A study on Aphasia leads to a theory of what makes us laugh

Quantifying humor has been a tough challenge for scientists. Why do we find some silly things funny? Dr. Chris Westbury, a psychology professor at University of Alberta, has recently shed some light on that question.

He didn’t set on from the start to study laughter, he was actually studying Aphasia. It is a very common in studying of Aphasia to give participants to read non-existent words. This is in part because scientists want to focus on the production of sounds and syllables rather than the semantic meaning of the words. So Dr. Westbury was