Hidden Brain - Laughter: The Best Medicine

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

If you listen closely to giggles, guffaws, and polite chuckles, you can discern a huge amount of information about people and their relationships with each other. This week, we talk with neuroscientist Sophie Scott about the many shades of laughter, from cackles of delight among close friends to the "canned" mirth of TV laugh tracks.

Hi there, Shankar here. This week we are bringing you an episode from the archives. Maybe more than any other hidden brain episode, this one brings a smile to our faces. And right now, that's something we can all use. Here it is. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantum. When Sophie Scott was about six, she came across her parents doing something very strange. They were rolling around, laughing. In my memory, they were actually on the floor of the living room, absolutely overcome with laughter.

They'd laughed so much they could literally do nothing else but laugh. What had got them laughing was a song. A comedy song about what people were not supposed to do in toilets on trains. It's said to be quite a famous piece of music and it's going to be customers. Well, please refrain from passing more to while the train. We encourage constipation while the train is in the station. And as they remembered more and more of it, they got more and more helpless. Now maybe you're thinking, wait, this song isn't that funny. But we've all been there, right? You're with a friend, they say something ridiculous, and then your laughter triggers their laughter.

Sophie didn't know then that laughter would play a big role in her life, but today she thinks about laughter a lot. She's a neuroscientist who studies the science of laughter. So she often thinks back to that moment with her parents back when she was six. Years and years later my father was mortally ill. I mean he thought he was dying, we all thought he was dying. And the doctors didn't know what to do. And it was all we were just sitting around waiting for something to happen. And my father suddenly said, we've laughed

a lot, haven't we? And I said, yes, we have. And I thought, you know, what's strange thing to say? And it was years later when I was doing a lot more work on laughter. I thought, no, he was right. You know, if you can look back on a life where you've shared a lot of laughter with the people around you, with the people that you care about, those are not times wasted.

Those are the good times, those are the times that really matter and letting yourself value that rather than thinking that it's a silly or trivial waste of everyone's time, you should be spending your time being serious. You know, it's worth taking the laughter seriously. Today, we take laughter seriously. Sophie Skar tells us about the varied shades of laughter. From politeness... ...to discomfort...

Oh! ...to delight. Decoding the meaning of laughter... ...this week on Hidden Brain. Sophie Scott is a neuroscientist at University College London. She studies laughter, how laughter is processed by the brain, and the role it plays in shaping social connection. Sophie, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hi. I want to play you a clip of a very strange sound, Sophie. I can't touch you. I've never heard that before. I'm assuming that is someone laughing, maybe not.

And the point's about laughter is it's more like an animal call than it is like any human speech. So it can be extremely similar between humans and other animals. That's what I wanted to get to. This is a clip of someone laughing uncontrollably, but it's almost as if another creature has taken this person over. You know, all the polish and the culture have gone out the window and you get these strange sounds, it's almost animalistic sounds.

It really is, and we actually, in our normal day-to-day behaviour, humans have a lot of control over the things that we do and the sounds that we make, and actually that's one of the things that's unusual about humans. We don't just react flexibly to our environment, but we can modulate how we respond. A lot of other animals, particularly for vocalizations, their vocalizations are highly reflexive, something happens and they make the sound, something triggers the sound, they make the sound.

And we have a handful of sounds that we make that are from this more kind of reflexive, involuntary route. And it can be quite startling when they come out of you. Sounds like weeping, grunting, and gasp of surprise. A few weeks ago, I was doing a radio recording and unexpectedly we were in a chemistry lab, but there was an explosion. Anyway, let's just drive it in and see.

And on tape, I made a proper kind of surprised, oh, sound. Oh. That was an involuntary vocalization, then. I don't know if you noticed. I was not hoping to make cries. Because I was actually a little bit startled. And I thought, oh, that's really irritating.

I haven't done that. But it was completely involuntary. And love to can be like that as well. It can just feel like it's issuing forth from us. And we can make sounds when we're laughing like that that probably all other things being equal. We probably prefer not to make. It can be extremely, well, very animal.

And it is animal. It's linking us exactly the same way that other animals make sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Sophie asked, what about sounds? I got into love to by being interested in non-verbal vocalization. So something like me going, oh, when I'm surprised, or screaming in terror. And I was working with those because we were interested in how humans recognize emotions and pretty much all the work on that is done with photographs of faces, following in the beautiful work of people like Paul Eckman.

And I was trying to come up with auditory vocal versions of those. So I was trying to steer away from emotional speech because the faces didn't have any verbal content to them. And it was looking at those and then starting to look at different kinds of expressions that may be more positive emotions as well as negative emotions like fear and anger is what actually led me to laughter. So I never set out to study laughter. I was interested in these non-verbal sounds and they can be highly involuntary and in fact when we make them they are much more like animal cause than they are like speech. We don't do any of the fancy detailed movements of the lips and the jaw and the teeth and the tongue that we do when we're talking.

We in fact often the mouth doesn't do much at all. You might pull a facial expression and then you just squeeze air out through the voice books. LAUGHTER Is there evidence that other animals laugh, like humans laugh? There is evidence that other animals laugh, so it's actually very easy to see it in other apes. In fact, Charles Darwin wrote quite a lot about this. Ape laughter is very, very similar to human, well we're apes, you know.

A non-human ape laughter is very similar to human laughter. So if you were to hear a chimp laughing, it looks really like laughter. So you see, it's very, very visibly similar to human laughter. But there is also laughter, like vocalizations that have been described in other animals that aren't apes and are sort of somewhat further removed from us in evolutionary terms. So laughter has been, well laughter like behaviour has been described by Pankskept that the Lake Neuroscientist and he was working with rats. And he noticed that rats make a very distinct vocalization when they're playing with each other,

and they wondered if that was something like laughter, because laughter is strongly associated with play in apes. And so they started tickling the rats, which is when you also find laughter in apes, and the rats make the same sound when they're tickled. They actually got rats in a cage and leaned in and tickled them, literally? Yes, yes, and if you, what they find is that really important stuff, so rats definitely produce this vocalization when they're playing and when they're being tickled. And if they want you to tickle them, they will make the sound. And if they see you come into the lab and you normally tickle them, they make the sounds. These sounds, by the way, are so high-pitched, they normally can't be heard by the human ear.

You have to manipulate the recording to hear how rats respond to tickling. So it really does seem to be a kind of an invitation to players, PankScap called it, but it may not just be a trivial thing. He found that the more you tickle a baby rat, when it's a baby, the more that rat will laugh when it's tickled as an adult, so you can potentiate laughter, the rats tell us. And some more recent work with laughter and rats is shown that if you remove the vocal chords of the voice box from rats, they can't make any vocal sounds. If you let those rats scrap and get it, they'll

interact with other rats, they'll play with other rats, but they are more likely to be bitten if they play with another rat. Because one of the things that the laughter vocalisation is doing when the rats play with each other is it's signifying we're still playing and it helps you manage that interaction because the same behavior that happens during play could just spill over into aggression and if you can't laugh the data suggests from the rats actually that's hard of you to manage. I want to play you one more clip that shows uncontrollable laughter and how strange it is. It's a clip that I

think you're familiar with, Sophie, two BBC commentators are talking about a cricket game. And I'm going to play the clip at a slightly extended version of the clip because it's worth hearing how this develops. It's new exactly what's going to happen. It's right to step over the stumps and just flick to bail with his right hand. You've tried to do the splits, Richard. unfortunately, the inner part of his side must have just removed the bail. He just didn't quite go his leg over. Anyway, he did very well indeed, about 131 minutes and hit three falls.

And then we had Louis play extremely well, but his 47 not out. Agas do stop it. Lawrence always entertaining, bad if a 35. 35 minutes, hit a 4 over the week he was. I was thinking this is a snake zombie. There's Lauren's. See me well. It's a four, I'm the weak human's head. He was actually a tough one. So Sophie, these are professional broadcasters on live radio. It's almost as if something has taken over. So the BBC very specifically gets cross with particularly news broadcasters and sports

broadcasters, people who are doing things live on BBC Radio, the BBC does not like them to laugh or show emotion, they call it breaking, and they knew they were going to get in trouble. They really didn't want to, you know, the situation is they don't want to be laughing. But when it's got, it's clause in you, it will happen. There's something unbelievably powerful about the way laughter can overwhelm our motor system. So it stops us breathing. It stops us talking.

You heard they were completely unable to keep speaking and all they have to do is talk on the radio, it's what they do for a living. And they're laughing, stopping them doing all that in, it just comes along and basically you have to just power through it. And right towards the end, you heard Brian Johnson's voice, you get a time you can't talk at all, other times you're going, you hit a four, I have to keep a set because he's trying to talk through the laughter. That's a very, very powerful thing to happen, actually render someone unable to speak. It's extraordinary. You know, there's two things that you said that jumped out at me. One is that, you know,

so much of this was social. In other words, one of the commentators is telling the other one, please stop because if you don't stop, then I can't stop. And I've had that experience too, where you're laughing uncontrollably and you're telling the person next to you, you need to stop because if you don't stop, I don't have any control. So that's one interesting point. But the second interesting point is, why would evolution create something in us that would essentially cut us off from being able to breathe? It's very interesting. So if you're going back to your point about the social and the contagion, so that in some ways that is a pure example of behavioral contagion because they're both only laughing because the other one is laughing. Interestingly, if they didn't know each other,

they'd be much less likely to share laughter that way because you don't catch laughter from someone you don't know or don't like in the same way as you catch from someone you know and maybe someone you like. So I think that's the other reason because the BBC likes playing that clip now. And I think that's because other reason, because the BBC likes playing that clip now. And I think that's because we know 25 years later that if those two men had hated each other, they would not have been laughing that way. Do you know what I mean?

You're hearing something real actually there. That's a completely unmoderated joy in each other's company that is overruling everything else. You know, I had a friend who visited the United States some time ago and this friend didn't speak English, but she was listening to a program that used to run on public radio called Car Talk. Hello and welcome to Car Talk from National Public Radio with us clicking on the tap at brothers.

They essentially had these two guys talking about car repair, but really it was about the relationship between them and they would be these extended sections of the show where the two of them essentially would be in hysterical laughter. I have the car for you Steve. I'm ready. An El Camino. They just could not stop laughing at each other and at themselves and my friend who did not speak English loved the show. Yeah, you even noticed when you said to a Volvo owner, oh, it's going to be a thousand bucks, they say, oh, only that. Only that.

Because she said there's something about listening to these two people laugh, you know, out of control laughter, that made her happy. There's something that language that laughter communicates that even perhaps goes beyond language. It does, and I think part of it is because, you know, as your friend is experiencing, it is a universal emotion. So wherever you go in the world, you'll encounter laughter, and it has at its heart the same meaning.

It's very truthful, and it's telling you something very positive, and that's always a sort of wonderful thing to encounter. Coming up, what makes us laugh? This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Here's how it usually goes. You're working from home and you call in by conference call for the morning meeting. Welcome, please enter your access. Everyone is happily chatting around the table. But as you sit there on mute, it all sounds very unfunny. You can't believe how much fun people seem to be having. Talking about nothing.

Then someone starts to laugh. Soon everyone's laughing. Except for you, silently listening on the phone, you're not even cracking a smile, forget about laughing. You wonder, when did this conversation become so hilarious? What am I missing? Well, it turns out laughter often isn't about responding to humor. It's an insight based on the work of laughter research of Robert Provin. Here's neuroscientist Sophie Scott. I thought that humor was the main thing that drove laughter.

That's what I called laughter for years when I was first working with it. I called it amusement. I thought, oh, it's an expression of amusement. And then I read Robert Provin's work. And Robert Provin is very clear. Although we think we laugh at humor and jokes, our label, our psychology, which I shared, is that it's a reaction to humor. Most of the laughter

that we produce is purely social in its origins. We laugh on where with other people, we're primed to laugh when we're with other people more than if we're on our own. And other social factors like, do we know those people, do we like those people that will feed into that? I understand some of the earlier research found that almost 80, 90% of the time, you know, laughter followed phrases like, you know, I'll see you later or it was nice meeting you at things that were completely unfunny. Exactly. And it's because we laugh, we laugh to show what we laugh to make and maintain social bonds. I mean, laughter can be a really efficient way of just smoothing over a social interaction with somebody

But when we're with people that we're having a more enduring conversation with That laughter is as much to do with a showing agreement showing understanding showing recognition You know saying go on. Yes. I think I remember this but carry on telling me you know It's got all this kind of nuanced meaning and Provin's even found that at any point in time, the person who laughs most in a conversation is the person who's talking, which really does suggest that it's being used

in a very communicative way. So I want to talk about the social nature of laughter and the context of laugh track. So this is an example of the media in some ways hijacking the way laughter operates in our brains. I want to play you a clip from the TV show Seinfeld. What are you doing?

What? Didn't... Did you just double-dip that chip? Excuse me? You double-dip the chip! Double-dip what are you talking about? You dipped the chip. You took a bite, and you dipped again. LAUGHTER

So what do laugh tracks tell us about the social nature of laughter, Sophie? Well, the interesting story of laugh tracks is that they became a necessity when we started to be able to record and broadcast programs that we were hoping people would find funny because the natural home of laughter is in social settings and in theatrical and performance environments people would be laughing they'd laugh at the theatre they'd laugh at musical they'd laugh at people doing performance stuff, but that was always be a shared experience you were in an audience and you were part of a group of people laughing and as soon as you go down to A shared experience, you were in an audience and you were part of a group of people laughing and as soon as you go down to something that's being broadcast, people don't necessarily

get all those cues. So suddenly they were finding that people weren't necessarily hearing a radio program or sounding funny because there were no cues to help you hear that. So a solution to this problem of people, that's not necessarily finding things funny if there wasn't the sound of laughter but also studio laughter, sometimes being hard to control. Charles Douglas, who was a sound engineer invented, a sort of a laugh box where he had recordings of laughter, which he could mix together and drop in, and then this became very easily controlled because you then have this technique for being able to have exactly as much laughter as you want at the time that you want it without having to worry about the empty silences or uncontrollable studio laughter.

And it's kind of incredible isn't it, which is in some ways the studio is manipulating when you laugh, not with the jokes but with the laugh machine. I suppose in a sense they always were. It is interesting that if you look at... because some programs carried on making a point saying, you know, this is filmed in front of a live studio audience. So, Seinfeld is an example of cheers, friends, they would make it quite a big deal that you knew this thing was being performed in front of an audience. And in fact, friends would, they would do a whole rehearsal with a live audience there and look at when people laughed and go away and reworked lines so you could maximize the relationships and what was being said and when the laughter happened. So they were almost being scientists about it, which is

a manipulative. It's all trying to control the audience laughter because it's considered to be something that makes it sound better. And I think one of the things that's interesting about studio laughter or candl laughter, as people started calling the, you know, an extra recording that's been dropped in, is that one of them started to be very, considered to be very infred, you know, not quite the thing. So we, we came a bit snobbish about Candle After. In the UK, I think, Mash was famously shown without Candle After in the US.

It was. I need my things. Oh, yeah. I packed your toothbrush with jammies and one of your slingshots. You jerk face. That's my garter belt. It has quite a different experience watching the two. I need my things.

Oh yeah, I packed your toothbrush with jammies and one of your slingshots. You jerk face, that's my garter belt. It sort of became a bit of a cultural thing about whether or not you had laughter on it at all so it became more of a fashion for comedy to not need that. So things like the office in the UK didn't have a laughter track of any kind and would have looked down a little bit.

I suspect on programs that felt they needed to. So, you know, it's definitely, it's not just the laughter and whether the laughter is live or canned. It's to do with your view of the sort of programs that might need laughter or do you think they need laughter. You know, are understanding of laugh tracks

gets a bit nuanced. You said a second ago that people can be snobbish about laugh tracks, but people are also in some way snobbish about laughter. We think of one kind of laughter as real and one kind of laughter as fake. So the social greeting laughter we think of as fake and we think about the rolling on the floor helpless with laughter as real. It is social laughter fake and spontaneous laughter real? Well, at one level they are, and you know, it's the case that the spontaneous laughter,

the kind of stuff you cannot stop doing, is definitely different to laughter that at some level is a performative or a communicative element. And I must admit, sometimes I call them real and fake laughter just because it's very easy and people know what I mean but I'm very well aware that when you call it fake you're you are valencing it you're making it sound like it's a bad thing and of course most of the time the vast majority of time it's not a bad thing at all it's a great thing. You recognize the meaning of laughter that a friend gives you or someone gives you it has a positive aspect to it and the fact that somebody's giving you their laughter,

the fact that they're actually choosing to produce that laughter for you, we've found that people actually seem to be marking the communicative laughter. For example, in the UK, it can quite often be very nasal, that sounds to it. You couldn't do that if you were laughing spontaneously, and that really does suggest that people are going out of their way to say, look, I'm giving this to you. This is laughter I'm trying to produce for you. In an interaction where you like the person, you have a good relationship with that person, you know what that means and you take it. I think the situation is where we get upset

by laughter that sounds put on is when we don't know those people. You've ever been on a train with a load of friends who all seem to be sitting there and they're like, ha ha ha ha. And you're like, oh, goodness me, they're all faking that laughter. Because if you're one of the friends, you wouldn't care at all. You know, because you're not part of that group, you are isolated from it and you're hearing the performance of this rather than the warmth. And also if you're, I've tried this isn't science, but if you think about it, there's

some of you know who laughs really inappropriately who hasn't it retating laugh. If you think about that, most people think of someone and I've never found anyone who really likes that person. So actually, so I have a relative who's always, I've always thought, oh, they laugh really inappropriately. And so working with the laughter is I've realized it's because there's nothing inappropriate about their laughter. I don't join in with it because I don't really like them. And it's me with holding my laughter that I'm

experiencing is them doing something wrong. And they're laughter being irritating but it's not it's me that's being different. So that's an interesting insight because what you're saying is that it's your affection or lack of affection that prompts you to see that that laughter is being inappropriate or appropriate or enjoyable. So it's really we think in the conventional way we think someone has an inappropriate laugh, I don't like it, but really you don't like them and that's why you think the laugh is inappropriate. I think so and I think actually I'm this is actually, I mean this is a hypothesis, let's be generous. I don't have any data to back this up, but I think we do that quite a lot with laughter,

because we do the opposite as well. If somebody makes us laugh, we will say, oh, they're hilarious, they're gonna great sense of human, they make us laugh. What they mean is, I really like them. I really like them when I laugh and I'm around them, so that they will know that I like them, and maybe they'll like me too.

You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, but we attribute it to other people. We attribute our laughter to other people or our lack of laughter. We attribute to other people. Laughter in other words can tell us a lot about relationships between people. It's a signaling device. But how are we so good at decoding what laughter means? Sophie had a hunch. She conducted an experiment to show that the brain actually processes different kinds of laughter differently.

She recruited a couple of people to join her on her London campus. She invited them into a strange little hut. Inside this hut was a windowless room, where all the surfaces were covered with wedges of foam, and the only things in the room were a pair of speakers, a chair, and a computer monitor that was bolted to the wall. Once the door was closed, you could finally encounter true silence and experience few people could tolerate for more than a few minutes. Inside this tiny,

joyless chamber, Sophie recorded herself and the two other people laughing. It is a weird little spice because it's perfect for making absolutely beautiful recordings, but it's sort of antithetical to getting people laughing. She used a few tricks. She started slow. We spent a long time warming them up before we tried to put anyone in the Anacote Chamber and on their own to laugh. And then we'd make sure that the person in the Anacot chain,

but when they did, you know, when they were laughing, we kind of throw them in their closer door and start recording. Once she had her beautiful recordings of different kinds of laughter, she played these clips for volunteers as the lay inside a brain scanning machine. Her question, would the brain register the difference between laughter that was polite and laughter that was spontaneous. And what we find is people hear laughter and they start trying to work out what it means.

And if the laughter is spontaneous, you get a different pattern of neural activation and if the laughter is some level being intentionally produced. And in fact that is reflected in the brain activation you see. When the volunteers heard uncontrolled belly laughs, the brain scans showed they focused on the sound of the laughter. But when they heard the recordings of the polite chuckles, the brain scans suggested the volunteers were thinking. They were asking the question, what's really going on here? For Sophie, the experiment confirmed that laughter always means something. It's a

cold, we're always trying to decipher. This might be why most of us can tell the difference between laughter among friends and laughter amongst strangers. It turns out you don't need to know anything about the two people laughing. You don't even need to see them. All you need to do is hear them laugh for one second. Some years ago, the cognitive scientist Greg Bryant at UCLA recorded pairs of friends and pairs of strangers having a conversation. He pulled out all the moments when they laughed and then cut the laughter into tiny bursts

that lasted just a second. He and his colleagues played these tiny little laughter clips for nearly a thousand people from 24 societies all over the world. The researchers asked the volunteers if they could tell whether the people laughing were friends or strangers. Why don't you see if you can tell the difference? Here's one set of three laughs strung together. And here's another.

And here's another. If you guessed that the first clip was strangers and the second clip was friends, you're right. Most people in the study got it right. People all over the world could hear the difference. And it makes sense because we don't laugh with just anybody. You know, laughter is a very good index of how we feel about the people that we're with. And it's not like we're laughing or we're not laughing and that's the only difference. You can have much more kind of performative, you know, if I bump into someone in the street, we both laugh and say, we're okay, I'm not going to stand again. That laughter wasn't very intense because I know what it means.

You know, it was doing its job of sorting out a slightly difficult situation. Whereas with a friend, the laughter is likely to be much warmer because it needs to be, and it can be, and it's an index actually of how those friends feel about each other. So, I think it's interesting that we're so alive to it, like we really notice it. And as I say, I think that's because it's incredibly important, the social signal, and we recognise its emotional meaning. your signal and we recognize this emotional meaning. This emotional meaning is usually positive but not always. When we come back the connection between laughter and power. A quick note before we start this next segment.

It includes a discussion of sexual assault. During the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearing for then-judge Brett Kavanaugh, there was a moment when the role of laughter took center stage. California psychologist Christine Blasiford had accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers in Maryland. She said that Kavanaugh had leaped on top of her and tried to disrupt her at a party while a friend watched. Kavanaugh strenasonously denied the allegations.

The US Senate invited Christine Blassey Ford to testify and Senate something that you cannot forget. Take whatever time you need. Indellable in the hippocampus is the laughter, the the aperious laughter between the two, and they're having fun at my expense. You've never forgotten that laughter. You've never forgotten that laughter. You've never forgotten them laughing at you. They were laughing with each other. And you were the object of the laughter?

I was, you know, underneath one of them, while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another. Sophie, I don't want you to get into the debate of a Kavanaugh, but as a researcher who studies laughter, how do you respond to what Christine Ford told the Senate? Well, it's almost unbearable to listen to, but it's also very recognizable because if you think about laughter as being about making and maintaining social bonds, it has to mean by definition that someone is excluded from that bond. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything. So we normally dwell on the positive side of that look. We're making and maintaining

social bonds and that's great. But if you are excluded from that, you're excluded from that laughter, it's awful. And you're awful because we have a very, very strong understanding of what that means. And there's a lot more to this, there's the situation where something terribly serious is happening from your perspective, something awfully serious is happening, that is being treated as fun by other people. There was a court case in the UK recently where a woman's son had been murdered. And in the court, the two young men who were up for his murder were laughing and joking. And she made a statement precisely about this. They can't even take this seriously.

My son's death and they're going to go to prison for it and they are still laughing. And I can totally understand one that was almost the worst part of what was going on for her. That's like marking how little they care about your situation. So it can be very powerful. That kind of distinction, who is laughing at who, who is got a bound with who and who's being excluded from that can be a very, very marked way of not just excluding somebody from a social group, but actually marking them as inferior. And we have this behavior that's being done done by the people who are more important, the people who have greater status, they can find something fun and enjoyable because they're the ones with the power.

And in some ways laughter is a way to reinforce statuses, isn't it? I mean, I'm thinking about schools, for example, when you think about bullying in schools, one of the things that happens is that a group of kids is laughing at another kid, the kid who is isolated is, recognizes, the experience of being isolated partly by who is laughing at him or her. Absolutely. So again, the same laughter can be incredibly warm, positive, friendly doing all its work for the people within the social group and then be absolutely awful to the person social group and then be absolutely awful to the person who's being not only excluded from it but is the target for the laughter. And it's one of the worst sensations, you know, if you realise not only are people laughing and they're not, you're nothing to do with

it but actually no, hang on, they're laughing and they're laughing at you. It's just sickening, it's a horrible feeling because it's one of the most basic things we care about as humans. We're social primates who we get to hang out with, who talks to us, who's what social network we're part of. That really matters. And when you get this absolutely clear example, not only are you excluded from this group, but they would care so little to have you be part of them, that they would mark you out as being worthy being laughed at. It's almost, it's extraordinary. You can see the power of laughter to bond and the power of laughter to exclude in one of the most famous clips in the news from the last few years.

In 2005, Celebrity TV host Donald Trump was on his way to film an episode of Access Hollywood. He was having a casual conversation with Billy Bush, a younger man known for his easy rapport with celebrities. Trump was talking about the woman he was about to meet. Yeah, that's it. With a gold, I'm going to use some text just in case you start kissing her. Pay attention here to the role that laughter plays in their exchange. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them.

It's like a magnet. Just, I don't even know where. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them but. BEEP. You can do anything.

Sophie Scott argues that powerful people often use laughter as a way to cover up misdeeds and indiscretions. When they are called out on their behavior, they say they are joking, that it was just locker room talks. Yes, the Donald is good. Oh my man! Wait, wait, you got to look at me. Because we aren't very good at understanding that most of our life is nothing to do with humour. We can mistake the fact that people who are laughing in a situation with us aren't laughing

because what we said was funny, they're laughing because they like us and they're part of the same group as us. But if you go away from that, you know, if you were to choose to take from that, oh, I'm hilarious, then you could also choose to use that as your defense for somebody else objecting to what was going on there. And it's a very, very common one. Often I think when people say, or, you know, it was just locker room chats, it was, I was being funny, what they mean is, you know, I almost don't need to justify myself to you. But I think also it can be, it can kind of conflate difficult in a difficult way with this notion of power because it is the case that if you look at strongly hierarchical situations, I think there was work with doctors in the UK with a senior doctor will have a very different social status than the junior doctors in his or her group and there was data showing that the junior doctors would laugh at something the senior doctor said and

the senior doctor would very, very rarely laugh at something the junior doctor said. Now that's normally taken to mean that people find the stuff funnier if it's produced by the senior person. I think it's also, as likely, that the junior people are trying to make themselves liked by the senior person by giving them the laughter. You know, it's something we will actively try and use around people. But it does mean that bosses who might have got used to people laughing at what they say and are not realising it's because of who they are, rather than what they're saying,

may find themselves in a situation where they have said something genuinely offensive. And when they get called on it, they can't, you know, they were all just, it was just banter, just being hilarious, but what they were simply something genuinely offensive and when they get called on it, they can't, you know, they were all those, just, it was just banter, I was just being hilarious, but they were simply straight up offensive. Lafter can also be used by the weak to hold a powerful to account. Historians talk about the role of the court jester, often the only one who could speak truth to power, usually through a laugh. Even in countries with authoritarian regimes, laughter can be a sly way to undermine leaders

and register discontent. I asked Sophie if laughter could be the weapon of the week. It can just be a straightforward weapon, so to be clear, it doesn't only have to be used by the week, but it can work very well. So laughter can be a very good way or rather than just getting angry about somebody, pointing out enormous shortcomings

in their statements or their behavior, in a way that creates people laugh. Sort of, it goes your signalling kind of playful intent and they're also clearly mocking them. You were excluding them and laughing at them. Sometimes there was a UK Prime Minister, John Major, who never really recovered from some journalist spotting when they were on the campaign trail with him, that he tucked his shirt into his underpants. You could sort of see it through his, you know, you got very close to him. And they just became

relentless. Now, by no means, his worst was the prime minister, as a political person, but it was like the thread that was easily pulled out and everything kind of fell from there. It was absolutely relentless and how that was run with. Laughter can also be used to hold other people at a distance. In our current politics, both liberals and conservatives love to mock each other. It's a way of not having to listen to people you disagree with. Laughter becomes a weapon to solidify the distaste that each tribe has for the other.

The elite! Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I'm smarter than they are. I'm smarter than they are. I'm richer than they are. Because it turns out the name Trump was not always his family's name. One biographer found that oppressive ancestor had changed it from, and this is true, DRUNP. Yes! It's grouping writ large. You know, these big social groups, you can sort of see it in the UK around Brexit with both sides trying to paint the other is ridiculous

and to better or less, you know, success. Be funny about it. Um, you're using it to mark the commonality with the group of people you share something with as well as your difference from and sort of separation from and the ridiculousness of that other group. We've talked a lot about your research and your ideas, but I understand that for the past a few years you've also been a stand up comedian yourself. Do you remember how you felt the first time you got a really big laugh?

I can tell you how I felt before then, I don't think I've ever been so nervous. Not since my exam at when I was at school, I'm literally at one point locked myself in the toilet, thought I could just stay in here, you know, I don't have to come out ever. And the first time I got a laugh, and it wasn't a laugh I was expecting, it wasn't on a line, I wasn't on a line that I thought was funny, I thought, oh, it's all, you know, you know, I can see light at the end of the tunnel, you know, I'm gonna be able to get through this. But the bit I really remember,

so when you finish the, you know, stand up normally in the UK, there's an MC who comes on and claps the nut, you know, and the guy came, I left the station, this guy came out and went, ladies and gentlemen, so big! And everyone was clapping and I was like, yes! Okay! Okay! this guy came out and went, ladies and gentlemen, so big! And everyone's clapping and I was like, yes! So big!

People can carry on doing this for as long as they wish to. This is pure hits of dopamine to my nucleus of coverage, you know. Perfect. And then really my next coherent thought was, I want to do that again and I want to do it better. I want to learn how to do this. It's very hard to say this without sounding like you, I don't know, the undead, but I like brains.

And I work with brains. And I'm very lucky because I get to use a technique called Mae'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gweithio'r gweithio, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

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And it was really nasty. It was really, really unpleasant. And I turn that into a stand-up act. a'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffyni'r ffynio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn gweithio yn These fear sciences. They'll be laughing on the other side of their faces. Thank you very much. Sophie Scott is a neuroscientist at University College London, where she studies the science of laughter. Sophie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed myself. This episode was produced by Laura Correll, edited by Tara Boyle and Kimmela Vargas Restrepo.

Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen, Thomas Liu and Pathshah. Our unsung hero this week is my colleague Steven Thompson, who works at NPR Music. Steven sends out periodic notes announcing guests who are going to perform at the Tani Desk concert series at NPR and his notes are invariably filled with funny observations about his boss, his green Bay Packers football team, and sunsets. These emails, like the one about eating between 15 and 25 bowls of cereal one Friday night, do something we could all use more of in our lives. They make us laugh.

You can hear Stephen for yourself on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. I'm Shankar Vita and them. See you next week. Because actually most people don't really like being tickled. I was doing a talk at the Raw Society a few years ago. This very elderly, very distinguished member of the Royal Society, fellow of the Royal Society went, I love to be tickles. LAUGHTER I am not going to tickle you, sir. That's not most people's reaction. Different show, different show, Sophie.

Different show.