Ori Amir has always been fascinated with how a comedian&rsquo;s brain works. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s been so much research about what goes on in the brain when you enjoy humour,&rdquo; says the neuroscientist, who moved to the U.S. from Israel to study at the University of Southern California. &ldquo;But nobody has looked at the neural activity that happens when you try to come up with a joke.&rdquo;So Amir and Irving Biederman, professor of psychology and neuroscience at USC, recruited 22 amateur and professional comedians, including six improvisers from the Groundlings &mdash; the Los Angeles theatre that launched the careers of Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy, among others &mdash; and asked them to come up with captions for New Yorker cartoons while having their brains scanned. (We&rsquo;ve visualised one of those scans below.) &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not easy to be funny while lying in an MRI machine,&rdquo; Amir says. &ldquo;There was a lot of complaining.&rdquo;The scans revealed two curious things. First, when professional comedians create a joke, there&rsquo;s more activity in the parts of the temporal lobe known for abstract thought; amateurs create humour primarily in their prefrontal cortex, which is all about rational decision-making. The data seem to indicate that the best jokes rely more on unfocused daydreaming than problem-solving.The researchers also found that when we think up a funny idea, regions with a high density of opioid receptor &mdash; the proteins that control feelings of euphoria or reward &mdash; become more active. Once those receptors get triggered, they flood the brain with dopamine. It&rsquo;s the same rush that comes with indulgent eating or having sex &mdash; or doing drugs. Are comedy writers just junkies who prefer laughs to narcotics? &ldquo;That&rsquo;s our theory,&rdquo; Amir says.Andrew B. Newberg, director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health, conducted a similar study in 2016, inviting comedians from The Onion, Curb Your Enthusiasm and other comedy cornerstones to have their brains studied. He noticed smaller structures in their basal ganglia, the region involved in the release of dopamine, which could suggest that &ldquo;comedians seek out comedy because they need more stimulation in order to feel happy.&rdquo;So how do these findings sit with actual comedians? Scott Dikkers, a founding editor of The Onion and owner of especially small basal ganglia, has doubts. &ldquo;Certainly the delivery of comedy in a live environment, where you&rsquo;re actually getting laughs, triggers that response,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But the creating of it, when you&rsquo;re alone in your apartment, trying to produce jokes on a blank computer screen? That&rsquo;s miserable work, the polar opposite of sex or drugs.&rdquo;Either way, let&rsquo;s be thankful that our favourite comedians are strung-out joke junkies and finding the perfect punch line is the only thing that gets the monkey off their back.

This Is Your Brain On Jokes

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