In the near future I’ll post a student-led series on humor and neuroanthropology, building off work we’ve done on breast cancer and humor over the past two years. So this had me poking around the web this morning, where I found this video on Jaak Panksepp and his laughing rats.
Panksepp sees laughter as having mammalian roots (Physiology and Behavior pdf), and as being grounded in affective neuroscience (the title of his book). As this informative interview on his intellectual career relates, he has built a bottom-up approach to understanding the brain and mind.
By coincidence, today I also happened to read an excerpt from Cynthia Willett’s forthcoming book, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom.
Neuroanthropology 