There’s all sorts of mysteries about consciousness. One of these is the origin of humor. It’s often touted as one of the many things that a materialist theory of consciousness, that our minds are just an emergent effect of our brains, will always struggle to explain.
I think I get it.
Think of your cerebral cortex as a big pyramidal hierarchy. At the base of the hierarchy are your senses and motor systems. At the top is the brain structure which encodes long term memories, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus. The whole pyramid is built out of structures called neocortical columns, that sit around analyzing patterns, classifying them, and feeding the information up the hierarchy, up toward the hippocampus. The higher you go, the more abstract the information the neocortical columns are dealing with. Information also flows down the hierarchy, so patterns discovered in one part of the system can be relayed to others. The only information that gets to the top of the hierarchy are things that weren’t caught at any other level. They are stored there, then programmed into all levels of your brain, so the system can know what it doesn’t know and use that to aid future pattern detection activities.
The important part in humor, at least the kind of humor that makes a bizarre association that you find amusing, is that downwards propigation from the higher association centers to the lower, more sensory and motor-related parts of the brain. I believe humor arises from a pattern the higher level association centers can recognize, but one which when propogating down the hierarchy raises a “What the hell?” from the lower level parts of the cortex.
My take is that the lower parts found patterns they thought they could recognize and passed their conclusions upward to the association centers. And the association centers balked: “Haha, you thought you could recognize the pattern, but you didn’t! Here’s the actual pattern”
A pattern which the lower level parts get incredibly confused about.
I think the simultaneous sense of understanding and confusion, happening in different parts of the brain, and the cross-chatter between them is what gives rise to humor.
Just a speculation.
