The ‘Absurd signs’ Facebook group is on a mission to share “Absurd and funny signs from around the globe,” as their own description reads; and they might be doing all of us a favor, it seems.
“I think that fun can have a very positive effect on our mental state, thus, I think that funny signs could have a very positive effect on our mental health,” professor of computer science at Dalhousie University and expert in cognitive neuroscience Thomas Trappenberg told Bored Panda in a recent interview.
Some of these signs are not only fun but unexpected, too, and, according to Dr. Trappenberg, surprise is a big factor when it comes to entertainment. “It is well known that music composers often play with the contrast of anticipation and surprise,” he pointed out. “Eliciting surprise is also a common factor in visual art.”
Prof. Trappenberg expanded on how surprising things affect our brain: “Cognitive neuroscience has established that humans have two complementary ways of making decisions. One is mainly subconscious and highly automated or habitual. Many of our actions in daily life are guided by this.
“In contrast, when something unexpected happens that needs new solutions, it grabs our attention and evokes our conscious decision system that is more deliberative and is trying to find causal relations. Funny signs can trigger grabbing our attention and evoke our conscious deliberative system.”
Professor of linguistics at University of Nevada and the author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, Valerie Fridland, seconded the idea that unexpected things tend to grab our attention. “Whenever we encounter something incongruent with our expectations, it increases our attention to it, both in terms of consciously standing out more, but also when there is mismatch or incongruence, cognitive processing seems to ramp up.
“In other words, we devote more processing effort to something new and unexpected than we do to the same old. This likely makes us more aware of our reaction to it—possibly making it even more funny than it would be in a more expected place,” she told Bored Panda.
Because of the way signs grab our attention and evoke our conscious deliberative system, they can be a double-edged sword. “The grabbing of attention away from some other task could be problematic when, for example, driving, but evoking our deliberative system can also be important, for example, for learning new things,” Prof. Thomas Trappenberg pointed out.
Valerie Fridland added that from the perspective of a business or organization, the unexpectedness of certain signs can help people remember the business or experiences more. “If it makes you laugh or feel better, especially when you were expecting to be serious, what is not to love about it?” she added.
In an interview with Bored Panda, the expert in cognitive neuroscience, Prof. Trappenberg, suggested that the process of comprehending jokes doesn't differ much depending on whether they’re visual or textual; it’s pretty safe to say that both graphic and textual signs can be equally amusing in some cases.
“Triggering surprises in the visual or textual domain takes, of course, different sensory forms, but ultimately surprise is triggered by the difference of the top-down prediction by the brain and the bottom-up sensory input. Thus, comprehension of jokes is rooted in the more abstract understanding of the world and should hence have common aspects visually or textually,” he explained.
Professor of linguistics, sociolinguist and author Valerie Fridland suggested there might be some differences in the way we comprehend things we hear and and the ones we read. “For one thing, there is generally a more stuffy feel to a written phrase, since writing is associated with more scholarly and formal behaviors, so, to have silliness there increases its effect,” she pointed out. “Also, many of the jokes rely on the way things are spelled, not pronounced, so it is much easier to get the joke if it is written.”
There are many factors that determine how entertaining we find puns, wordplay, and other linguistic conundrums. “Generally in researching the language of humor, researchers call out two different types,” Prof. Fridland told Bored Panda. “One is humor that draws upon simply the meaning of what is being said; if we are playing on the meaning of a word itself (e.g., like making a joke about ‘I thought elephants never forget’ in a context where a republican forgot something), linguists call it referential humor. If it involves some play on the sound or form of the word itself—like a wine bar making a joke about ‘get your whine on’—then it is referred to as verbal humor.”