Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind - Couverture souple

Hurley, Matthew M.; Dennett, Daniel C.; Adams Jr., Reginald B.

 
9780262518697: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0262518694 ISBN 13 : 9780262518697
Editeur : MIT Press, 2013

Synopsis

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the science behind why we crack up—“one of the most complex and sophisticated humor theories ever presented” (Evolutionary Psychology).
 
Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons?
 
In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

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À propos de l?auteur

Matthew M. Hurley is currently researching teleology and agency at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

Reginald B. Adams, Jr., is Associate Professor of Psychology researching emotion and social perception at Penn State University.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
MIT Press
Date d'édition
2013
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0262518694
ISBN 13 
9780262518697
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
359
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780262015820: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  026201582X ISBN 13 :  9780262015820
Editeur : The MIT Press, 2011
Couverture rigide