Items related to Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind...

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (The MIT Press) - Softcover

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

 
9780262518697: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (The MIT Press)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0262518694 ISBN 13: 9780262518697
Publisher: MIT Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

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About the Authors

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 Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

Reginald B. Adams, Jr., is Associate Professor of Psychology researching emotion and social perception at Penn State University.

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Publisher
MIT Press
Publication date
2013
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0262518694
ISBN 13 
9780262518697
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
359