“Laughter and mirth are not the same thing. I can elicit laughter by electrically stimulating parts of the brain,” the neurologist Richard Restak said the other night, onstage at the Rubin Museum. Beside him, at individual tables, sat three New Yorker cartoonists, Zach Kanin, Paul Noth, and David Sipress; a crowd of cartoon-and-neuroscience enthusiasts, many of them wearing colorful scarves and little glasses, were gathered in the audience. The event, part of the museum’s Brainwave festival, intended to explore the mental processes involved in creating and understanding cartoons; the crowd was eager to laugh—a screen showing E. B. White’s famous line about humor, dissection, a frog, and its innards went over big—but audience members soon found themselves quietly studying a diagram of the brain and hearing a speedy description of its parts and their functions.
“It’s a holistic thing,” Restak said. “You can’t just look at one part of this picture. […]” He described the parts of the brain that help people comprehend such things. “The occipital, that’s where the cartoon is seen. The parietal gives you the ability of seeing the whole picture. And here’s the important part for the cartoon: the temporal pole. It contains perhaps hundreds of thousands of scripts, or schemas…. This is the occipital area; this is the where. In the diagram I showed you, the picture of a kitchen, it gives you the whole totality of it; it tells you what the things are: the dishes, the water, et cetera. The dorsal, which is this part on top, is important for scanning the cartoon, what scripts are being evoked, what’s coming out of the temporal pole. This all occurs before reading the caption.”
He went on to describe the processes involved with language, as well as the mesolimbic reward system. “Funny cartoons activate the system,” he said. “Cartoons are great brain enhancers.”