Ideas - Why laughter is so contagious

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

If you want to hear what a laughing rat sounds like this podcast is for you. From why the sound of laughter triggers us to join in, to how a laughing yoga class starts, to the difference between AHA and HAHA in science, IDEAS contributor Peter Brown takes us on a joyride to reveal the mystery of laugher. Will this podcast make you laugh? Most likely. But it's better than catching a cold. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 4, 2020.

What's that noise? I don't know. I get that checked. Quickly. Yeah, good point. Point S, Tires and Auto Service. You think Point S has good deals on tires? Definitely.

What makes you say that? This. Until May 31st, get up to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point S.ca.com. Good point. Point S, tires, and auto service. This is a CBC podcast. This is Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.

Now get ready for 10 seconds of pure joy. It's just fantastic. But what exactly is that? That is a video of a baby laughing at an ostrich, and it always makes me laugh. And it's also a strange human behavior. A big belly laugh is like a scream, and people throw their head back. Imagine you were an alien and you came to Earth and you heard these sounds. This is ideas contributor Peter Brown.

You'd hear these weird honking noises. You'd see people gasping and then falling over. And then others would start making the same honking noises and falling over. You'd have to wonder, what is this behavior? What's the point of it? You don't care what you look like. You don't care what you sound like. There's no control.

Peter Brown's documentary is called Laughing Matters, the Science of Laughter. And when you get right down to it, the biggest question is, what is a laugh? Your face is contorted. I think if you saw it, to be honest, and you muted the audio, it might look terrifying, though. So if someone's really laughing hard, they can barely make a noise sometimes. You start to get spasm sounds when you get these big movements and intercostal muscles run into each other. and you just get a kind of sound. You get little whistles. You get squeaks.

You can get snorts as people are desperately trying to pull air back in. As long as there's a ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, we hear laughter. But laughter itself is a lot more than that or can be. Sophie Scott directs the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She spent most of her career studying laughter and what it's, communicates? First of all, it's a nonverbal emotional expression. And those that are interesting because they are things we make when we are in stronger emotional conditions than words are good enough for. So if you are properly scared, you'll scream. If you are really, really upset by

something, you will probably start sobbing. And in terms of the emotion that's behind laughter, I think it's a particular kind of social joy. Social joy. I hadn't thought of laughter that way. It's a joy that you find when you are with people with whom you like, who you love, who you want to play with, who you want to share positive emotions with. It can happen when you're on your own, but it pretty much mostly happens in the company of others. So it's a sort of social joyfulness. The social joyfulness, Sophie Scott is talking about, appears to be universal.

It transcends language and culture. As long as you have the sort of shape of the sound of laughter, people hear laughter. It's quite extraordinary. And it was the only positive emotion that we tested that was cross-culturally recognised. So my PhD student, Disa Sota, there's several trips to Namibia where she was looking at the recognition of emotion from the voice and to what extent any of this might be cross-culturally meaningful. And again, laughter was the only positive sound that fell out. And all of these things started to make us think, hang on, this is quite unusual. We've got something different here.

And I always say that laughter was hiding in plain sight. It was basically saying, look, I'm a very different thing. You haven't seen anything like me before. What's weird about laughter is it doesn't seem to have any survival benefit at all. In fact, it seems to be disabling. When you laugh, for example, you lose muscle tension in your upper body. So you can't wrestle or throw somebody to the ground or even throw a rock. ha ha ha has air running in and out of your lungs really quickly in your diaphragm and all of this

stuff seems utterly inappropriate. John Morel is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He's written six books about laughter and humor. Say it's 20,000 years ago and we all live in caves. Cave A has people who haven't developed humor yet. And Cape B has these people who can laugh about things. Well, wouldn't Cave A be better off than Cave B? People who would, for example, see some wild animal and laugh about it, how could it be of value?

He raises a great question. Why would we evolve a behavior that leaves us unable to stand or even breathe? The first clue is found in the sound of our laughter. That laughter contains a link in an evolutionary chain that goes back millions of years, according to Marina Davila Ross. Sometimes when I listen to a human laugh, if I identify them with a specific ape, I could say somebody laughs a little bit more like a gorilla

or somebody laughs more like an orangutan. Dr. Davila Ross is a comparative psychologist. Her signature achievement was proving that there's a direct line from this, orangutan laugh, to this. And yes, she says, that apes laugh. Not that they do something like laughter. They actually laugh. We are quite convinced that great apes laugh because we examined all of the great

apes and we treated the acoustic data like a geneticist which treat genetic data in order to make conclusions about evolutionary relationships. Dr. Davila Ross traced our laughter backwards about 13 million years to a time before humans, before. or even the Great Apes. And the research she conducted is called phylogenetic analysis. Phylogeny is the study of evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic analysis examines the features of a species to see how they're related in the evolutionary progression.

And by conducting specific analysis that lead to evolutionary trees, we can assess with, for instance, acoustic data or typically genetic data, how species relate to one another. I collected long calls of male orangutans throughout Borneo and also obtained recordings from my colleagues in Sumatra and from Borneo. And we used them the acoustic data in order to reconstruct evolutionary relationships. Her research into the sonic properties of lab, began with tickling.

She asked animal keepers all over the world to tickle the great apes in their care. And she had human mothers tickle their babies. Then she compared the sounds of all the tickled creatures. I just systematically coded the recordings and then put it into a phylogenetic analysis. And the phylogenetic tree told us which one is the more rudimentary laughter. How are they connected with each other?

How are they connected with human laughter? You develop trees that provide the simplest explanation, the fewest number of evolutionary steps. And the fewest number of evolutionary steps means here Bonobos and chimpanzees were closest to humans, orangutans were furthest away. And in the middle there were the gorillas. So this is what millions of years of evolution sounds like in reverse order. The ancestral ape laughter about 13 million years ago must have sounded very similar to the orangutan laughter. Very rudimentary, very simple in its form. It's just one call element.

A very simple structure. that resembles just breathing out in a grunt-like way. So that's what laughter sounded like roughly 13 million years ago, and then it changed. About 5 to 8 million years ago, that's probably where laughter became more complex. If you picture the evolutionary tree, there's one branch where orangutans are all alone.

The other branch leads to the rest of the great apes and eventually to humans. On this more populated branch of the tree, the first ape you find is the closest relative of the orangutan, the gorilla. Gorilla laughter is more of a staccato-like laughter. It has many call elements close to one another, and it's often produced while they're exhaling. There's less of a panting there. So laughter is produced for a longer period of time. in comparison to the orangutans.

Now jump ahead another few million years, and the tree branches off again. Gorillas are in one branch, and down the other branch, we find chimpanzees and our nearest kin, Bonobos. Roughly speaking within 5 to 3 million years ago, laughter became even more complex in its temporal pattern and its acoustic structure or spectral structure.

and bonobos or chimpanzees next to that produce laugh sounds that are more complex in their temporal patterns that can be quickly produced. Often particularly chimpanzees are producing panting laughter. The panting comes from this inhalation and exhalation. and while inhaling, producing the sound and while exhaling, producing the sound. One of us can also do that. They can also produce a lot of very interesting elements. Acoustic structures more complex than that of a gorilla. And finally, the tree branches off one last time.

And this is where we live, nearest to bonobos and chimpanzees, with gorillas farther away from us and farthest away, orangutans. Human laughter is characterized by one of the key features Marina Davila Ross is constantly listening for, voicing. Voicing is what makes laughter sound so melodic, this ha-ha type or this he-ha type of laughter. It has many quickly changing bits in the acoustic structure and makes it even more complex than a chimpanzee laugh or a bonobo laugh. Listen again to the sound of the bonobo. And now the human baby.

Uncanny, isn't it? They're both a long way from the orangutan. Millions of years away. But all of those calls were produced the same way by tickling. Laughter is the sound of play. Primates, like all mammals, especially juveniles and infants, they play with one another. And play is rough and tumble, play. It's wrestling, growing on another, hitting one another, grabbing one another, shazing one another. That's legendary Dutch primatologist Jan Van Hofe.

He studied chimps at play and was the first to document what he called the Playface, It's in fact a kind of mock fighting. It exercises the animal and the animals get experience, but that it's not why they do it. They do it for fun. They do it for fun. And when two animals play, they accompany it regularly with a play face

and a particular focalization which tells them, hey, what we are doing now is just for fun, it's just for fun, but don't take it seriously. It is for fun. And they do that by opening their mouth very widely and making kind of short-breathing sounds that sound like and you can hear that. And that is indeed, it is homologous. It is similar to our human laughter. Philosopher John Morrell. Without a base signal, animals that are mock attacking, another animal might very well be taken as a real attack, and in that case, they would get hurt. If I just reached over, grabbed your arm, and started to bite you without indicating that I'm just fooling around, you could hurt me.

And especially in animals. Great apes aren't alone in voicing play signals. In several famous studies, researchers tickled rats. Rats laugh, and this is work done by Jan Pankset, so he found that rats laugh when they're tickled and they laugh when they're playing. So, showing the same characteristics as chimps and humans. It's a different sort of sound. Here's what a rat laughing sounds like. Okay, you don't have to turn that up. A rat's chirping laughter is actually beyond the range of human hearing. So here's what it sounds like when it's brought down into our auditory range. And they make it when they want to be tickled or there was amazingly, there were studies last year where they taught rats to play hide and seek

with a human and the rats would make the sound when they got found and they would make the sound when they were looking for the human and it was associated with this fantastic behaviour called Freudensprung where they jump up and down and they squeak so it's a really it's like a delight delighted rat it seems to me whew interestingly when they're trying to hide from you they stop making it oh no don't laugh now going to get found you know so that's already pretty complex in the rats and there were these studies in the US last year where they studied rats who'd been devocalised. So rats who cannot make any sound. All mammals pretty much make sounds in the same way. They vibrate the vocal folds. These rats can't. So they can't laugh because they

can't make any sounds. Now they are very social rats and they play with the other rats. Rats play a lot. That's an affiliative behaviour. The other rats want to play with them. It's not that they are disliked by the other rats. But when they are playing, these devocalized rats are more likely to get bitten because one of the roles of laughter in play is to show that you're still playing. And if you can't show that, there's a very thin line between sort of rough and tumble and just straight out aggression. So they can't make the sound that would indicate that they were still playing. And consequently, it more often ends badly for them, which is incredibly complex. You can exactly imagine that scaling up to humans. Humans had difficulty with laughter might often find

that sort of thing going on. But if you think, well, if laugh is that complicated in rats, what on earth the implications for us? Well, one of the simplest implications for us humans is that babies also laugh so they don't get hurt during play. Babies start to laugh at about four months. And the same things that they laugh at in the first two years or so are the things that chimps and gorillas laugh at. John Morrell. How do you get a baby to laugh? You do things like tickle, which is a mock attack.

You blow bubbles on their belly. The stage at which babies most enjoy peek-a-boo is a stage at which they don't have with it's called object constancy. That is, they don't know that something continues to exist when it's not around anymore. So for them, peekaboo isn't, you're here, and now your hands are over your face, oh, you're here again. It's you're here, you're not here, and now you're here again. If this is a person who's taking care of them, that's dangerous. If the mother disappears and she's gone, well, if peekaboo lasted more than five seconds, the baby starts to cry. we're not alone in this kind of behavior either. Jan Vanhoef.

One of the thing that we saw in our Arnhem's chimpanzee colony is they, for instance, play peek-a-boo. I've seen a chimpanzee raise a towel when they had that in their enclosure and then lower it. It's a potentially threatening situation, anxiety-arousing situation. But immediately, the joke is, it's not serious. It's for fun. You're being. tricked, and the appreciation of that is done by showing the play phase. Marina Davila Ross, Jan Van Hofe, and other researchers have drawn a straight line from humans back to great apes and rats. But over millions of years, we humans took the play signal we inherited and started putting it to other uses. Many psychologists and humor scholars believe that

in early humans, laughter signaled something more than just play. You think you're in danger, but suddenly you realize you're not in danger. You're ready to be afraid or angry or disgusted. Then you realize it's a false alarm. And laughter is the natural response there. This is John Morrell again. So my suggestion is laughter starts as a play. signal among the apes. It develops in early humans as a play signal. And then they develop it for more sophisticated situations. Like, I think I'm in trouble. Oops, I'm not. You've experienced this in really simple ways when you're sometimes riding a bicycle and you think you're going to fall and suddenly you write yourself. Laughter is very common. So you're all set for a negative emotion or you've

started to feel a negative emotion. But now you realize that negative emotion is, you're isn't needed, and so you go to laughter. The nice thing about laughter is, physiologically in the body, and also psychologically, laughter and humor are the opposite of fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Laughter really is the opposite. Stress raises your blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. Laughter lowers all of them. And when early humans were faced with uncertainty, this false alarm signal offered an alternative

to the fight or flight instinct. It would be loud enough for everyone to hear, and it would spread quickly through the pack. So the false alarm theory offers a pretty good answer to one of my biggest questions about laughter. Why is it so contagious? Nothing makes me laugh like the sound of someone else laughing helplessly. It shows this very strong priming effect in the brain. You can sort of see people getting ready to join in when they hear laughter, which they don't when they hear other really emotionally contagious sounds like disgust and fear.

You know, if I sit here going, you'll start feeling a bit sick, I'll start feeling a bit sick, but you probably won't start joining in with me, whereas you do with laughter. Sophie Scott and her colleagues measured that phenomenon. they had people listen to laughter while an MRI measured their brain activity. Just the sound of chuckling was enough to trigger neurons that control laughter and smiling. And what is the mechanism? What do you think is happening in the brain that primes us to laugh when we hear laughter? Well, I think it's twofold.

It's something that we learn to do. Babies show no contagious behaviors whatsoever. They blink only when they need to. They do not laugh and someone else laughs. They don't yawn when someone else yawns. We teach babies to do this. And certainly from a brain perspective, what you see when you see people listening to laughter,

you can see very strong activation of motor areas in your brain that you would use of view of yourself to start laughing. Even if people don't laugh, you're seeing this kind of slight priming just towards doing that. Over the ages, composers and musicians tried to capture that contagious quality of laughter. This is soprano Claudia Novakovar performing the tipsy waltz from Offenbach's La Percocle. For me, this vintage recording is the closest a musical performance comes to capturing laughter and its infectious nature.

If Offenbach is the artistic champion of capturing laughter in music, the commercial crown goes to the most infectious record from that same era. This is the Okha Laughing record, one of the most popular novelty records of all time. It was produced in Germany after the First World War and released in North America in 1920. That anonymous German tavernkeeper and his wife were played in around a million households in North America. That record also had a lasting impact that you've heard thousands of times. The laugh track. First radio producers, then TV producers, found that the sound of audience laughter made their program seem funnier.

And even when things aren't funny, people in groups can get each other laughing just by laughing. My name is Gita. And I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Please. Anybody else want to share? This is laughter yoga. People start saying ha, ha, ha, in a group, and soon everyone is laughing.

I recently acquired insulin-dependent diabetes. You're listening to Laughing Matters, a documentary about the mystery of human laughter by contributor Peter Brown. Ideas is heard in Canada on CBC Radio 1, in North America on SiriusXM and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.com. You can also find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

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This. Until May 31st, get up to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point S.ca. Good point. Point S, tires, and auto service. At Desjardin Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's foundation needs to be strong. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company.

So we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. Laughter is so basic to being human that it's easy to overlook. But what exactly is it? And why do we even laugh in the first place? Contributor Peter Brown tries to answer those questions in his documentary, Laughing Matters.

So we know this much. We inherited laughter as a play signal from our evolutionary ancestors. We're wired to respond to some affiliated behaviors, including laughter. And that's why laughter may have been useful to us as a false alarm signal. It's loud and it spreads quickly. But for me, there's one aspect of laughter that evolutionary theories have a harder time explaining. Because laughter is more than just contagious, it can leave, you absolutely helpless.

It stops the muscle, the brain control and spine control that's leading to metabolic breathing, so, you know, normal staying alive breathing. It stops you speaking. If you, you know, I feel like there are several good examples on the radio and on TV of news presenters desperately trying to keep talking while they are laughing. And most of the time, the laughter wins. What's happening in the course of the next hour? Well, first up after the news.

So there's one from the today. program, which is a very serious news program in the UK. One of the hosts, James Nocti, was talking about an upcoming interview with Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. Well, first up after the news, I'm going to be talking to Jeremy Hunt the Culture Secretary about broadband.

And he called him, yeah. It's 8 o'clock on Monday. The 6th of... I mean, he just then has about a minute, because he has to talk. There's no one else in the studio. He has to keep talking. He sounds like he's having a fight with a pig.

Every community in Britain. has been promised that it'll have access to the fastest broadband networks within five years. Excuse me, and Egypt has called an international shark experts to investigate a series of attacks in the Red Sea. Pardon me. He says, oh, sorry, I've got hiccups. You manifest the are laughing. It's beautiful. Or one, where there's a man and a woman interviewing the swimmer, Ryan Locti,

and they're talking to him about a new television program, which is going to be like a reality TV program about his. life. There's so much more to me than swimming. I like to go dancing, hang out with my friends. I like doing fun stuff like playing basketball, skateboarding. And they come back to the studio and they just start screaming. What are they going to put in the program? He's so boring. Okay, Ryan, good luck to you. We'll be watching. Oh, thank you. Seriously, how are they going to get enough material? What was the question that stunked him?

We've all been there. You can't breathe, you can't stand. You also become very, very weak. You know, if a tiger came in at that point, there would be a short span of time and there wouldn't be very much you could do about that. So, say, from an evolutionary point of view, that's hard to justify, unless the opposite's true.

We don't laugh like that just anywhere and with anybody. You're sort of saying, I feel safe enough with you. I am comfortable enough with you that I would let myself be this vulnerable around you. And I suspect, again, that's where a lot of its power lies. Laughter's as much of an index about where you are and who you're with and how you feel about them as it is to do with anything that's actually caused the laughter. We now reach the moment in our evolution where our laughter changes,

and what we laugh about begins to change as well. This is the moment between three and six million years ago when our ancestors stood on two legs. There's a pretty long moment. Suppose you and I are part of a hunting party on the Serengeti in East Africa, and we're coming through a clearing, and we look up ahead and we see four or five lion tails wagging above the grass. John Morel with another lion scenario. We grab our spears and we're all set for a big fight. As we get a little closer, we see that the lion,

has brought down a gazelle, and the lions are just eating away, they're stuffing themselves with a gazelle. And we know that a lion that's full isn't going to attack us. So at this point, false alarm, we might laugh. Now, if we don't have language yet, that whole thing just disappears right away. When we stand up, our laughter is transformed. It sounds different. We can control our breathing, so now we can laugh longer on an out breath and generate a greater variety of sounds. And that same breath control also gives us the ability to speak. So we have more to laugh about. One of the things that I think happened very early in humor is exaggeration. Suppose we saw four lion tails, but then we got up close and we saw the lions are eating

the gazelle. If we get back to camp and we said, you remember when we got to the clearing, there were, now I couldn't say four, but wouldn't it be better if I said 10? We do this today. We say there were millions of cars in the parking lot. So one of the first things I think happened is people had funny experiences. They enjoyed it with other people, and then they shared it with the wider tribe. But why is the tribe laughing in the first place? They didn't see the lion's tales, so what makes the story funny? For thousands of years, philosophers, theologians, and thinkers of all stripes

have been offering theories about what makes something funny. What most of those accounts have in common is this. Surprise! Whether you call it a psychological shift or a violation of expectations or a punchline, something unexpected happens. Our brains process that surprise and then we laugh. A psychology experiment from the early 1980s offers a perfect illustration of the way we react to surprise, the Lambert Decker's experiment. In the Lambert Decker's experiment, people are asked to pick up pairs of weights. And all of the weights look the same.

John Morel. They look like metal blocks on a table. So this looks completely unsurprising and boring. You pick up a couple of weights, and then you're told, okay, now move to the right. Pick up the next pair. By about the third or fourth pair, you're bored. But the fifth pair either weighs ten times as much or one-tenth as much as the first. And almost everybody laughs.

So to me, this is the pure incongrued. of your expectations were violated. Obviously, the situation is utterly benign. You're not being tested on this. You're not being evaluated. Nobody's going to get hurt. So you are surprised, but you can enjoy it. And that's what laughter is.

So the input is a surprise, and the output is a laugh. Now it's time to attach some electrodes to your scalp and find out how you do that. I'm most interested in how does the brain basically adapt the mechanisms it has for surprise and turn that into like a humor processing mechanism. Scott Weems is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of, Ha, the science of when we laugh and why. First, I would like to know what part of the brain recognizes the joke, what part gets that something has happened that you weren't expecting in normal dialogue.

And then, you know, that's the beginning. And then after that, what do you do with it? How do you make sense of that grow out to a Mark's line or whatever as you've just encountered and aren't fully getting? And so for humor, that's kind of where it starts with me. It's a matter of conflict and surprise, at least in the way I see it. There's still a lot to discover about the neuroscience of laughter, but we're starting to gather clues thanks to high-tech tools like MRIs that allow us to track brain activity. If you're listening to a joke, you'll definitely have auditory parts of the brain active.

a whole bunch of other areas, reasoning too. Visual jokes, you know, like cartoons, we'll have visual areas. Pretty much always there'll be some frontal lobe involvement. That's our problem-solving area. That's MRI kind of findings. There's also a tool called the EEG, electroencephalogram. And it works differently in that it doesn't really tell you so much where. I mean, it can't tell you.

You could see where electrical activity is produced on the brain, but not highly localized. So you're looking at general regions a little more than down to the millimeter kind of resolution. And it is really useful because it can look at changes in electrical activity over the course of thousands of a second. And for a joke, which might last half a second or a second or two, you know, sometimes if it's a one-liner, it's really quick. It's happening in a few seconds or less. Some of the most productive tools use a combination of both. So you're looking at what parts of the brain where are active.

and in what order? Scott Weems breaks down what happens whenever we hear a punchline or twist into three phases. First, the constructing phase, when the brain tries to make sense of what it just heard. Second, the reckoning phase, when we sort through all the options and discard the incorrect solutions. And third, the resolving phase, when we get it. It's that last stage that I think a lot of people miss, and that was, to me, kind of the most interesting, I call it resolving, because what you're trying to do is you're trying

to resolve the punchline. You're trying to get, what did I just encounter with that joke? Trying to make sense of it. If it's a Groucho, Mark's line. I want to shout an elephant in my pajamas. How we got my pajamas, I'll never know. You're trying to figure out who's wearing the pajamas, and every joke needs to have a destination. If you don't have some sort of new way of thinking that the punchline has directed you to, then you've probably not heard a joke. You've probably just heard an interesting story or just surprises you. It's not necessarily funny. Researchers have measured what's happening in our brain as we work through that process. The first EEG response you see with a joke, typically, it's called a P300. And you call it that

because it's a positive deflection, like a positive electric spike, about 300 milliseconds, a third of a second, after you've heard the punchline. That's your surprise response. It comes among other regions of the brain that might be implicated with that. A big region is the anterior cingulate. It's basically the surprise processor and the brain. I look at it as like an error detection mechanism. It tells you if whatever you were expecting to happen didn't. And so, you know, a third of a second after hearing a punchline, you get that surprise. And if you're looking at the electrical activity over someone's brain, you can see a positive spike. Anything that is out of the ordinary, gets you that surprise response.

But what you need to actually have a joke and a funny punch line, you get a processing about 100 milliseconds after that, and generally researchers will call that an N-400. It's a negative spike, and it's, like I said, 100 milliseconds later. And you see that as a more of a cognitive processing kind of stage. You see an N-400 for a lot of different cognitive behaviors, most of them having to do with just understanding for a lack of a better word. So the surprise alone isn't going to be rewarding enough to give you like a dopamine response in the brain.

What you need is you need that surprise and then you need that figuring out that, okay, Groucho Marx is not the one wearing pajamas. Oh, I get it. I want to shout an elephant in my pajamas. How we got in my pajamas? I'll never know. Forgive me for using technical jargon here, but this is where the researchers use two scientific terms. Aha and ha ha. Ha ha is the moment we laugh at a joke.

But first, there has to be an aha, the reckoning phase, the moment we get it. Anytime you get something, you have an aha moment and you feel like you've figured things out. That's when you see a response like the N-400. So again, it comes down to both a surprise. rise in a destination, you get a squirt of dopamine because that's your brain rewarding you for getting it. Let's give your anterior singular to work out with an aha moment with a puzzle from Scott Weems. I'm going to read three words and I want you to tell me what word connects them all. So if I tell you to think about the words tooth, potato, and heart, what word is linked to all three

of those words. That's tooth, potato, and heart. You have five seconds. Five for three to one. The answer is sweet, sweet tooth, sweet potato, sweetheart. If you ask people, what's the first word that comes to mind when I say tooth? Ake is pretty high up there. Heart ache is also a really common word. Heartache is the word we hear of. Potato ache is, of course, not a thing at all. The thing you have to do when you get something like that is you need to sometimes ignore the first word that comes to mind and instead think of like the third, fifth, or maybe the tenth word that comes to mind, because you don't need to just solve one, you need to solve all three. And so doing that requires shutting up the wrong answers and letting the right answer basically shine through. So basically

telling the part of the brain to shut up and letting other parts speak up is the quintessential interior your singulate activity. You can have an aha moment without ha-ha, like when you solve a crossword puzzle, but you can't have a ha-ha moment without an aha moment. You have to have that cognitive shift. I have another surprise for you. Most of the time when we're laughing, this whole process from a comic setup to a punchline to a surprise to resolution in the brain doesn't happen. Somewhere along the evolutionary road, we developed a second kind of laugh. Research has shown that 90% of our laughter has nothing to do with jokes. It's overwhelmingly a sign of affection or affiliation or belonging to a group.

Sophie Scott calls it communicative or affiliative laughter. We have these what are called lateral motor areas, which are associated with very, very fine, controlled use of the articulators, such as for speech or song or beatboxing or anything else we do with our voices, which you only find in humans. So we have these parallel systems. We've got this voluntary system for talking, for singing, for beatboxing, for impressions, for everything else that we can do with our voice. and then this older pathway associated with involuntary, often emotional, reactive sounds. Most other mammals only use this older system. We have this extra system. And what I suspect is we have two different kinds of laughter that reflect this. I'm going to play you the sound of the same person laughing twice.

Try spotting the social laughter versus the spontaneous real laughter. Here's one. And here's the other. The genuine spontaneous laugh was the first one. And now which is the spontaneous laugh? This one? Or this one? That time it was the second.

Where spontaneous laughter stops us cold, communicative laughter slides into the flow of speech. And in fact, if you look at the rhythm of sentences, what people do in conversation, which is where most of this laughter happens, people laugh at the end of sentences and they laugh at the end of turns. And what people do is they laugh together at those points. They look to people having sign language conversations, where in theory you could laugh all the way through

because most of the communicative burden is happening with your hands, and you don't. You do the exact same thing. You laugh at the end of the sentences, you laugh at the end of the turn. So it's actually incredibly tightly coordinated as part of that conversational interaction, which again makes it look more like the speechy bits of that interaction or the siney bits of that interaction. And you've pointed out, and I hadn't even thought about this, when I'm laughing helplessly, I make a high-pitched sound that even the pitch of the laughter is different.

Yes. I mean, I have an extremely high-pitched laugh. I could never sing that way. I could never get, I'd love to be able to sing that high. What you're seeing is you start generating these massive forces when you laugh really, hard. And that's driving the pitch up. But the involuntary aspect is the fact that this is generating forces you couldn't produce voluntarily. Our brain appears to interpret spontaneous laughter as sound and communicative laughter as speech. Of course, if laughter is communicative, it follows that it can

communicate widely different things, as in there's laughing with and then there's laughing at. If you think you're being laughed at, it's one of the most social. appalling things that can happen to you. It's awful. That really terrifying bit in Goodfellas when Joe Peske's character is telling a joke and everyone's laughing and laughing and laughing. Then he goes, am I a joke to you? Am I a joke to you? Why are you laughing at me? I'm funny how? I mean funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?

But the panic, the absolute visceral panic. You know how you tell the story? How do I know? You said I'm funny. Until he lets them off the hook. I almost had him. I almost had him. He's one of the most anxiety and provoking bits of film I've ever seen. That menacing laughter rings through our culture, Joaquin Phoenix and Joker.

Side show Bob from The Simpsons. And the best of them all, Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmatians. So while laughter can be social, it can also be antisocial. So this is where I become all earnest. But at least I waited until the very end. You're welcome. Laughter is central to human culture and civilization.

But humor as a subject of study hasn't traditionally been well respected. And as John Morel likes to say, In traditional schools, a kid who's good at art might be sent to the art room, and a kid who's got some musical talent might be lucky and go to the music room, but a kid who's got a good sense of humor is sent to the principal's office. but he believes that laughter reveals one of humanity's best qualities. The biggest thing I think it reveals is human resilience. We can live in heat and we can live in cold,

and we've adapted ourselves amazingly to different climates. Some people even want to put us on other planets now. I think humor and human creative thinking, the human problem solving, I think are closely related. And when I think of the people that I know who've got very, little sense of humor. They're also not creative thinkers. They're not good problem solvers. The ability to laugh about things shows the ability to suddenly shift your perspective and look at things in a new way. And I think those are strongly linked. So creativity and humor go together. And

humans are amazingly creative compared to any other species. Neuroscientist Scott Weems also believes that it's the getting of a joke that sets humanity apart. We are built to be curious. If we are not curious about our world and constantly trying to find ways to adapt, we are probably less likely to pass on genes to future generations. And I think that's why humor is kind of so useful, is it tapped into that in such a way that we can get at it very quickly. We try to remove the tusks, but they were embedded in so firmly that we couldn't budge them. Of course, in Alabama, the Tuscaloosa. Groucho Marx line, you know, might just be a dozen words or more, but we still get at that confusion, that conflict, and that resolution, sometimes very quickly.

and we take pleasure in that. So it makes sense that we would be curiosity machines. We like learning new things and being surprised. There's a joy in waking up one morning and understanding what you thought, you understood, and then realizing at the end of the day, nope, I understood it a little bit better today. Personally, I feel there's something profound

in giving ourselves over to laughter together. In comics Ivan Decker, Sophie Buttle, Nile Segan, Trent McClellan and Carly Heffernan may talk about slaying an audience, but when they hear an audience laughing, they all believe something deeper is happening. Laughing and rhythm. Now more than never, social media is designed to make you feel alone. It's a place where anonymous people can criticize and argue all the time.

And even understanding that if people are on the surface, very different than you, if you can both laugh at the same thing, it shows that you're not that different. We love to feel part of a group and part of a tribe and laughing together just tells everybody around you, yes, we all think the same thing, and you know, you're not alone.

And, yeah, it's really beautiful. You watch TV and everyone in the commercial has just a perfect life and the perfect family and yada yada, when nothing in real life is like that. People were like, yeah, oh, my God, yeah, right. You're right. forgot. This is all totally ridiculous. It's obscene, absurd. They'll recognize themselves or their dad or their wife or their husband or their kid in the stories that you're telling. And that

makes it human. That allows us to feel connected in that moment. And I think that's one of the most powerful moments of connection you can feel anywhere. When we laugh as an audience together, it's the closest we come to telepathy. that wave of laughter that connects us it doesn't know gender and it doesn't know race and it doesn't know class or privilege it has connected this unique group of people in this moment in a level of humanity that i think is aspirational to live from that last voice belongs to ryan mcmann he's a writer podcaster and comic. He's also anishnabe and has done a lot of thinking about the way laughter appears in the Ojibwe language. Bopi is the word that we use for laughter. Bopi or Bapi wuk means they are laughing

Bapi wuk. And the Ojibwe language in particular is a verb-based language. So it's an active language. When we speak our language, we're talking about the things we're actually doing. And so There's different ways that you can use the word bapi or bapi wuk or bapi de wuk, which means they're laughing at each other. Bagamapi, which means they show up laughing. What really shines for me when you look at the language around the word laugh is that the laughter is not at your expense. You're in on it. When you were saying that, what popped into my head was there's a neuroscientist named Sophie Scott, who I interviewed for this. and when I asked her what is a laugh, she said,

laughter to me is a kind of social joy. I think it's a particular kind of social joy. And it sounds like that's exactly what you're talking about. I think she nailed it. I think she's probably an is shinaabe. And if she's not, tell her to call me and I'll get her a status card from Kuching, First Nation, Northwestern Ontario, Treaty 3, she's in. That's incredible.

Oh, what a lovely quote. That's lovely. I mean, I just had to call Sophie Scott to play her that comment from Ryan McMahon. And to ask her to do this next thing. I know that you can do a very good Northern English accent because that's where you're from. How would you say Anishnabee? Anishnabe. They won't want me now. So it's only fitting that the last word on laughter

goes to Cognitive Neuroscientist and Honorary Anishinaabe, Sophie Scott. 22 years ago, my father was taken desperately ill. I mean, like really ill, was dying, was incredibly unwell. We were all sat around in a hospital waiting for someone to do something and nothing was happening, and we were all just going to, we'd kind of moved through anxiety and just sort of silence. And my father suddenly said, we've laughed a lot, haven't we? And I said, yes, yes, we have.

And I thought at the time I thought, I don't know. I didn't quite understand why he said it. And then of course, you know, he actually made it through that afternoon and had another happy 14 years of life, so that's fine. But then the interim, I started, you know, it wasn't the end of a story. The more I worked with laughter, that kind of thought, comment was always at the back of my mind. And now, of course, I think he was right. You know, if you can look back at a life that feels like it had a lot of laughter.

in it, that actually for you means that you probably were. You know, at least, you know, if nothing else, given that one day we all die, the days before that death should be filled with as much happiness in laughter as possible, because what else is there? You were listening to Laughing Matters by contributing producer Peter Brown. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval, additional help from Tom Howell.

Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly. This was for fun. This was a joke. And I'm Nala Ayad. Yay! For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca.