How do you get jokes?

Scientists, not as a group thought of as the world's greatest comedians, have recently probed the human brain in a bid to find out how people 'get' (understand) jokes.

Researchers from the Institute of Neurology in London carried out brain scans of volunteers as they listened to two types of joke. The participants rated how amusing they found the jokes by using a 'funniness scale'.

But to ensure the experiment was conducted seriously, and prevent jogging of the scanner, they were asked not to laugh.

Sixty jokes were tested on the 14 volunteers. Half were semantic jokes, one example being: "What do engineers use for birth control? Their personalities". The others were phonological jokes based on puns, such as: "Why did the golfer wear two sets of pants? He got a hole in one".

The scientists, Dr Raymond Dolan and Dr Vinod Goel, used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging which can show which parts of the brain are active at different times. When the volunteers heard semantic jokes, parts of their brains involved in the processing of language were found to be activated.

Puns, on the other hand, triggered areas that deal with speech production. For both types of joke, the scans showed activation in an area of the brain called the medial ventral prefrontal cortex (MVPFC), known to govern reward-related behaviour.

For further information please contact Institute of Neurology, University College London via ph: +44 20 7833 7472 or fax: +44 20 7278 5069.