Cutting Room Floor Series, part 2, The Neuroscience of Humor Comprehension

As I have mentioned before, I have written a book chapter for the upcoming monograph on John Kennedy Toole, a book that has the working title "Theology and Geometry." Because I have trimmed items as I have edited the chapter, I plan to put some of them in this series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor."

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

Back in February of 2019, I reported that there were strange spikes in traffic on this blog. The spikes were generated by a machine running Linux. The traffic would jump from the typical five hits a day to two hundred. But no one blog entry recorded the traffic. Those spikes have gone away.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number Two: The Neuroscience of Humor Comprehension

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of the neuroscience of humor comprehension. I had a further statement of brain waves which was not essential to my point. The information comes from the book "Ha! The Science on When We Laugh and Why" by Scott Weems. The first two sentences stayed in the final version of the chapter. Here it is:

The job of the anterior cingulate is to resolve cognitive conflicts coming from other parts of the brain. The dorsal area of this structure focuses on resolving logical puzzles such as grammatical conundrums, while the ventral area deals more with conflicting emotions. For example, when a traditional joke hits its punchline, there is a positive deflection in the brainwaves at 0.3 seconds centered in the anterior cingulate, indicating that the brain is working on resolving an incongruity, followed by a negative deflection at 0.4 seconds across the rest of the brain, indicating that the incongruity has been resolved to produce the meaning of the joke.