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Colloquia: Cognition - Brain - Development - Disorders
Ksenija Marinkovic, PhD
- Dept. of Radiology, UCSD
- Understanding Words and Getting Jokes: Anatomically Constrained MEG
- Friday, Nov. 20
- Note the changed time: 10:30-11:30am
- New location: 6330 Alvarado Ct. #125
Abstract
Understanding words and getting jokes: Anatomically constrained MEG
Humor plays an important role in social interactions as people take great pleasure in sharing moments of suspense followed by mirth as they listen to a joke. Contributions from multiple brain areas including semantic, mnemonic, emotional and inferential are necessary to understand a joke and derive a sense of amusement, but the functional neuroanatomy and processing time course of such a network remain unknown. Prominent models commonly postulate that the punchline is appreciated as funny in two stages of integration: in the first stage the punchline is perceived as incongruous with the setup, and in the second, further consideration establishes a deeper coherence with the preceding context. Thus, amusement may result when a "twist" is successfully incorporated into the context, that is, when the initial incongruity is resolved by reinterpreting or "frame shifting". We will discuss neural underpinnings of these processing stages by examining evidence obtained with intracranial EEG and anatomically-constrained magnetoencephalography (aMEG) in language and humor tasks. By combining high-density whole head MEG with anatomical MRI, the aMEG method allows us to estimate where the humor-specific brain activations occur, and to understand their temporal sequence. Our results indicate that coherent integration of the intended meaning and a sense of amusement may emerge from the dynamic interaction of both left and right hemispheres with special contributions from the right prefrontal region.
Additional Information
Ksenija Marinkovic, Ph.D., is/was a research scientist at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, instructor in the Radiology Department at Harvard Medical School, and assistant in Neuroscience at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. [1] Now Dr. Marinkovic is faculty at the UC San Diego Department of Radiology
- Contact: Ksenija Marinkovic, Ph.D.
- kmarinkovic@ucsd.edu
- University of California, San Diego
Nov 18 2009 4:43 pm
Sounds Interesting
Nov 18 2009 4:45 pm
test
Nov 20 2009 12:55 am
According to this article, from my interpretation, if we damage the right pre-frontal region of the brain, we might not be able to activate the humor-specific brain activities which are likely to hinder our ability to process jokes, which really means- we cant understand humor, emotions, and sense of pleasure.
BCNov 20 2009 1:04 am
if any region of the brain is damaged, i suspect that many loss of processing emotion capacity may occur. if we can identify a part of the brain that can perceive/receive pleasure, we might be able to develop drugs that really antagonize depression.