#ThinkfullyHabit: Joke about
Does making a joke feel a bit frivolous? A distraction that should be avoided? Or saved for after work? If so, it may be worth taking a quick step back to look at what the brain is doing when making a joke, and the benefits of doing so.
Great comedians are often great because they push the boundaries by making unanticipated associations between wildly different ideas. In fact, you could argue they are masters at making remote associations meaningful. They are the people who often look for the less obvious and more clever connections that work their way together to get to the punchline and the moment of surprise as people ‘get it’. What is ‘got’ is often the unexpected connection of two ideas coming together.
Connecting two or more ideas together in the form of a joke uses the brain’s core ability to connect ideas in totally new ways to get to novel solutions and help us get out of a thinking rut when we’re stuck.
“It is believed that wit is strongly related to creativity as both involve making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. ”
WHY?
Our brains are built to make connections and find new links.
Part-time comic and full-time neuroscientist Ori Amir is better qualified than most to understand comedians and their brains. Amir is leading the way in a new field of research that looks at what happens inside the brains of comedians when they create jokes. In a study with fellow scientist Irving Biederman**, they took a handful of professional comedians, a handful of amateur comedians and a bunch of non-comedians. They asked each person to individually create captions for a series of New Yorker cartoons and as they did this, they scanned their brains. They found that the brains of the professional comedians showed more activity in the part of the brain which lights up when remote associations converge.
Professional comedians are essentially better at making connections between less obvious connections. It is this same ability to make new connections between less obvious ideas that is valuable for all of us to use when we need to create new solutions and fresher ways forward.
The good news is that just like comedians can get better at creating funnier jokes, so too can we, at making meaningful connections between existing ideas in order to get to new breakthroughs. It’s this ability that can get us out of a rut when we’re stuck and help us get beyond the obvious and toward the more creative ways forward.
You don’t have to be a professional comedian to build this ability. When faced with a challenge, try this:
Jot down your immediate ideas (the ones that come easily to mind within the first minute).
Sit with the challenge. Keep jotting down ideas until you get to the less obvious ones. Try and get to some diverse ideas (give yourself 5 further minutes to pull these ideas to mind. It doesn’t matter about viability at this stage).
Select two of your ideas that seem the most different from each other. Collide them together to form one new single idea. Incorporate elements together or reimagine a new idea altogether by simply being inspired by the starting ideas.
Repeat with two more ideas. Each time see if the new single idea improves on the original ones in any way.
Step back and see if any of the newly formed ideas are worth exploring further.
Alternatively, simply try making up jokes. It’s a great way to get better at making spontaneous connections between ideas and boost the ability to collide ideas together to find new meaning and get to novel outcomes.
While the problem you face may be no laughing matter, a way to get the best out of the brain may be.
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