Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

Hurley, Matthew M.

ISBN 10: 0262518694 / ISBN 13: 9780262518697

Editore: MIT Press, 2013

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Titolo: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to ...

Casa editrice: MIT Press

Data di pubblicazione: 2013

Legatura: Paperback

Condizione: new

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto:

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor.

Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

L'autore:

Reginald B. Adams, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Penn State University.

Matthew M. Hurley is researching emotions and creativity under Douglas R. Hofstadter at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognitionat Indiana University.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books.

Matthew M. Hurley is researching emotions and creativity under Douglas R. Hofstadter at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books. Reginald B. Adams, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Penn State University.