That Wonderful Thing

"That awful thing, a woman's memory!"—Oscar Wilde

As if research done on singer Shania ‘shunno’ Twain’s (see: http://chowk.com/ilogs/75595/30139) perfect facial features was not enough—a study conducted at Stanford University in California has found that women use more parts of the brain than men to process jokes and have less expectation that they will find them funny. Probably this was what the famous wit meant when he wrote the aphorism in ‘A Picture Of Dorian Gray’ and which I have placed at the head of this article.

Even before I read Oscar Wilde, I always suspected there were more moving parts inside a female head than my own—science has now caught up with my suspiscions. A keen observor of both natural and supernatural phenomena, looking at women convinced me long ago that her active imagination never slept and that she could even recall in an instant—given half a chance—not the virtues but the sins committed by her man’s family, reaching back at least seven generations.

More moving parts mean more maintenance, spares related problems and factory recalls, just as fewer parts may result in greater forward momentum, and which explains why the minds of most men resemble a speeding steam engine heading in one direction on a narrow gauge railway track.

I certainly have no objection if women take whatever extra time it takes to understand my jokes but one thing is certain, they derive infinitely more pleasure of the prohinted bore from a decent punch line—or rather what is in between the lines—compared to their male counterparts. This has now been confirmed by the new study at Stanford.

The research, aimed at unravelling the mystery of how our sense of humour works, suggests that women prefer more sophisticated humour and use more complex brain functions to process it. In my most private moments I do rejoice in the fact that the authorities have not imposed a tax after declaring women baby production units that employ no staff to run their minds.

The Stanford research says that women participants of the study took slightly longer to react to jokes that were funny, but enjoyed the punchlines more—although the time difference was marginal.

Now how can one gauge the level of sophistication of female circuitry? I for one have neither measured the facial features of my female loved ones with a vernier caliper nor measured with a stopwatch how many extra nanoseconds they take to laugh either at me or with me.

Looking at any female loved one within the family, I always wonder why God put more wiring inside a head that appears physically smaller than my own—my own being well-proportioned and preganant with ideas. Of course, the most important women in my life tell me all the time—usually when I am asleep and can hear no more—that I am well-mannered and extremely witty.

“Men show more activation of nucleus accumbens (the part of the brain involved in reward and pleasure), indicating they expect to get the joke but when they don’t they get more depressed,” said one of the researchers.

Nucleus accumbens what?