14 DAY TRIAL // Despite tremendous advancements in the field of medicine, experts still have a poor understanding of what happens to the human brain when it enters a vegetative state. A new study by an international collaboration managed to cast some light on this mystery by using humor and jokes.
Researchers in Canada and the United Kingdom worked together for this investigation, which involved analyzing the brain of people listening to jokes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Understanding an unresponsive patient’s state of mind is the primary objective of doctors, nurses, friends and family, but doing so has proven to be extraordinarily difficult. By understanding how the brain processes jokes, experts hope to make a stride forward in understanding states of mind.
FMRI is a medical investigations technique that allows healthcare experts to see which neural circuits exhibit more electric activity (light up) when a certain stimuli is presented to a person. Test subjects for the new experiments were hooked up to the fMRI machines as they listened to jokes.
The overall goal is to create a method or a test capable of determining whether a person in a vegetative state can experience positive emotions or not. The research was led by University of Western Ontario (UWO) Center for Brain and Mind expert Adrian Owen.
For the research, he and his team enlisted the help of 12 volunteers. They were all told jokes as researchers were monitoring their brains. The data were then compared to readings of the brain taken while the same participants were engaged in non-joking dialogs.
“Although our study looked at the brain’s response to jokes, our reasons for doing that were very serious. One of the main questions that families of severely brain injured patients ask us is can they still experience emotions?” Owen explains.
“With the brain imaging technique we've developed here, we can answer that question in a simple and painless way,” he adds. Details of the study appear in the latest issue of the prestigious medical Journal of Neuroscience.
The line of study Owen is engaged in has the potential to address a number of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).