When doctors electrically stimulate certain spots in the brains of awake epilepsy patients, some people burst out laughing while feeling no amusement at all. Stimulate a different set of regions, and the laughter arrives with genuine euphoria.
That split sits at the center of a review published June 23, 2026, in Trends in Neurosciences, in which Fausto Caruana of the National Research Council of Italy and Sophie Scott of University College London propose that the brain runs laughter on two parallel systems. The idea that laughing and feeling amused can come apart is not just a lab curiosity. Neurologists have described patients whose humor broke down in strange ways since the late 1880s, and those cases look a little less mysterious in light of the new framework.
