Abstract
Unlike passive humor appreciation, the neural correlates of real-time humor creation have been unexplored. As a case study for creativity, humor generation uniquely affords a reliable assessment of a creative product’s quality with a clear and relatively rapid beginning and end, rendering it amenable to neuroimaging that has the potential for reflecting individual differences in expertise. Professional and amateur “improv” comedians and controls viewed New Yorker cartoon drawings while being scanned. For each drawing, they were instructed to generate either a humorous or a mundane caption. Greater comedic experience was associated with decreased activation in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but increased activation in temporal association regions (TMP). Less experienced comedians manifested greater activation of mPFC, reflecting their deliberate search through TMP association space. Professionals, by contrast, tend to reap the fruits of their spontaneous associations with reduced reliance on top-down guided search.
Highlights
A handful of studies have recently begun exploring the neural correlates of creativity, with tasks ranging from narrative generation (Howard-Jones et al, 2005) to jazz improvisation (Limb and Braun, 2008) to creative drawing (Schlegel et al, 2015)
It has been suggested that activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and a deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were the hallmarks of creative processing, along with regions associated with the particular type of creative task (e.g., Limb and Braun, 2008; Liu et al, 2012, 2015)
The differences in Reaction times (RTs) reported above were unlikely to have produced the fMRI differences between groups as the main regions of interest (ROIs) were localized with the early peak of activation, which coincided for the two conditions (HUM and MUN)
Summary
A handful of studies have recently begun exploring the neural correlates of creativity, with tasks ranging from narrative generation (Howard-Jones et al, 2005) to jazz improvisation (Limb and Braun, 2008) to creative drawing (Schlegel et al, 2015). A one-dimensional comparison between creative and non-creative control conditions (e.g., jazz improvisation vs playing from memory; Limb and Braun, 2008) may be inadequate for revealing the roles played by different brain regions in a creative endeavor, as it can only reveal a set of regions, typically unsurprising (e.g., visual regions for book cover design, Ellamil et al, 2012; language regions for poetry composition, Liu et al, 2015), associated with a particular creative task (as well as, commonly, the mPFC). The laugh reflects a subjective state, it is one that is readily accessible for ratings and typically has high agreement
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