those triads, the
muscles responsible for smiling and laughing (zygomaticus major muscles) were activated and the muscles responsible for frowning (corrugator supercilii) were relaxed. In other words, although the subjects thought they were simply reading unrelated words and didn't even try to come up with solutions, they responded as if they had just heard a joke. They experienced pleasure.

Perhaps this is why Karuna Subramaniam, the Northwestern University scientist who conducted the experiment described in this chapter's opening, also had subjects rate their mood before starting. Though mood can be a difficult thing to measure, scientists have developed several tests—such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory—to identify the degree to which people feel positive or anxious at any given moment. By assessing her subjects' emotions at the point they entered the lab, Subramaniam was able to determine whether mood had any effect on how well they solved the insight problems. It did. Subjects in a good mood not only solved more problems than those in a bad mood, they also engaged a specific part of the brain responsible for managing conflict. That region is called the anterior cingulate.

In this chapter we'll take a closer look at humor by examining the three stages our brains go through when transforming ambiguity and confusion into pleasure. Along the way we'll see how these stages allow us to both understand jokes and solve problems using insight. We'll also see how one region of the brain, the anterior cingulate, plays a special role in keeping the rest of our minds in check.

T
HE
T
HREE
S
TAGES

Interpreting our world is a creative event. We are by nature hypothesis-generating creatures, meaning that we don't just passively take in our environment but, instead, are always guessing what we need to do or say. Sometimes these guesses are wrong, which isn't a bad thing. It's good, because detecting errors is how our brains turn conflict into reward. Reward comes in the form of pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters,
such as dopamine, that are released only when the conflict is resolved. Without this conflict, there would be no way to regulate reward, and so everything would give us equal amounts of pleasure. And, as the saying goes, if everything makes us happy, then nothing does.

These three stages, which I call
constructing, reckoning,
and
resolving,
are key not only for humor but for all aspects of complex thinking. When solving insight problems, we must generate possible solutions while also inhibiting “false alarms” and other incorrect answers. This process introduces the potential for lots of conflict, and it takes our brains several steps to work through the challenge. Let's look at these steps individually to see why each is so important.

Constructing and the Anterior Cingulate

Why are insight problems so difficult? Is it because we have too many words floating in our heads to make sense of them all? Absolutely not. The challenge of insight problems is that our minds get stuck on wrong answers. We have trouble coming up with the correct response because the wrong ones keep pushing themselves upon us.

The initial triad we looked at—
tooth, potato, heart
—is a good example. For each word, the solution
sweet
isn't the first one most people think of. It isn't even in the top ten. We know because there are databases containing what scientists call semantic associates—words that come to mind when subjects are presented with a prime such as
tooth
—and
sweet
appears near the bottom of the list for all three of our triad words. In fact, even as I write this chapter, and though I've seen the answer many times, the word
ache
still keeps coming falsely to mind. During an early draft of this book, I even misidentified it as the correct solution. Thank goodness for proofreaders.

I call the first stage of the humor process
constructing
to show how active we are in processing our environment. When solving problems, we don't simply search our memories for possible solutions. Rather, we let our brains go to work generating lots of possible answers, some of them useful (
sweet
) and others not (
ache
). We do the same when reading jokes—though, in this case, misdirection comes before the punch
line.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know
goes the classic Groucho Marx joke. Who wears the pajamas depends on how far along you've read.

The brain is a complex beast. There are separate regions for vision, hearing, and language, plus several guiding our movements. There are regions that activate when we do complex math, others that store new memories, and still others that help us recognize faces. The only thing more amazing than the brain's specialization is that it does so many things that evolution could never have fully prepared it to do. So, it shouldn't be surprising that when the brain gets to thinking about things, it makes some wrong turns.

Consider the fact that your brain has between 10 billion and 100 billion neurons. That number is so large it's meaningless, so let's compare it to the number of people living on Earth, which is roughly 7 billion and growing. That's pretty close to the lower estimate for the size of your brain, so let's consider these two systems further. Imagine that at this very instant the entire population of the United States decided to scream. That would be comparable to the neural activity in your brain—at rest. A brain not at rest would be ten or a hundred times more active, so now it's not just America screaming but all of Asia too. All it takes is for multiple parts of your brain to disagree, and pretty soon you've started World War III.

The brain manages this complexity the same way humans do—by building “governments.” As I've noted, its various regions are specialized for nearly everything we do, and although nobody knows exactly how many specialized modules the brain has, it's probably close to the number of governments in the world. There has to be a way to manage all these voices, and for humans the solution is to create entities like the United Nations. The UN isn't itself a government, as it has no land, economy, or political goals. It simply keeps an eye on everyone around it, hearing complaints and keeping troublemakers in check. The brain has a UN, too. It's called the anterior cingulate.

Located near the center of our brain, just above the corpus callosum connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, the anterior cingulate is in a perfect position to oversee the rest of the brain (see
Figure 2.1
). In front is the frontal lobe, our primary reasoning center and the region responsible for initiating movement. Behind are the parietal and temporal lobes, which help with reasoning, as well as language and memory. And as part of the brain's limbic region, the anterior cingulate is closely connected with the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the ventral tegmental area—regions that, as noted earlier, are key to the dopamine reward circuit.

F
IGURE
2.1. Selected regions of the human brain.

We know that the anterior cingulate is especially important for insight because we can observe activity in subjects' brains prior to solving problems like our word triads. Most parts of the brain become less active as subjects prepare to solve these difficult problems, but the anterior cingulate is different. It becomes
more
active, because rather than coming up with solutions, it handles conflict. The Remote Semantic Associates task doesn't appear at first to be one driven by conflict, but it is. As we already discussed, the solution is seldom the first one anybody thinks of. Coming up with a solution requires “holding back” more potent responses. The part of the brain that thinks it has the easy answer
needs to be “shut up” so that softer voices can be heard. And telling others to shut up is exactly what the anterior cingulate is good at.

A good way to understand the anterior cingulate is to explore the Stroop task, named for John Ridley Stroop, who developed it in 1935. He found that when we are asked to identify the color of something, we are slower and less accurate when that thing is a color word. For example, it's easy to identify the color of four asterisks printed in red, but much harder to provide a correct response when the items printed in red are the letters
B-L-U-E.
Why? Because now we have two competing responses. The human mind naturally wants to read, and preventing it from doing so is almost impossible. If you don't believe me, try performing this simple experiment at home: watch an English-language movie tonight with the subtitles showing. I guarantee that you'll be reading every word on the screen, even though you understand exactly what is being said.

What does this have to do with the anterior cingulate? Well, the Stroop task is exactly the kind of thing the anterior cingulate is specialized for, because it's the only brain structure able to keep the reading regions silent so that the color-identifying regions can respond. And it's especially effective at managing such control when we're in a good mood, which is why the Stroop effect disappears when we're happy. When subjects are asked to recall positive life events such as vacations or birthdays immediately before performing a Stroop task, they no longer have difficulty ignoring the conflicting color words. Just as insight is positively correlated with happiness, happy people are better at maintaining focus while identifying the color of fonts.

Mood and happiness are also important to
constructing,
as we'll soon see. As the brain constantly debates over what to say or do, the anterior cingulate stays very busy, and so anything that provides help can have a big influence. Positive mood improves focus by helping the anterior cingulate hold back unwanted responses, such as
ache
in the insight problem and
B-L-U-E
in the Stroop task when the font is red. If the anterior cingulate is like the UN, then positive mood is its operating budget.

However, it's important to realize that we are not passive actors in our environment. We don't just take in information, we create it. We are constantly developing theories and expectations about our surroundings, then revising them when necessary. This phenomenon is observed not just in laboratory settings but on the scale of whole societies, past as well as present. Our ancestors interpreted lightning as anger from the gods, and eclipses as dragons eating the sun. Such beliefs invaded science too. Aristotle, who was born almost two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, thought that life spontaneously arose from slime and mud exposed to sunlight, because this was his only explanation for mold. And Isaac Newton, who lived during an age when chemistry offered no explanation for the mysterious existence of gold, wrote more than a million words about the subtleties of alchemy.

To show how ubiquitous our need is to construct such theories, and also to see its link with humor, let's consider one last study before moving on to our second stage,
reckoning.
This study was conducted by the Swedish psychologist Göran Nerhardt, who wanted to know if he could induce laughter using materials that weren't funny at all. He didn't even tell his subjects that they would be participating in a humor study. Instead, he simply instructed them to pick up a series of objects and waited to see just how far their false expectations could take them.

Nerhardt's task was quite straightforward. Subjects picked up objects of various weights (e.g., between 740 to 2,700 grams, roughly 2 to 6 pounds). Then they were asked to classify each on a 6-point scale, ranging from very light to very heavy. This sequence was repeated several times, after which subjects were given an object that was much lighter than the others—just a tenth of a pound. They weren't told anything special about this last object. They were simply asked to make a series of judgments about items that weren't funny at all.

Yet Nerhardt found that, when the subjects were asked to make a judgment about the final, wildly incongruous weight, most of them laughed despite being given no indication that it was intended as a
joke. Not only that, but the more the weight differed from those lifted earlier, the more they laughed at this absurdly light one.