Amir is a part-time comedian, full-time neuroscientist based in Southern California who studies the brains of comedians. Specifically, what goes on in the brains of comedians when they invent funny jokes. A study last year published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, funneled 13 professional comedians, nine amateurs and 18 control subjects into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). While getting their brains scanned, subjects were asked to caption New Yorker cartoons with two captions: one funny and one not. Amir and his colleague, vision scientist Irving Biederman, recorded where and when brains lit up while their subjects scribed.

Source: Forbes January 30, 2018 21:22 UTC