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| |  DG DISPATCH - RSNA: Researchers Localize Brain’s Humor Center By W. A. Thomasson, PhD Special to DG News
CHICAGO, IL -- November 30, 2000 -- The funny bone is not just in the elbow, but it is also not in just a single part of the brain, according to results presented this week at the Radiologic Society of North America annual meeting. Identification of the regions involved in humor may help neurosurgeons to avoid these regions during surgery-- some of which were once believed to have little or no function -- or to anticipate the resulting deficits if they cannot avoid them. It will also allow neurologists to correlate clinical symptoms with lesions in these regions. The research was presented at the RSA by Dean K. Shibata, MD, of the University of Rochester Medical Center, in Rochester, New York. Dr. Shibata originally began by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain’s processing of verbal incongruities. But when he tried to exaggerate the incongruity by using such sentences as, "The plane landed on the hippopotamus" he found that he was instead studying how the brain handles humor. Further study involving verbal jokes, cartoons and canned laughter tracks -- with subjects being asked either to internally join in the laughter or to refrain -- identified at least three specific regions involved in different aspects of humor. Appreciation of jokes and cartoons seems to be related primarily to the ventromedial frontal lobe, an area that shows relatively little activity in patients with major depression and in which lesions may destroy the person’s sense of humor. Laughter seems to be associated primarily with the supplemental motor cortex, an observation supported by a recent report of the results of electrically stimulating this area during brain surgery. The right premotor cortex may also be involved. Finally, the pleasant emotional feeling that accompanies mirth appears to be associated with the nucleus accumbens, as are many other positive emotional states. Dr. Shibata pointed out that psychiatry has often tended to focus on the negative emotions but needs to study the positive ones as well. It is even possible, he speculated, that in the future psychiatrists may be using fMRI to assess these emotions in individual patients.
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