Humankind’s urge to seek patterns and ability to recognize them—or even to find them where they don’t exist—is well known and is arguably one of our prime survival skills. When faced with floods of information, be it sensory data, impressions of the personalities of those around us, or facts and figures, it’s easier to recall and use the information if we can fit it into some kind of pattern. A new theory of humor makes what strikes me as a surprising but fascinating connection between our pattern-recognition skills and our capacity for humor.
Science writer Alastair Clarke has come up with a pattern recognition theory of humor that in itself illustrates the ability to look beyond superficial differences in the content of humor to identify an underlying pattern for the phenomenon. The idea appears to be that pattern recognition is such an essential cognitive skill that our brains are wired to reward us for recognizing an unexpected pattern, and the response to such recognition is laughter. By looking beyond the content, which can vary from culture to culture and person to person, the theory applies broadly across the species while still offering a way to explain individual variation. And because pattern recognition is an important aspect of cognition, the theory is linked to other areas of study involving human evolution and cognitive science. You can read more in this article from PhysOrg.com. Thanks to Keith for passing this one along.
