Cases of brain damage leading to 'dad joke addiction' reported
Many people have had the experience of coming up with a silly pun or a stupid joke but never saying it out loud. ScienceAlert, a science news site, has compiled a list of literature reporting on people who have developed '
This Rare Neurological Condition Can Cause an Addiction to Jokes : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-rare-neurological-condition-can-cause-an-addiction-to-jokes
A case report published in 2016 by doctors at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles described the case of a 69-year-old man who developed a compulsive joke habit after suffering a stroke.
The man had suffered an unexplained subarachnoid hemorrhage 10 years before his visit to the hospital, which caused his personality to change drastically. His changes included a tendency to recycle things, rummaging through trash cans looking for things that were still usable, and a tendency to hold young women for longer than they should have. But what particularly bothered his family was his compulsive urge to tell jokes.
The man, who wanted to make up jokes day and night, would wake his wife up every night laughing out loud to tell her jokes, so his wife got so fed up that she asked him to write down all the jokes he came up with in a notebook.
'The patient brought with him a 50-page joke book filled with jokes, most of which were sexual or scatological in nature or simply silly puns,' the doctors said.
One example of a pun that the doctors plucked from the men's book of jokes and included in their case reports was: 'What did the proctologist tell the therapist?' and 'I deal with assholes all day.'
After a medical examination, the man was diagnosed with 'Witzelsucht,' a set of symptoms characterized by a constant desire for humor. Witzelsucht is a combination of the German words 'Witzeln' (to joke) and 'Sucht' (addiction). In Japanese, it is called 'fuzake-sho.'
Humor syndrome was first described by German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim in 1890. Oppenheim discovered that damage to the right frontal lobe, caused by trauma or illness, led to excessive humor in patients.
Often, the jokes that people with prank disorder come up with are socially inappropriate, poorly timed, vulgar, or offensive, but they are unaware of this and enjoy the humor of their own jokes.
Later, in 1929, German neurosurgeon Otfried Forster reported that while performing brain surgery on conscious patients, stimulation of specific areas in the brain caused them to suddenly utter puns in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German.
This has allowed neuroscientists to narrow down the areas of the brain associated with humor in detail, but decades later, we still don't know how common it is or how to treat it, and there aren't many case studies of the condition.
Dr. Mario Mendez, the doctor who treated the 69-year-old man, is one of the most documented experts on the condition, and in another case report he presented the case of a 63-year-old man who had suffered brain damage from a gunshot wound.
The man, who suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, was shot by police and received multiple bullets in the head after he started shooting wildly. After miraculously surviving through surgery, the man experienced a personality change filled with joy and happiness, and he no longer needed treatment for depression or suicidal thoughts.
The man, who had gone from being depressed to being cheerful, began entertaining those around him by frequently cracking jokes and puns, as well as his signature routine of breathing with his mouth closed to inflate the hollow part of his head, so he was diagnosed with pranksterism.
'Upon examination, the patient was observed to have a nonchalant demeanor, to be frequently making jokes, puns and light-hearted remarks to tease others and generally not to take his situation seriously,' the doctors wrote in their case report. 'He also frequently inflated the area of his skull defect to the surprise and amusement of those around him.'
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