LAST night I finished a jigsaw puzzle after working on it for six months. I was really pleased with myself, because it said "2-3 years" on the box.
Trying to work out why you did, or didn't, just laugh has taxed some of the world's greatest thinkers. Freud thought that good jokes helped release repressed anxiety, Thomas Hobbes believed they made people feel superior to others, and Immanuel Kant was convinced they generated a sense of surprise. In Inside Jokes Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett and Reginald Adams review these classic theories and present their own thoughts about why we laugh.
Taking an evolutionary and cognitive perspective, they argue that the brain is constantly trying to predict the future by building mental models of the world, and that it is important to actively discover when these models are correct and incorrect. To help this along, the brain rewards us when we ...
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