From the brain's point of view, what is humor?

When something is funny, why do we breathe in and out rapidly?

Do other animals laugh?

Why do most jokes come in threes?

What do mystery novelists, magicians, and comedians have in common? And could AI be

truly funny? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at

Stanford. And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how

our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about humor. Although humor is one of the most valued aspects of our lives, you've probably heard very little about it from the scientific point of view.

And that changes today. So why do we laugh? After all, it's a very strange behavior. Imagine that you are a space alien and you are studying humans. So through years of study,

you note that humans seem to have a relatively high bandwidth channel of communication by an

extraordinarily rapid and precise use of their larynx and their vocal cords. They move their

tongue and their lips very rapidly, they blow

air at just the right moments. And in this way, they have language. They communicate to each other

at about 39 bits per second, which is a pretty good transmission rate and way higher than any

other animal species as far as you, the alien can tell. But there's something

else these human creatures do, something that's very strange. Every once in a while, they do a much

lower frequency, lower bandwidth thing where they make a series of rhythmic, involuntary

contractions of their diaphragm, which causes a sequence of vocalized exhalations,

usually a series of short-repeated vowel sounds like ha or he or ho.

Now, you notice that this typically begins with some language or event that triggers the brain's reward centers and lights

up something about the emotional networks and that triggers the activation of facial muscles,

particularly around the mouth and eyes. And often the human's mouth will open up wide and the

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