About the Authors

Matthew M. Hurley is a research associate at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University where he works with Douglas Hofstadter. He splits his life between his university office in Indiana and his home, with his wife, in Hong Kong. He earned his B.A. in computer science and cognitive science at Tufts University in Medford, MA, not far from where he grew up in Reading, MA.

Inside Jokes is his first book and first publication. His current research focuses on the role that emotion plays in intelligence, creativity and will.

He is also a mountaineer well into pursuit of the seven-summits challenge and an avid yachtsman.

You can find more information about Matthew at his website.

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics and the American University of Beirut.

He spends most of his summers on his farm in Maine, where he harvests blueberries, hay and timber, and makes Normandy cider wine, when he is not sailing. He is also a sculptor.

You can find more information about Dan at his website.

Reginald B. Adams Jr. is an assistant professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. He recently published an edited volume, The Science of Social Vision (Oxford, 2010), which heralds a newly burgeoning field of inquiry at the intersection of social psychology and visual cognition. He completed his B.A. in psychology at the University of Virginia in his hometown of Charlottesville, and completed his Ph.D. in experimental social psychology at Dartmouth College. He currently lives in Central Pennsylvania with his wife and two children. He has authored nearly 50 scholarly publications focused on human emotion and nonverbal communication.

Reg has cultivated a major interest in humor over the years. He teaches a course on humor, The Laughing Animal, designed to explore the origins of this uniquely human phenomenon from phylogenic and ontogenetic perspectives. This course applies insights gained from examining humor to broader research themes including creativity, attribution theories, and emotion theories.

You can find more information about Reg at his website.