When Patrick Yitzchak was in grad school, he studied a mind control parasite that gets into a mouse brain and makes it lose its fear and gain an attraction to a cat. And what I found so beautiful about this paper when I came across it was it seemed as if in the same way that this parasite kind of took over free will or took over the will of the organism to kind of shape or change or alter its preferences. So people here in this room are laughing in response to earlier, even in the audience, people have laughed in response to the retelling of the story of her laughing,. which means in 1997, it's like pushed a button. People just poked around and
While operating on a 16-year-old girl who suffered from severe seizures, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried stumbled on the region of the brain that makes us laugh. To neuroscientist Patrick House, Fried's ability to produce laughter surgically raises deep and disconcerting questions about how the brain works. Join Fried, House, and EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a live broadcast from Jerusalem's Shalem College that is a sequel of sorts to House's earlier appearance on EconTalk. House and Fried discuss the mystery of consciousness and try to square the biological bases for emotions with the circle of our humanity.