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Comedy lights up brain cells

Humourous clips shown to epilepsy patients and their brain reactions monitored.

  • By Roger Highfield, Telegraph Group
  • Published: 23:28 September 6, 2008
  • Gulf News

London: A "comedy brain cell" that responds to humour has been discovered by scientists.

Clips of The Simpsons, Seinfeld and cartoons were shown to epilepsy patients and their brain reactions monitored.

A particular cell "sparked" when watching the clips, and reignited when the programmes were recalled. Funnier programmes created a bigger reaction.

The advance in understanding the neuroscience of comedy is reported in the journal Science.

Patients in America had electrodes implanted into their brains to help find where their seizures started. They were then shown 48 comedy clips.

In one patient they found a nerve cell that responded most vigorously to The Simpsons. The "firing rate" went to more than 15 times per second, compared with a couple of times per second for other clips, or blank periods. This firing lasted for several seconds and even beyond the actual time that the clip was on the screen.

In some patients the cells sprang to life 1.5 thousandths of a second before they told the researchers that the memory of the show had "come to mind", suggesting a direct link between free recall and the "replay" of cells in that portion of the brain.

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