“Aha!" In The "Haha!"

Humor is an extremely common phenomenon in society, it happens when people are joking or laughing. When they get the punchline of something or some words, they will express their emotion by laughing and have a pleasant experience. Humor is an important kind of high-level cognition, it plays an important role in human social life.Humor has a lot of fitness value: it can help people to regulate emotion, adjust the distance between people, improve the cognitive ability, enhance creativity. It is good for the physical and mental health of human being, and it is also a kind of charming personality traits. We can see that humor is good for humans, it is of great significance for human life to study humor.The punchline of a joke elicits a moment of insight, a sudden understanding resulting in a new analysis of a situation or problem. In Suls(1972)incongruity-resolution theory, the cognitive aspects of a joke can be divided into two components: the detection of incongruity and its resolution. Humor is thus processed in a step-by-step procedure. Based on the incongruity-resolution theory, many researches have studied the neural basis of humor comprehension. Most of these researches use two kinds of materials: visual(cartoons, visual puns) and verbal(phonological or semantic) jokes, but most of them made use of only one type of material, making a direct comparison of visual versus verbal stimuli difficult. Besides, there are not enough studies focus on the neural basis of humor in China. Gestalt theorists claim that the processes involved in understanding jokes might share features with those involved in insight, and neural researches about insight also found that there are some common regions between humor and insight. Therefore, by using both visual and verbal stimuli,our study aims to explore the insight during humor comprehension, compare the region activation patterns in the two stimuli conditions immediately, to find that whether thereare common regions in both visual and verbal stimuli.Present study uses functional magnet resonance imaging technique to probe the neural basis of the insight during humor comprehension. Study 1 is the preliminary test,the period of collecting materials. We apply some students to rate the material that we collected from different ways. Finally, we select the materials that had a good reliability and validity to as our formal experimental stimuli. Study 2 use visual and verbal joke as experiment material. Compare the brain activation between humorous conditions and non-humorous condition, results show that, in the picture condition, the contrast revealed activation in the left superior frontal gyrus(SFG), right middle frontal gyrus(MFG), left triangle inferior frontal gyrus(IFG), bilateral middle temporal gyrus(MTG),left superior temporal gyrus(STG) and left fusiform gyrus and parahippocampal, while in the character condition, HU contrast NH activated regions such as the left superior frontal gyrus(SFG), right middle frontal gyrus(MFG), left inferior frontal gyrus(IFG),left precentral, bilateral middle temporal gyrus(MTG), right superior temporal gyrus(STG), left temporo-parietal junction(TPJ), bilateral middle occipital gyrus(MOG),posterior cingulate cortex(PCC), subgenual anterior cingulate cortex(sg ACC) and hippocampus. No matter what the stimuli is, visual or verbal, the activated regions almost concentrate on the left superior frontal gyrus(SFG), right middle frontal gyrus(MFG), left triangle inferior frontal gyrus(IFG), bilateral middle temporal gyrus(MTG,cingulate cortex and hippocampus. These brain regions are not only consistent with previous findings, but also have some overlap with insight. Our study results show that:there is insight during humor processing, the attributes of stimuli will not effect the key region of humor, visual and verbal stimuli have some common regions and there is not a great difference between Chinese and Western culture on the humor brain activation.