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Abstract
Humans naturally have a sense of humor. Experiencing humor not only encourages social interactions, but also produces positive physiological effects on the human body, such as lowering blood pressure. Recent neuro-imaging studies have shown evidence for distinct mental state changes at work in people experiencing humor. However, the temporal characteristics of these changes remain elusive. In this paper, we objectively measured humor-related mental states from single-trial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained while subjects viewed comedy TV programs. Measured fMRI data were labeled on the basis of the lag before or after the viewer’s perception of humor (humor onset) determined by the viewer-reported humor experiences during the fMRI scans. We trained multiple binary classifiers, or decoders, to distinguish between fMRI data obtained at each lag from ones obtained during a neutral state in which subjects were not experiencing humor. As a result, in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the right temporal area, the decoders showed significant classification accuracies even at two seconds ahead of the humor onsets. Furthermore, given a time series of fMRI data obtained during movie viewing, we found that the decoders with significant performance were also able to predict the upcoming humor events on a volume-by-volume basis. Taking into account the hemodynamic delay, our results suggest that the upcoming humor events are encoded in specific brain areas up to about five seconds before the awareness of experiencing humor. Our results provide evidence that there exists a mental state lasting for a few seconds before actual humor perception, as if a viewer is expecting the future humorous events.
Highlights
A sense of humor is a common human characteristic that people in many cultures experience
Compared with the decoding accuracies obtained from the control experiment, we found humor-specific information was encoded two seconds before or at the same time as a humor onset in the brain regions including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), ventral prefrontal cortices (vPFC) and temporal areas (Figure 2)
We have shown that the upcoming humor experiences can be decoded from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses two seconds ahead of and at the same time as humor reports in the areas including the bilateral DLPFC, vPFC, and temporal areas
Summary
A sense of humor is a common human characteristic that people in many cultures experience. Chan et al examined fMRI activity while audiences listened to several humorous short stories, and showed that humor-related mental states correlated with activity in distinct brain areas; incongruity detection, resolution and elaboration of humor were respectively involved in the right middle temporal gyrus and right medial frontal gyrus, the left superior frontal gyrus and left inferior parietal lobule, and the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the bilateral parahippocampal gyri and the bilateral amygdale [16,18] Such physiological measurements for experiencing humor should be of value to the creators of comedy shows and movies, because it would help them to know the detailed reactions of audiences and the objective value of their products
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