IT SURE WOULD be a time-saver if it did. Imagine how much more productive you’d be if you had someone else to laugh at your own jokes for you.
That would free up at least an hour a week for the typical middle-aged dad, who, despite his invariably generous self-appraisal, is deemed by his wife and children to be roughly as humorous as Lenin’s funeral. Ask us how we know.
If we may recast your question slightly, what’s actually at issue here is whether a person’s sense of humor is wholly innate, or whether its development is influenced by external factors. Prevailing scientific thinking suggests that, like most personality traits, sense of humor is the product of both nature and nurture. “There’s almost nothing in the emotion space I can think of that isn’t deeply the result of an interaction between genes and environments,” says Robert W. Levenson, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who studies emotions and their genetic basis.
While there is no single region of the brain that produces humor, Levenson says, in order to be funny—or to perceive things as funny—your brain has to process information quickly. “You need to be able to step outside of yourself and take in the context,” he says—an ability that he believes partly depends on the genetic characteristics that shape our brains. Then again, what we find humorous is also a function of the experiences we’ve had. “The clone might have that brain, but might not have the experiences that provided the material that the brain would process to produce humorous observations,” Levenson says.
This story is from the May 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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This story is from the May 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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