Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Hurley, Matthew M.

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780262518697)

Vendor: Matthew M. Hurley
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$40.00
$40.00
$40.00
Subtotal: $40.00
Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Hurley, Matthew M.

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

$40.00
Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Hurley, Matthew M.

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

$40.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x
This evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor seeks to reveal the complex science behind why we crack up.

"A sophisticated analysis . . . written with clarity, good cheer, and, of course, wit." ―Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works

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.

Author: Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams
ISBN-10: 0262518694
ISBN-13: 9780262518697
Publisher: MIT Press
Language: English
Published: 02/08/2013
Pages: 374
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 8.64h x 5.81w x 0.76d
By Matthew M. Hurley
By Matthew M. Hurley
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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.

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