Funny Business

This is interesting:

Women and men are often perceived as having differences in their senses of humour but, until now, there had been no neurological evidence for such suspicions. The new brain scanning study showed that although men and women tended to agree on which of the single-panel cartoons they were shown were funny, they processed the humour differently in their brains.
...
[M]en and women shared many similarities: they mostly found the same cartoons funny or unfunny; they activated the same semantic and language processing regions of the brain; and the response times for finding a cartoon funny was the same.

However, they were surprised to find differences in the part of the brain known as the reward centre. The nucleus accumbens, part of the mesolimbic reward centre, is a dopamine-rich area that is most strongly activated when a reward – in this case, a funny joke – is unexpected.

The team discovered that when women found a cartoon funny, their reward centre was more active than for men, suggesting the females’ expectation of being amused was lower. But when men found a cartoon unfunny, they showed de-activation in their reward centre, suggesting disappointment.

Azim suggests the differences may be the result of the genders having different ways of processing emotional information, and that better understanding of these differences could provide insight into mental illnesses that affect one gender more than the other, such as depression.

But what's keeping neurologists from that all-important "Three Stooges" study?