Your Brain On Comedy

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* 1. In a 2017 study conducted by USC Neuroscience department how comedy effects the brain : "The results showed that two regions of the brain were activated when the participants came up with jokes — the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporal association regions. However, the regions activated were different depending on the person’s level of expertise.
“What we found is that the more experienced someone is at doing comedy, the more activation we saw in the temporal lobe,” said USC doctoral student Ori Amir, who led the study with Irving Biederman, professor of psychology and computer science. The temporal lobe receives sensory information and is the region of the brain key to comprehending speech and visual cognition. It’s also where abstract information, semantic information and remote associations meaningfully converge.
In contrast, the amateur comedians and non-comedians relied on their prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions like planning complex cognitive behavior and decision-making.

True

False

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* 2. A 2018 study regarding the the beneficial effects of laughter therapy on elderly patients found that "Laughter therapy intervention resulted in a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure and heart rate, accompanied by a significant increase in plasma concentration of serotonin and a significant decrease in salivary concentration of chromogranin.( Nurs Open. 2018 Jul 18;6(1):93-99. doi: 10.1002/nop2.190. eCollection 2019 Jan.
Beneficial effect of laughter therapy on physiological and psychological function in elders.)

True

False

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