Sunday, December 11, 2016

Here’s What Happens in Your Brain When You Hear a Pun

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Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images
Why do spiders make great baseball players?
Because they know how to catch flies.
 
Sorry, sorry, I know that was bad. And that puns, in general, are among the most despised forms of humor. But pun-haters, bear with me — there’s a reason I made you suffer through the last couple sentences: In the split second between when you read the pun and when you rolled your eyes, something pretty cool was happening in your brain.
As writer Roni Jacobson explained in a recent Scientific American column, new research published earlier this year in the journal Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, sheds some light on how our minds process the complexities of wordplay.

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