Laughter as marking insight (in psychedelia?)

14 Nov, 2023

A truism about humor is that certain violations of expectation are funny. This suggests that explanations of humor in terms of hierarchical probabilistic models could be fruitful.¹ For example, different qualities of humor could attend the violation of predictions generated at different hierarchical levels. Or higher precision-weighted priors might generate greater humor when they are violated.

If humor indicates the violation of expectations, understood as top-down prediction signals in a hierarchical probabilistic model,² then lowering the precision-weighting of high-level models,³ which makes it easier to note violations of expectation, should create more opportunities for laughter. Conversely, we might be able to regard certain episodes of laughter as diagnostic -- marking the violation of particularly entrenched expectations, which may be of particular clinical significance.

Violation of expectations seemingly doesn't by itself entail insight. We might say that insight occurs when an expectation is violated and that leads to a revision (or abandonment) of the higher-level model that generated the expectation. It would seem to be too strong to say that laughter always marks insight, and not merely violation of expectation. That is, it seems that we can laugh at a joke while simultaneously understanding that the violation it embodies is not realistic or likely, and accordingly not adjusting the model it violates. For example, we may laugh when the magician pulls 25 feet of handkerchief out of his sleeve, but expect only a single handkerchief the next time we see someone pulling one out of their sleeve. It's not immediately obvious whether there's a qualitative difference in humor that reflects insight and not.