Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind - Hardcover

Hurley, Matthew M.; Dennett, Daniel C.; Adams, Reginald B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 026201582X ISBN 13: 9780262015820

Verlag: MIT Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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. Hurley, Dennett, and Adams describe the evolutionary reasons for humor and for laughter. They examine why humor is pleasurable and desirable, often sharable, surprising, playful, nonsensical, and insightful. They give an "inside," mechanistic account of the cognitive and emotional apparatus that provides the humor experience, and they use it to explain the wide variety of things that are found to be humorous. They also provide a preliminary sketch of an emotional and computational model of humor, arguing that (Star Trek's Data to the contrary) any truly intelligent computational agent could not be engineered without humor.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 026201582X
• ISBN 13: 9780262015820
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar