Humour lights up the neurons in our brains

The funnier a joke is, the more activity is seen in the brain's "reward centres" that create feelings of pleasure, a team of UK's Medical Research Council scientists has found.

And learning how humour affects the brain may have serious implicaitons, as scientists believe it could help determine whether patients in a vegetative state experience positive emotions, the Daily Mail reported.

For the study, the scientists scanned the brains of volunteers to compare what happened when they heard ordinary sentences and jokes.

This showed that the reward centres "lit up" much more in response to humour.

What is more, the strength of the response depended on how funny each of the 12 patients found these jokes.

"We found a characteristic pattern of brain activity when the jokes used were puns," said study researcher Dr Matt Davis of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.

He said: "For example, jokes like 'Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny!' involved brain areas for language processing more than jokes that didn’t involve wordplay.

"This response differed again from non-humorous sentences that also contained words with more than one meaning.

"Mapping how the brain processes jokes and sentences shows how language contributes to the pleasure of getting a joke. We can use this as a benchmark for understanding how people who cannot communicate normally react to jokes."

The study was published in Journal of Neuroscience.