Comedy brain cell responds to humour
Humour? Well, it’s all in the mind, says a new study. An international team, led by researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, discovered what it claims is a comedy brain cell which in fact responds to humour.
According to researchers, a person’s brain fires when he or she watches, say a comedy scene in a movie, and go into action once again as that individual recalls the same episode. They came to the conclusion after analysing the mind of 13 epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted into their brains.
The same electrodes could be used to monitor single brain cells in the brain’s hippocampus, a structure known to play a central role in memory, and related structures as the clips played. As the people recalled a comedy show minutes after they saw the episode, the same brain cells increased their firing rate again. The critical finding was that the same select nerve cells went into action when people recalled these memories too. Remarkably, the cells sprang to life even before the people told the researchers that the memory of the show had “come to mind” by 1.5 thousandths of a second, suggesting a direct link between free recall and the ‘replay’ of cells in this portion of the brain. The study has been published in Science. — PTI
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