PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

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English
Massachusetts Inst of Tec
08 February 2013
Series: The MIT Press
"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.

This evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor seeks to reveal the complex science behind why we crack up.

""A sophisticated analysis . . . written with clarity, good cheer, and, of course, wit."" ―Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works

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."

By:   , , , ,
Imprint:   Massachusetts Inst of Tec
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 19mm
Weight:   499g
ISBN:   9780262518697
ISBN 10:   0262518694
Series:   The MIT Press
Pages:   376
Publication Date:  
Recommended Age:   From 18
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Matthew M. Hurley is currently researching teleology and agency 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) and other books. Reginald B. Adams, Jr., is Associate Professor of Psychology researching emotion and social perception at Penn State University.

Reviews for Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

Science advances by asking new questions, and Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams raise a lot of them.... Some of these questions have been asked before, but no previous attempt succeeds in answering so many so well.-Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Science


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