He keeps telling jokes, but they're not funny: This disease turns him into a real clown

We may have heard of alcohol addiction, food and drug addiction, but did you know that jokes, which are supposed to bring people joy, can also be addictive?

Their brains are making jokes all the time, but to be honest, those so-called jokes are not funny. Ask the people around them and they will know that they are not funny at all. In fact, they are likely sick. And for these patients, the feeling of not being able to control is not pleasant.

Derek (not his real name) started to chuckle to himself, and people around him looked at him strangely. He took out a card from his pocket, which read: **I'm sorry. I always come up with all kinds of jokes and laugh at them myself. ** This is not something I can control.

“I can’t help myself.”

We’ve probably all said or thought something like this:

“I couldn’t control my drinking.”

“I can’t stop myself from eating.”

"I can't stop myself from checking my Moments."

…

As for Derek, “I can’t help telling jokes.”

Before he was officially diagnosed, Derek had been compulsively making "jokes" for five years. American doctors Elias Granadillo and Mario Mendez wrote: "According to the patient's self-report, life is generally pleasant." However, for his wife, being woken up by him in the middle of the night and listening to him excitedly telling those "jokes" did not seem to be something worth rejoicing about. But Derek could make himself laugh almost every time.

Later, these jokes were brought into the doctor's office. He wrote them down as soon as he had an idea, sometimes even bringing 50 pages of "jokes" to show the doctor . But the jokes he was satisfied with were actually not funny at all, and most of them were easy to understand.

So funny

“To the mind, when it perceives something unexpected, a new or inconsistent idea, it finds it amusing,” Charles Darwin wrote in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. The unexpected, inconsistent, or incongruous is the key to pleasure in the brain.

In 2015, a group of scientists from Oxford University in the UK collected jokes from undergraduates and selected the 10 funniest jokes. Let's take a look at one of the jokes selected by the scientists:

Three people were stranded on a deserted island and found a magic lamp with a genie inside. The genie said that he could grant each of them one wish. The first person said that he wanted to leave the deserted island and go home. The second person also made the same wish. But the third person said, "I feel very lonely now. I hope my two friends will come back."

Image source: Unsplash

So what does your brain do in the process of hearing this joke and ultimately laughing (if you laugh)?

Humor and Addiction

In 1972, Jerry Suls, a researcher from Temple University in the United States, borrowed the idea of ​​the general problem solver (GPS) in the computer field and proposed the incongruity theory, which is now also called the incongruity-resolution theory. This theory divides the brain's process of processing jokes into two steps: the first step is to detect the incongruity part, that is, the brain must first detect the emergence of the joke; and the second step requires the brain to "resolve the problem". The brain will look for possible explanations for the incongruity part, especially looking for answers from past experience, which requires the brain to integrate all information and then make a judgment.

Although Suls' theory is still the most important view on humor in neurocognition, the understanding of how the brain processes humor information has changed from "two steps" to "three steps" - dissonance-relief-pleasure. This is due to the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Currently, most studies are using fMRI to explore the neural activity of humor.

In fact, the dissonance-relief theory is answering the cognitive process related to humor, while "pleasure" requires the participation of other parts of the brain. When it comes to brain pleasure, we should be familiar with the "pleasure molecule" dopamine. In the face of "humor", dopamine is mainly responsible for making the brain feel pleasure, and the brain areas involved mainly include the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra, nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

However, as in all forms of addiction, the brain's pleasure centers release more dopamine when they experience pain than when they experience reward, so addicts will compulsively repeat behaviors, such as continuing to consume large amounts of alcohol or stuffing more food into their mouths, even when it's painful.

For Derek, "telling jokes" has become a compulsive addiction . As early as the late 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Oppenheim described four patients with right frontal lobe damage who always told a large number of simple, sometimes sarcastic jokes. Oppenheim called this symptom "Witzelsucht", where "Witzel" means joke and "sucht" means addiction. Together, it can be called "joke addiction", "clown disease", or "self-delightful humor" .

Image source: Unsplash

When searching for "Witzelsucht", I accidentally found a forum where real people who are addicted to telling jokes share the jokes that keep popping up in their minds. Some posts talk about their own feelings of joke addiction: **"In fact, it's very likely that you're extremely desperate about it."** However, the latest interaction stopped in 2016, and I don't know if they have received help, except for taking prescription drugs.

When tracing Derek's medical history, Granadillo and Mendez found that Derek had also suffered from depression. But in his self-report, he felt happy in life.

What does the right brain do?

Granadillo and Mendez also said that Derek had suffered an unexplained subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) 10 years before he came to the hospital. The brain hemorrhage also damaged a small part of the right frontal lobe, and he was no longer himself (his personality changed completely) after that - he began to have obsessive-compulsive tendencies and hoarding habits, such as taking home napkins and cutlery from every restaurant he visited.

When it comes to the impact of frontal lobe damage on personality and behavior, Phineas Gage is a "celebrity" in the history of neuroscience that cannot be ignored. Gage was no longer Gage because an iron rod pierced his head and destroyed his frontal lobe.

As for Derek, five years after the brain hemorrhage, he changed again. This time, the Derek who "can't help telling jokes" appeared. Not only that, but verbal attacks, stealing and other inappropriate behaviors also made him further away from the original Derek.

In humor-related tests, Derek scored very high in the "joke-making" category (i.e., creativity, not whether the jokes were funny). Moreover, in another test, he correctly identified the jokes in 16 of the 24 jokes (multiple-choice) provided by the researchers. However, he did not laugh or report that the jokes were funny. In other words, he had no emotional response to other people's jokes .

But usually, he would burst into laughter because of his own "jokes". For example (appreciate one of Derek's jokes, you may find it funny): How do you think you should resist hunger? Just stay away from the buffet table.

In 1975, Howard Gardner and others from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Boston, USA, studied the sense of humor of 60 brain-damaged patients (41 with left-side brain damage and 19 with right-side brain damage, all right-handed). They found that both left-side and right-side brain damage would reduce the patients' sense of humor, but only patients with right-side brain damage would have two extreme reactions to jokes or funny cartoons: they would either laugh at any funny thing, even if they might not understand the joke, or they would know the joke but not react at all.

This suggests that for patients with right-side brain damage, the connection between cognition and emotional response is "cut off" , that is, the right brain plays an important role in emotional expression. Subsequently, in 1999, P. Shammi and DT Tuss from the University of Toronto in Canada located the key part of the right brain in the right frontal lobe, and pointed out that the right frontal lobe is essential for integrating jokes and punchlines, as well as extracting episodic memories. These processes determine whether the brain can "solve the problem", understand the punchline, and induce pleasure.

We can see that Derek's performance is the dissociation between cognitive and emotional responses, and the inability to recognize the connection between the funny points and the jokes (that is, the impaired ability to integrate information), and his right frontal lobe is indeed damaged. But it is worth mentioning that many patients like Derek can still respond to simple jokes, such as puns or body language. Moreover, most of the jokes written by Derek are puns (simple and easy to understand). Granadillo and Mendez said that both sides of the brain are actually at work in understanding and feeling humor, but the left frontal lobe is mainly responsible for perceiving simpler jokes, while the right frontal lobe is mainly responsible for more complex jokes.

American neurologist Oliver Sacks once wrote in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat And Other Clinical Tales: "The entire history of neuroscience and neuropsychology can be said to be the history of the study of the left hemisphere." The right brain is often ignored or called the "secondary" hemisphere. This is mainly because doctors can easily find the effects of damage to various parts of the left brain, but the symptoms of the right brain are not so obvious. It should be noted that Derek did not receive detailed treatment until 10 years after the right frontal lobe was damaged, and at this time, the "joke addiction" had been going on for nearly 5 years.

Jason Warren of University College London focuses on frontotemporal dementia. Warren noticed that this neurodegenerative disease also affects the patient's normal sense of humor. And this sign is likely to begin to appear several years before the formal diagnosis (up to 9 years) . It is conceivable that real-time monitoring of "abnormal sense of humor" can buy doctors and patients more treatment time?

Why so serious?

Source: Bringing Science Home