 a form of brain damage that affects people's ability to process language. They asked participants to look at non-words among a sea of random letters on a screen. When snum-coople came up, everyone laughed. All of the non-words were made up by computer. We didn't have anything to do with it, so we didn't choose that word because it was funny. But the interesting thing is we thought it was funny too, and most people do. Westbury and his team decided to figure out why. They analysed their computer-generated non-words...