I studied everything from how visual processing happens in the brain, to, you know, moral processing, moral cognition. That is a college in the US in California, not far from Los Angeles. In episode three, we chat to a researcher and amateur stand up comedian who explores what's happening in our neural networks when we're trying to be funny. I’m Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal Nature Neuroscience, and in this series we speak to brain scientists all over the world about their life, their research, their collaborations, and the impact of their work. Hello and welcome to Tales from the Synapse, a podcast brought to you by Nature’s careers section in partnership with Nature Neuroscience. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research. This is the third episode of T ales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series with a focus on brain science, produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. “Then you do some original research and it all culminates in a dissertation defence in which you present your work in front of five important neuroscientists. “It’s going to take seven years, the first five-and-a-half-years to work very hard on developing a silly accent,” he adds. So I’m refraining from making any such jokes,” he tells his audience.Īmir’s stand-up act also includes anecdotes about life as a PhD student. “I’m afraid that if I make any jokes about artificial intelligence, I will get in trouble in the future. Amir’s research also investigates attempts to use artificial intelligence to generate humour. His interest in this was triggered after realising there were around 20 studies examining brain activity when we are enjoying comedy, he says, but nothing about the creative process involved in being funny. That's probably the closest most of us will ever come to understanding photons.After a mostly miserable childhood in the small Israeli village of Tel Aviv (his words), Ori Amir moved to the US, where he gained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and launched a second career as a stand-up comedian.Īmir is now a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he researches what happens in our neural networks when we are trying to be funny. I object to this on the grounds that photons experience no time within their own reference frame and therefore could not possibly respond. This joke has several variations, but the best response to the joke was in the Reddit thread by user palordrolap: Meanwhile the phrase "traveling light" indicates traveling without much (if any) luggage. Whatever you want to call a photon, it involves light and is almost always moving. Light is really complex (just ask Albert Einstein, who in 1921 won the Noble Prize partly for his explanation of the photoelectric effect), but that's the key term here you need to know to understand the joke: Light. Here's why it's funny: Very smart people disagree on what exactly a photon is - some call it a " particle of light" while others say it's not because it behaves like a wave. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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