Instant Genius - Why humans need laughter

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Laughter is a fundamental part of our lives, but why do we do it? We spoke to Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London to better understand why and how we laugh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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handcrafted tradition with cutting edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes, and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. Human expressions of emotion are quite frankly weird.

We cry when we're sad, we smile when we're happy and we laugh. Well, we laugh a lot. Whether it's that rib-tickling kind of laughter or a small exhale of air at a funny video, laughter is a constant in our lives. But why do we do it? We spoke to Sophie Scott to better understand the laughter experience. She's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London, an all-round expert in the science of laughter.

She explains everything from why we laugh to why our form of laughter is truly unique compared to other animals. So to an outside witness with no context, Laughter could seem like a somewhat bizarre behaviour even to us when you really do think about it. It is a bit strange. So why do we laugh? What is it that is causing that reaction? So if you ask people, why do you laugh?

When do you laugh? They'll talk about jokes and comedy and humour. And we do laugh when things are funny. But the primary reason why we laugh is in fact social. So we're really primed to laugh when we're with other people. Robert Provine, the psychologist, found that we are 330 times more likely to laugh at there's somebody else with us than if we're on our own. And we suspect that that number is enhanced if you know those people and if you like those people. So it's a social behaviour and it's kind of

amplified by the context, the social and emotional context that you find yourself in. I assume in a way, is that why when any time you're on your own, you see something funny, you experience something funny, it tends to be more of an exhale or, you know, a bit of a noise that comes out of you. Exactly. A friend of mine was saying to me earlier in the week that she'd seen something funny and she wanted to share it with a lot of friends on WhatsApp. And so she's seen the thing. She shared it on WhatsApp and then they were responding. And she said at no stage, did she laugh. But if she'd been with them, she would have laughed at it. You know, she's kind of sharing the idea almost. I guess in the sense of it being when we're in a social group and we're

laughing, is it good for us? Is that something that's healthy when we experience that? Yes. And it's probably good for us in a number of different ways. So on a physical level, there are neurochemical changes inside you when you laugh that are good for you. So you get an endorphin hit when you've been laughing. And endorphins are the body's naturally circulating painkillers. And you get the same kind of hit from laughing as you do from doing quite heavy exercise, like going for a run. And that means actually you can tolerate more pain when you've been laughing. You get a measurable change in pain thresholds when people have been laughing. And it seems to be because of the endorphins. You also immediately get a reduction in adrenaline. And adrenaline is the fight or flight hormone.

It's the thing that if something scares you, makes your heart race. And very, very quickly, that declines when you've been laughing. In fact, I found that if you are looking at something that you expect to make you laugh, your adrenaline levels seem to drop in anticipation of that. So it's really fast. So you're more relaxed when you've been laughing. And also, on a much slower time scale, you get a reduction in cortisol. Cortisol has a much slower reaction than adrenaline, but it's the stress hormone.

It's the thing that runs at high levels when you're feeling really exhausted and overworked. It's the thing that wakes you up in the morning, which is why you sometimes feel a bit rotten when you wake up. And when you've been laughing, you get a reduction in cortisol. So you feel better. You've got that nice warm endorphin glow. You are more relaxed and also you are less stressed. There's even an increased production of human growth hormone, which is very important in your childhood because it's growing your body. But it doesn't stop being important once you're an adult and you've stopped physically getting taller.

It still plays a strong role in affecting your immune system. So people have even suggested that's a potential link between. laughter and the immune system. We certainly don't know why that actually, why that link exists. But it's not just that laughter is good for you physically because the other really important thing that's happening when you're laughing with friends is that you are increasing your sense of affiliation of bondedness with those friends and they're feeling more bonded to you. And that really matters for humans. The size and the strength of our social networks have incredibly strong predictions about things like our mental health and our physical health.

And that's partly because friends will do things like help you when you need help. but also it's because those are the people that I think you spend time with and you laugh with them and you talk to them and you do the things that make you feel better together. So you improve your mood together. So you get like a virtuous circle with laughter. You're feeling good so you want to do it more. You're sharing it with the people that you like and the people that you love. So you want to do it more. And it's just reinforcing you for carrying out this crazy behavior with people that you feel close to all people that you'd like to feel close to. And I think as well, I don't know about you, but there is no greater feelings. feeling of pride than when you can make a whole group of people laugh, when you come up with the best joke. It is, I have to say, having done some stand-up comedy, one of the most rewarding

things on the entire planet to make people laugh is just joyous. You'd feel wonderful. And we were saying a minute ago about something could be funny when you're alone, but the laughing reaction is something that we do as a group. If you're finding something funny, you're on your own or you're in a situation where you wouldn't laugh, is that still having all of those positive impacts, or is it entirely in the social grouping? It's certainly you seem to need to produce the laughter to get those changes. I don't think we've done enough work on people

consuming humorous material on their own. But I think certainly the work that has been done on the physical benefits of laughter, I don't know how much of that is the laughter and how much that is the social setting in which you would laugh. It's quite hard to pull those things apart. Even for the physical things,

it's not the case that it's necessarily just the physical act of laughing. I'm not sure if you've seen much of this, but there's lots of these ideas of laughing therapy or, you know, this idea that similar to, oh, if you smile without happiness, you'll feel happier. Is there something to that with laughter as well? You can force it out of you? Well, certainly there is something called laughter yoga or laughter therapy. And the idea there is because laughter primes laughter. And people at work in comedy know this very well. You don't just

put the comedian out cold in front of an audience. You get that audience laughing before you bring the comedian out. You get them making lots of noise and behaving like an audience. And they'll then laugh more when they're comedians there. So, that kind of priming, laughter priming more laughter is part of what's going on with laughter yoga. The first one I went to, somebody just had a script that said, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha. And he would read this out and the audience would repeat it back. And then by the end of it, some people were just on the floor and absolute hysterics as they'd gone beyond just sort of faking laughter through into really spontaneous laughter.

I think the only thing I'd say about it, and you find this with every kind of cultural construction where we make a way of encouraging people to laugh, it doesn't work for everybody. A lot of people really get tremendous benefits from doing laughter therapy, laughter yoga. Other people find it intolerably stressful. I cannot bear it. I get a headache. I get really stressed out. I don't enjoy it.

But that's also true. It was stand-up comedy. I have perfectly lovely friends who hate stand-up comedy if they go to it by accident. They're miserable all evening. They don't like it. Some people don't like clowning. You know, some people don't like going to see fast. There's actually quite a lot of, certainly, even in our culture, quite a lot of cultural phenomena that we associate with laughter.

As soon as you go into those, it doesn't work for. everybody, whereas out there in the wild, talking to your friends, laughing with your friends, that's as far as we can see that it's a font of a better phrase, the natural state of laughter, and that's what will work for everyone. I kind of read my mind there a little bit, because I was going to ask you if there's any, I guess, universally accepted things that make us laugh, are topics that have just been proven to always do well? Yes and no.

So if you look over the whole world and over all of human history, what you find is that there's always been stuff that's considered to be funny. So humorous material, comedy material. As far as we can see, as soon as modern humans appear, as soon as they can start making marks and they start writing stuff down, they start writing down jokes. So there are some absolutely ancient jokes out there. There's a whole book of Roman jokes. And the thing that's really striking is that they're not funny anymore. You can tell that they're meant to be funny, but they're not funny. And that continues being true. So over time and over place, there's not one thing that everybody says, right now, that's funny, that's golden. We all find that hilarious. There'll be some stuff

that's funnier than others, but there's not one thing. So there's a tremendous influence of sort of geography and history and culture on what at any one point in time somebody finds funny, but that still won't tell you, you can still have a room for 30 people and obviously somebody going, that's not funny, that's how my brother died. Now, given that, there are some things that are stronger than others. So across all cultures, you find taboo things like farting and poo jokes, they're funny for a lot of people. And, there is a very general rule that says the more barriers there are to you understanding a joke and that barrier could be linguistic or it could be cultural, the less likely it is that you'll find

it funny. And if you flip that round, the fewer barriers there are to you understanding a thing, the more likely it is that you'll find it funny. That's why silent humour tends to be more universally found funny. So Charlie Chaplin is still considered very funny in parts of the world. Mr. Bean was very popular. It still is very popular. Benny Hill was hugely popular in the UK and the broad and the vast majority that relied on humour that was wordless. So that's the most general type of universal comedy would be around wordless stuff, would be around sort of taboo stuff. But it's still, it won't be funny for everybody. There'll still be somebody going, no, that's not funny at all. It's a stupid thing to do. And that's because it's an aesthetic

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So I think like we were saying earlier about laughter being this social exchange or it's mostly in these social groups, is there a sense that like you were saying with certain communities or certain groups that are going to find something funnier that that experience increases when you're, I don't know, for example, speaking to a group and you get that humor perfectly fitted to that group, it's that social community.

So actually in the wild, in normal conversations, which is where you find laughter, people mostly aren't laughing at jokes at all. And people do laugh at things that are meant to be funny, but most of the time people laugh at comments and statements like, I might miss my bus or, well, he would say that, wouldn't he? People are laughing to show agreement and understanding and affiliation and recognition as much as they're laughing to say something was, you know, straight up funny. In fact, a great deal of laughter happens just because of contagion. Laughter is behaviorally contagious for humans. So you catch a laugh from someone else just because they're laughing. So it is true that you can do better humour and tailor it well to people, but that's not a conversation. And I think it's not always because of something being funny or amusing or sometimes, I guess, it's coming from a different place. And is there a difference between the laughter you experience when, I don't know, for example, when you're tickled or, you know, people get nervous laughter in very serious situations that they shouldn't be laughing in? The difference that we've found between different kinds of laughs, mostly comes between whether or not the laughter is intentional or not. So if you think about the last time you were laughing and you could not stop, you may even have been somewhere where you shouldn't have been laughing.

That's coming from an evolutionarily older place that we share with a system that controls vocalizations in all other mammals. That's the same sort of brain system that's involved if you scream in terror or you make an, oh, sound out of surprise. And that is different, we think, from the brain areas that are involved in your laughing conversationally. and that actually looks a bit more like speech in the brain. It's more intentional. It's more communicative. Now, within that, there are also differences, but those differences are more to do with how you hear the laughter.

So the same laughter could be really sort of warm and spontaneous and shared amongst friends. But if you thought those people were laughing at you, that laughter would sound awful. And the same laughter might sound nervous and anxious, but it's because only one person's doing it. No one else is joining in. There's a big contextual effect to how we hear laughter happening and what we think of it. on the point about nervous laughter, a very common use of laughter for humans, certainly human adults, is to try and resolve stressful or awkward situation. So people will laugh to try and reframe a

situation that might be embarrassing or difficult or dangerous. And people will laugh to try and make it, okay, this is fun, this is fine, we're not, no one's in pain, we're all having, this is hilarious. And that only works if everybody joins in. It doesn't work. If just one person laughs and the other person doesn't laugh, then it doesn't make anything better at all. So there's something very important about the sharing the laughter, but I think that's partly where the idea of nervous laughter comes from is we recognize what that person is trying to do. And they are nervous, but no one else is coming in to help them. They're laughing on their own and it's not working.

And in the same sense of uncontrollable experiences of laughter, sometimes it can be easy to get just so caught up in it that you can't stop and tears kick in, the ribs hurt. Why is it that our body gets to that uncontrollable level? Well, it's a very good question, and I don't know if I can give you a very good answer. So I think it's very interesting evolutionarily because you're pretty helpless when you're in that stage. And in fact, you get suppression of motor reflexes, so you become very floppy. And it's really hard to do things. Next time you're laughing like that, see if you can do something like unbuttoned shirt, you know.

You can't. So you kind of find motor control is really difficult when you're laughing like that. And, you know, if a tiger was to walk in at that point, there would be a brief window when you couldn't do a great deal about it. So I'm very interested in that sort of how extremely incapacitated we can be by laughter and what that can mean for how it works in our brains, actually how it's overtaking our motor system, but also it's evolutionary meaning.

People often say that laughter is, I guess, contagious and in these situations where you're in that rib-tickling laughter and you can't stop that even if the person isn't laughing, they haven't found a joke funny, it's the laughter itself that can drag them in. Is that also true? Behavioural contagion is quite common in nature. You find it in social animals.

So something like contagious yawning, whereby you catch a yawn off someone else who's yawning, You find it in humans, you find it in dogs, you find it in chimps. You even find it in budges and tortoises. You know, it's an affiliative behaviour. You're much more likely to catch these things off a dog or a tortoise or a chimp that you know than someone you don't. And it's something that we learn to do. It's babies don't do this. We train it up. So it's an basic affiliative behavior. And you find it very commonly, coughing can be contagious, blinking, scratching. But interestingly, only humans show contagious laughter. And there's a researcher called Marina de Villa Ross, who's really looked into this. in other apes. And although they laugh in a way that's very, very similar to us, and they laugh when they're playing and they're being tickled, two apes can be playing and laughing right next to a third one. That third one is not physically involved in the game. They don't laugh. So there's something very interesting about the meaning of that, I think. Like laughter can kind of jump the gap between humans in a way

that it doesn't with other animals. And I mean, you're talking there about animals laughing, and obviously it's not every animal that does this, but there are lots of groups that behave in more social kind of ways. But how is it different to us? Is it mostly down to the development of culture that humans have? So there's some very interesting similarities. So laughter first emerges in infancy, quite early in infancy, and it's always involved in interaction. So whether you're a rat or a chimp or a human, the first laughter appears in interactions, normally between parents and babies, often something like tickling, a physical interaction. And you can't tickle yourself. It requires that other person to be there. And of course, you can't

just march up and tickle any baby. There's also a strong social-emotional element to how you're reacting to that. So it's like the baby's picking up on the parents' intention to be playful and fun. They're not trying to hurt them. You find that laughter is strongly associated with play and all mammals play. When there's a noise associated with play, it's laughter, it's been argued. And that's true for humans and it's true for other animals. And that can be really quite complicated. So devocalised rats who can't make any sounds, they will play with other rats. Rats are very social and they are more likely to get bitten during play because they can't make the sound that indicates that they're being playful, that their intentions are playful. So the play can

run out of control. So that's, you know, that's very recognisable. We've all said that to children, like, oh, look it be tears before bedtime, you know. And even in chimpanzees, what you find is chimpanzees have two different laughs depending on whether they laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're trying to make play last longer. So you find that looks very like our spontaneous laughter and our more kind of intentional laughter being used for social purposes. So there are a lot of commonalities. And then there are some really big differences. So as I've said, humans laugh contagiously and other animals do not.

So it can jump the gaps between us. From infancy, there are other things that will make human infants laugh. So tickling will make human infants laugh and lots of other animals. But there are non-physical things, things you don't have to do that involve touching a baby that will make them laugh. So things like games of peekaboo, that will make a human baby laugh. And that does not work on other animals. Other animals don't use information about eyes the same way we do. There's already, in fact, that kind of laughter jumping the gap from infancy.

Human laughter is really loud. Most other laughter is quiet. Chimpanzee and gorilla laughter is really gentle. We are laughing out louder. We are laughing for other people to hear us. We want it to be. You know, the ape laughter is quite intimate. We put it right out there.

We laugh on an exhalation. That might be another reason why it gets louder. Chimpanzees laugh on a he-heel he-heelheel. Breathing in and out. We have different breath control because we walk upright. So we do this big booming laugh that goes on. And finally, and people get very crossed with me, when I say this. But there's also no evidence that you find something that looks like humor in other

animals. So you find things like teasing, pulling a tail and running away. But that's kind of, you can sort of see the shape of something that might be humor there, but it's never reacted to with laughter and it's never done with laughter. So there really is, I think, again, if you think of humour as being a way for laughter to exist between humans without having to physically interact with each other, I think that's interesting. There is one exception to this. The time when you do find it is when they've been around humans. So there was a zoo in the US where the chimpanzees learned to do this behavior where they'd throw rocks at humans until the humans kind of gathered to look at them. And then when they got a decent size of humans around, they'd start flinging feces.

And the humans would run away, but they would laugh. Now, the chimpanzees didn't laugh when they did it, but they wanted the human laughter. And I think that's a Coco who's a signing gorilla who passed away a few years ago, lived in the US. And it's a bit complicated because the person who looks after Coco also translated, Coco could sign. She can use American Sign Language and this researcher was the person who did all the translation. So with that proviso, we don't have like studies on this. She gave examples of Coco telling jokes. The interesting thing is Coco didn't laugh at them. So if it's really true that she was telling jokes, she was still doing it to get the humans to laugh. She wasn't joining in with it. And that's very different from humans. If you look at humans having

a conversation, the person who laughs most to anyone point in time tends to be the person who's talking. There's a lot of big differences and some really strong similarities between humans and other animals. Despite all of its complexities, laughter is a rather simple and, I guess, common expression that they all do constantly throughout the day throughout your life. In all of your years studying it and experiencing it as well, what is the thing that I guess strikes you the most about laughter? What stands out about this such a common experience? It is so interesting. If you think about it as being an old mammal play vocalization, that does seem to be the roots of it. And it's still,

has that role for us. We do laugh when we're playing. We will laugh to show our intentions are playful. But then it's this like hall of mirrors. People will laugh to show that they're friends with someone, to show that they like them. They'll laugh to try and deal with stressful situations. They'll laugh to mask other emotions. They'll laugh to see if they're getting away with the lie. They'll laugh to get someone to keep talking to them. So Robin Dunbar has shown that if you get people laughing, they will tell you more intimate things about themselves. And people can game that. And they do game that. My brother had a colleague, my brother used to work in journalism and he had a colleague who always got better stories than him. He started listening to her

to work out what she was doing. What she did was she laughed a lot and people would tell her more things. It's got this very strong, positive bonding element, but then it gets more and more complicated. There are all these sort of things we can sort of see. That's got two sides to it, hasn't it? You know, the intimacy is lovely, but also that intimacy can be gained. Someone could grift at that. So, you know, it's a very interesting, a really phenomenally complex behavior based on it's an incredibly simple vocalization, and it's got such an old evolutionary history. and we use it in such a complex way. I find it fascinating and it's really hard to articulate it. I took me years even to believe that laughter, I thought laughter was about jokes. That's what I thought

it was for years before I read enough of other people's work to realize I was wrong. We don't have a lot of insight into our laughter. We like it, but we don't often sit down and really unpack what it means. Why do I, you know, we'll associate it with other people, so-and-so is, oh, and so-and-so's really lovely. It's got such a great sense of humor. And what you mean is, I really like so-and-so, and I laugh when I'm with him to show that I like him and in the hope he might like me. You know, so it's endlessly fascinating. I've been working on it for years now and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. The main thing I'm taking from that is that I really should be gaming laughter more and I should be using it more to get things. Well, you know, it can be extremely

effective. If you want to know how somebody feels about you, think of how they laugh around you, you know, and that's unfortunately highly gamable information for all you psychopaths out there. I'm not saying you're a psychopathic. I'll try that next time. I'll let you know. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Sophie Scott on The Science of Laughter. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store.

Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.