Wild, Rodden, Grodd, Ruch Neural Correlates of Laughter and H

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resolution of the incongruity, one would not know whether patients could be found (Head, 1926; Isserlin, 1936;
one had solved a problem (as in a riddle) or had experienced Weinstein, 1955; Luria, 1970; Critchley, 1970) but no
humour. experiments had been designed speci�cally to test whether
In the following, an attempt is made to dissect what damage to discrete areas of the brain might result in a
happens when the elements of humour are presented to an disturbance of the patient's sense of humour. As predicted by
observer. First of all, the perception of elements of humour their hypothesis, the group of patients with brain injuries in
can (or cannot) result in the feeling that something is funny. If the study of Gardner and colleagues performed more poorly
they do not result in that feeling, then humour is not present in than did normal controls in distinguishing the funny from the
that situation. The responses to humour are by no means tied non-funny cartoons (Gardner et al., 1975). There were,
to jokes or joke-like constructions but rather can be induced however, no signi�cant differences between results in
by a variety of means (Ruch and Ekman, 2001). If the feeling patients with lesions in the left and right hemisphere in
of something's having been funny is generated, that transitory their global ability to perceive humour. Patients with right-
feeling, or McGhee's `humour response' (McGhee, 1979), hemisphere lesions, however, performed slightly better when
can then feed into an emotion (such as exhilaration, but there was a caption, indicating that they were probably helped
alternatively into anger, fear, etc. depending on what the by linguistic information.
object of the humour was). The emotion with which the Six years after the above study, Wapner and colleagues
humour response is most often associated is labelled reported that patients with lesions of the non-dominant
inconsistently as `amusement', `mirth', `hilarity' or `exhilar- hemisphere exhibited abnormalities in their responses to
ation' (the last of these designations corresponds to the Latin humour (Wapner et al., 1981). These de�cits were interpreted
root of the term as a transient uplift into a cheerful state). The as being based on the patients' impaired abilities to process
emotion then may in�uence a mood. The humour response the non-canonical and pragmatic dimensions of language.
can elicit a smile or laugh, but does not have to; it can even Two years later, Brownell and colleagues found that patients
elicit a frown. These distinctions are important to bear in with defects in the right hemisphere were able to detect the
mind inasmuch as not everything that (i) contains the necessary surprise element of a verbal joke's punch-line but
potential elements of humour is (ii) perceived as humorous were unable to discern which of several surprising endings of
and leads to (iii) exhilaration, (iv) the motor expression of an `experimental joke' were funny due to the ending's
laughter and (v) to an elevated mood. Each of these elements essential coherence with the body of the joke (Brownell et al.,
may have its own cerebral substrate. 1983). These results showed that these patients either suffered
It is, however, clear that, regardless of how these speci�c from an inability to integrate content across parts of a
tasks are apportioned, the perception of humour is dependent narrative unit or were unable to deal with affectively laden
on certain faculties of the brain, such as attention, working materials. This either�or ambiguity was addressed in a study
memory, mental �exibility, emotional evaluation, verbal by Dagge and Hartje (1985) of patients with damage to the
abstraction and the feeling of positive emotions. Given these right hemisphere. Their impairments in understanding car-
involvements, theory dictates that (at least) those regions of toons were more related to de�cits in their visuoperceptive
the brain associated with these processes should be active in and cognitive capability than to their inability to identify the
the perception of humour. affective components of cartoons. In a study published the
following year, Bihrle and colleagues reported similar results [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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