Just going through my archives and wanted to post these interesting bits I saw elsewhere a while back, just for those who aren't aware.
Humour and problem solving"In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/sc...ml?ref=scienceThere's more
Insight, humour and problem solving
Abstract
A sudden comprehension that solves a problem, reinterprets a situation, explains a joke, or resolves an ambiguous percept is called an insight (i.e., the “Aha! moment”). Psychologists have studied insight using behavioral methods for nearly a century. Recently, the tools of cognitive neuroscience have been applied to this phenomenon. A series of studies have used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of the “Aha! moment” and its antecedents. Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales. Elucidation of these precursors suggests interventional opportunities for the facilitation of insight.
The cognitive neuroscience of insight
http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/4/210 Finally but on a tangent, an explanation for
dark humour.
"
Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny''
A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren
Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion."
http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mc...en.inpress.pdf What are your experiences? Do you find you have a good sense of humour? Do you find you also have a good grasp of problem solving? Are the two related for you? Do you find this of others?
Topic: Humour and problem-solving