Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist, comedian and science blogger. In this book 'The Happy Brain" he rattles through studies and reflects on his own life in a quest to find the secret of contentment.
The Burnett method is to combine a chatty style with hundreds of academic endnotes, interviews with “experts” and personal anecdotes, and on the whole it is very effective.
He begins by describing the parts of the brain – and why none of them is solely “responsible” for processing any emotion. He runs through some chemical neurotransmitters and what we know about their roles, such as dopamine (reward and pleasure), endorphins (a response to pain and stress) and oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone).
He rattles through studies, building a picture of what exactly tickles the human brain and why. Including tickling. Laughter, it turns out, may originate among the temporal, occipital and parietal lobes, whose role is to “detect and resolve incongruity”. This really is explaining the joke on a minute scale, but who better qualified to do so?
If this helps us understand ourselves better, then it can only serve use well.
Article Source - Katy Guest, The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment