Humor Is The Healthiest Thing Our Brains Can Experience!

Humor activates our brains and enhances our well-being perhaps more than anything else

- Adam Piore

BY DAY, ORI AMIR is a mild-mannered 30-something college professor. He teaches undergraduate psychology and neuroscience classes, conducts research into how the brain functions, and holds regular office hours on the leafy campus of Pomona College in Southern California. But his students aren’t fooled. They’ve seen the YouTube videos, the ones that document his not-so-secret other life. In one of them, Amir is gripping a microphone and standing center stage at the 1,400-seat Alex Theater in Glendale, California, wearing a striped rugby shirt, faded blue jeans, battered construction boots—and a ridiculously shaggy white fur coat. It’s the second night of the Glendale Laughs Comedy Festival, and Amir is grinning broadly at the audience through his ample beard, looking like a crazed six-foot-two redheaded Fozzie Bear.

“As you can tell by my accent, I’m a neuroscientist,” says Amir, who grew up in Israel. “They tell the professors at the university where I work to dress ‘business casual.’ This is pretty much the best I can do. My wardrobe ranges from very casual to inappropriate.” Tonight, he’s wearing the full spectrum.

Amir likes to tell his audiences— and occasionally his students—that his dream is to become a “professional comedian and an amateur neurosurgeon.” (“That way I could cut up brains for fun!”) In fact, he has already managed to combine these seemingly unrelated passions. Amir is one of the leading researchers studying the way the brain creates and understands humor. Unless you happen tobe a neuroscientist who moonlights as a stand-up, that specialty might seem trivial compared with other fields of cognition.

But the question of why we find things funny has fascinated philosophers for centuries.