Here’s an interesting short article about the effect that laughter has on vision. It seems that during normal vision, your brain does this thing called “binocular rivalry” where it switches back and forth between the images received from either eye. One eye will be dominant, and then it will switch. The phenomenon is more clearly illustrated by what they call a “Necker Cube” which is that optical illusion where you draw a hollow cube, and the image seems to flip-flop back and forth.

But when you laugh, some kind of brain-state change occurs so that binocular rivalry stops, and all you see is the flat 2-D image, rather than this flip-fliopping cube. The researcher quoted in this article claims that when you laugh then, your brain is striking some kind of balance between using both hemispheres at the same time.

They don’t really explore the implications of this very much, but it seems like a really important piece of research. It seems like it could be extended beyond sensory data, into things like education, and realizing the importance of humor in unifying the brain, and all kinds of other shit like that. It also reminds me of this one time I got really stoned and I became very conscious of the fact that when you laugh, you take in much more oxygen than you do normally, and that this sort of lights up your whole body and mental processes. I’m kind of curious to see what other kinds of research has been done about laughter and the physiological & neurological effects. It seems pretty interesting and worthwhile.

There’s a link to another stupider study at the bottom of this page, about a study that claims that old people aren’t as good at getting jokes as younger people. This is a dumb line of research, I think.

In research designed to probe humour comprehension and appreciation, Shammi and Stuss found that while older people were just as capable as younger people of “getting” wordplay jokes, they were not as good at recognising funny cartoons, or identifying funny punch lines to jokes. Nevertheless, when the older people did get a joke, they responded appropriately, showing they were still capable of appreciating jokes they understood.

Maybe they were just showing them stupid cartoons or giving them bad jokes. I mean, like can you really scientifically measure a sense of humor? It seems almost worthless to try for something so subjective. They go into talking about how they administered a series of “humor tests” - I mean, these are scientists. I’m sure they picked out shit that just wasn’t funny, or else had that weird science nerd sense of humor.