Eliza Stein's List: evolutionary basis of humor

• • laughter = short seizure
• • laughter is fixed action pattern and is inate
• • laughter is result of positive reinforcement
• • advantages: avoid confrontation, courting, boosting immunity

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• • humor is internal; laughter is social signal
• • laughing is a signal of acceptance or overcoming danger
• • jokes trigger higher order thinking in frontal lobe to resolve inconsistency and determine sense
• • cognitive dissonance
• • happens in prefrontal cortex

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• perception of the unexpected or the incongruous.
• This area is incidentally also involved in the reward system in humans and primates,
• median ventral prefrontal cortex
• contagious laughter,
• anterior motor cortex and the nucleus accumbens, an area also associated with the reward system
• Laughter boosts endorphins, and causes the reduction of certain neuroendocrine hormones: epinephrine, cortisol, dopac, and growth hormone, all of which are part of the body's stress response.
• For example, during stress, the adrenal gland releases corticosteroids, converted to cortisol in the bloodstream, which has an immunosuppressive effect. The experience of laughing lowers cortisol levels in the bloodstream and consequently boosts T-cell activity (7).
• • body deals with stress either by crying or laughing; need to relieve muscle tension

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• Humor exposes ugly human phenomena (those that render the world almost unbearable) to mockery, in the hope of thereby eliminating them
• Bergson's theory lays special emphasis on the "educational" function of humor.
• Moreover, the fear of becoming a target for mockery should be sufficient to prevent a person from again committing the deed that has led to a punitive reaction
• Its goal is not to make us laugh, but to arouse us to moral improvement.
• Satire, both written and acted, works in a similar way.
• Comic and satiric theater have the same function - to "reform society"

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• • "humor involves the bringing together of two normally disparate ideas, concepts, or situations in a surprising or unexpected manner"
• • "Resolution of the incongruity, appropriateness of the incongruity, the acceptance of unresolvable incongruity, or the "Safeness" of the context in which the incongruity is processed" are also necessary for humor