The science of laughter with Sophie Scott | 91TV
Transcript
- Thank you very, very much to the Royal Society for this extremely kind honour, which I am delighted
- to accept, and now you're all my prisoners because of it because I'm going to tell you about
- laughter. I want to start by thinking a little bit about laughter before we get into the science and
- the nature of laughter. I'm going to start with a clip that's been doing the rounds on social media
- for the past few weeks from a television program in France from 2016 called C'est Mon Choix, It's
- My Choice. The title is, 'My Laughter Does Not Pass Unnoticed,' and they've got together
- some people whose laughter does not pass unnoticed, and it sounded a bit like this.
- [Loud
- laughter]
- Yeah okay, I think I noticed that. Something happened there, didn't it?
- It's interesting if we look back at the science of laughter and trying to account for whatever
- was happening there, what was that thing? The first scientist to really engage with laughter
- as a behaviour was in fact Charles Darwin. He wrote in his book, 'The Expression of the
- Emotions in Man and Animals,' he wrote a lot about laughter. There's beautiful
- description in the book of keepers at London Zoo tickling various primates for him to observe,
- and one of the things he noticed was that they made quite a gentle sound, but also - this is
- really lovely - their eyes would brighten and sparkle, and the sparkling and brightening
- of the eyes was something he was very struck by. Now it's actually very interesting as a scientist,
- a neuroscientist or psychologist, to go back and read this book, because a great deal of
- what he talked about in terms of emotions that you could find in humans and in other animals,
- other animals that seem to have this shared evolutionary quality, we carried on studying as
- psychology developed through the next 150 years. So emotions like fear and anger and disgust,
- we tracked all that. He basically started it and we followed in his footsteps, and we just ignored
- everything he said about laughter. We paid no attention to it whatsoever. It just languishes
- scientifically. So if I go on to Web of Science and I do a search on the published papers using
- the search term emotion, expression and fear, I'll get back 4731 papers. If I switch out
- fear for laughter, I get 259 papers. That's it. That's all of them. Most of those, interestingly,
- are clinical cases where laughter is appearing as an unwanted sort of symptom in somebody
- who has a problem, a neurological problem. Very little empirical work around laughter.
- I think it seems like a silly thing to study. It feels a little bit foolish,
- and I think we probably should pay more attention to Charles Darwin and look a bit more for that
- sparkle because it is very interesting. So I've got a couple… So Darwin was obviously interested
- in laughter in animals, and I'm just going to show you a couple of examples of that. So
- laughter in other apes is pretty easy to spot. It looks and sounds like human laughter. We're
- apes. This makes sense. So I've got a clip here of the late comedian Robin Williams meeting the late
- gorilla Koko, who lived in the US and who could sign. She did American Sign Language, so she
- signs to him at the start, 'Tickle. Tickle me,' and it's really humourless like,
- 'Just do it. You said you would. Tickle me,' and he does. He tickles her and it's hard.
- It's really hard to tickle a gorilla and it takes him a while.
- They've got thick skin, and when he gets in there you'll see what starts to look like the eyes are
- sparkling. She starts moving in a very familiar way. Her face moves in a very familiar way, and if
- we could hear it there's a very gentle sound. The other thing I have to point out is that Koko was
- extremely interested in human nipples, everybody's nipples, and devoted a great deal of her time and
- attention to investigating them, which explains some of the other things happening on this video.
- So here we go. Tickle me. She's not working, so what have you got going on
- here? Okay. Try harder, try harder. He manages it now.
- Then she's just like, let's not waste each other's time. What's going on there?
- It turns out other apes are not the only animals that laugh.
- So laughter has actually been, or laughter-like vocalisation has been,
- very well described in rats. It doesn't sound like our laughter or ape laughter. It's a very
- high-pitched squeaking sound. Scientists, Jaak Panksepp and his colleagues, have studied this,
- and this is just showing an example of a rat being tickled in the lab. When they take their
- hand away. The rat is running around trying to get the person to tickle them again. So it's an
- activity that the rat enjoys. The rat wants to be tickled. Apparently if you tickle them every day
- in the lab, they start making the sound when they see you come in. 'Come on, do it. Tickle me.' It
- turns out… I always used to say, 'Well, there's probably more laughter out there. We're just
- not looking for it.' If we look at laughter as an index of play, and that's what… I should say this.
- Darwin thought that laughter was an expression of joy. He thought it was an emotional expression of
- joy. Panksepp, working with the rats, thinks that laughter is an invitation to play.
- You can see those two things could be linked, but it is interesting if you look at play. It's a very
- interesting and important primate behaviour. All mammals, in fact. All mammals play when they're
- juveniles, and some continue playing their whole lives. It's a very important behaviour. You need
- to show that you're being playful. So what you find is animals use what's called play face,
- this very loose, open, unthreatening mouth. That's play face going on there with the dogs.
- Play is so important to dogs, in fact, they have this thing called play bow.
- That's what the dog at the top here is doing, and that basically says, 'Everything after
- this is a game. I might growl but I'm not mad at you because we're playing a game.' This is
- brilliant. So what this is all doing is saying, 'This is playful.' So the same behaviour could be
- aggression or unpleasant or sexual, but now you're saying, 'No, this is playful. It's all okay.'
- A guy called Greg Bryant in the US did a much wider search on play vocalisations in mammals
- and found that the most unlikely mammals such as cows and weasels also make play
- vocalisations. Laughter seems to be one of these sounds that you make during play
- to show that you're being playful. So along with the play bow, along with the play face,
- there is this sound, this sound that you make to say, 'I'm being playful. This is a
- game. This is fun.' So likely cows are laughing alongside the weasels. Laughter-like behaviour,
- or certainly a play vocalisation, has even been described in parrots suggesting that you might
- find it in other very social animals. You don't find it in all parrots. These are kea parrots
- from New Zealand, which are extremely sociable. In New Zealand they're considered to be naughty
- parrots because they're slightly too playful if anything, and when they play they make a sound.
- So we're seeing this relationship between play and laughter in other animals. Possibly also
- true for us. Well, let's take a look at humans and laughter. In humans,
- it's important to contrast laughter from other things that we can do with our voices. So this
- is just a vocal tract image of somebody talking in our MRI scanner, and this is just a glimpse of the
- complexity of what happens when human beings start speaking. No other animal can make the sounds we
- make. It's absolutely extraordinary the way that we can use our tongue, our lips, our soft palate,
- our voice box, all of this moving continuously and shaping the sound that we're making,
- and giving us this unparalleled complexity of the sounds that humans can make with their voices.
- This is under a very distinct pattern of brain control. Brain areas that you don't
- find in other animals are recruited in humans to control the complexity of our speaking,
- and if these brain areas are damaged, then we have great difficulty talking.
- If these brain areas are damaged, we can still make other kinds of sounds because
- we have another completely different way of producing vocalisations, one that we
- share with other mammals that's older, and it runs under a different kind of neural control,
- which I'll show you in a second. That's involved in emotional vocalisations like laughter.
- So this is just showing you the same woman with a vocal tract imaging. Now instead of talking she's
- laughing in the scanner, and you'll see all of those beautiful complex movements go away.
- What's happening is she's opening her mouth, the tongue staying at the bottom of the mouth,
- and then she's making a lot of noise and that's laughter. So this is an extremely
- basic way of making a sound. This is effectively more like an animal call than it is like speech.
- When we laugh in this involuntary way, if you think about the last time you were
- laughing and you couldn't stop laughing, when you were laughing like this, it's under this
- very different pattern of neural control. So instead of these bits at the side of the brain
- that are controlling things that we voluntarily do with our voice there's this midline system that's
- going from the anterior cingulate down through the periaqueductal grey to the brainstem nuclei,
- and then directly controlling the articulators, and in fact also the rib cage, which we use a lot
- when we're doing things with our voice. So that's why patients who have damage that means they have
- difficulty speaking can still do things like laugh and cry. This this older network is undamaged.
- Just a glimpse here of what… You could see she was moving a lot in the scanner,
- although her mouth was just opening. That's because when you laugh a great deal of stuff is
- going on down at the ribcage. The human ribcage is extremely interesting and very important. You're
- all using it right now to do what scientists call staying alive. Very important. Don't stop doing
- that. So to stay alive, what you do is, you do what's called metabolic breathing. Very important.
- Don't stop. You take the muscles between the ribs and the diaphragm at the bottom of the rib cage
- and you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between the ribs. You contract them, it pulls the
- rib cage up and out, and that creates negative pressure inside the lungs. Air is drawn in,
- and then you relax them back out and it pushes the air out. So that's metabolic
- breathing. Continue doing that. If I was to put a breath belt on you, so just measuring
- how your ribcage is moving in and out as you breathe, I would see this sinusoidal
- pattern that you see up at the top here. So that's what you're all doing at the moment.
- As soon as we start talking we use the rib cage very differently, and we use the
- rib cage to very finely control the flow of air out through the larynx. It's extremely complex,
- although it doesn't feel very hard. That's actually again something very unique to humans.
- We have this ability to control how we breathe out using these same muscles. We see a very different
- pattern of movement of the rib cage. As soon as we start laughing this gets different again.
- Now for laughter you have these single very, very large deflections of the rib cage,
- and each one of those big deflections is just pushing air out of you. So each of those ha,
- ha, ha sounds is one big movement just squeezing air out. We don't have a good understanding of the
- way that this is happening at the brain level, but if there is a competition between laughter and
- breathing and talking, laughter will normally win. It stops you from breathing. It stops you from
- talking. It's just squeezing air out of you. It's trying to kill you, and it's relatively dangerous
- in that respect. It is a little bit stressful on the ribcage, but don't stop obviously. Now,
- sometimes if you're really lucky when you're listening to Radio 4 in the morning you hear
- the systems start to compete with each other. So one of the things I really like to listen
- out for is when people who are doing live radio or live television start to laugh, because you
- hear these two systems, the speech production system which you're trying to use to talk
- and the laughter production system which has somehow got in there and is going to stop this.
- You hear them duking it out, and what you can often hear happening first is that people have
- difficulty controlling the pitch of their voice. So I've got an example here from the Today
- Programme from a few years ago. Charlotte Green is about to try and read the news. The
- pitch of people's voices is shown down in the lower panel in blue.
- You're going to hear somebody coming down the line first.
- '…Unpopular replacement has now been dismissed, with the Army's popular chief of staff Jack Twatt
- taking over.' 'A 40-foot sperm whale which was stranded in the Firth of Forth for more than
- four days is now thought to be swimming towards open waters again. It freed itself late last
- night. Marine experts are hoping to establish this morning whether the whale is finally back at sea.'
- 'Good luck to the whale. 8:10 is the time. An investigation is underway…'
- Now if you're interested in laughter and voices and speech like I am, this is gold dust.
- There's everything here. The guy coming down the line has got to say a bit of a rude word,
- 'Popular chief of staff Jack Twatt,'. and he just goes for it. Nothing to see here.
- 'Popular chief of staff Jack Twatt.' Then back in the studio, where Charlotte Green is crucially…
- We'll get to this. She's not on her own. Somebody whispers to her just before she starts to read
- the news headlines, and if you listen very, very carefully, what they whisper is, 'Jack Twatt,'
- because they are doing one thing and one thing only. They are trying to make her laugh,
- and at first she's okay. She's doing all right. The whale in the Firth of Forth is
- coming out okay. Then the laughter starts to get her and she's starting to lose control of
- what's happening at her voice box, because she's losing control of what's happening at her cage.
- Then her voice starts to shoot up in pitch and then at the end, if you listen very carefully, she
- continues to make squeaking noises after she has stopped talking because now she's fully laughing
- live on the radio. Now, the BBC doesn't like this. The BBC does not like their news or their
- sports broadcasters to show emotion when they are broadcasting because it's considered to be bad
- form. That's the power of what's happening here. She doesn't want to do it and it still happens.
- So we've got this very interesting behaviour. It can kind of creep up on you. It seems to often be,
- at least potentially, not under your voluntary control. Something else we were interested in,
- laughter basically insisted we study it. Me and my PhD student Disa Sauter, and then many other
- colleagues I'll come across, we were interested in these emotional things in the voice, but every
- time we looked at things that included laughter, laughter started to do something else interesting.
- So, for example, we were very interested in the extent to which if you go outside of the UK and
- you study these nonverbal emotional vocalisations, how many of them can be recognised when you go
- to a completely different culture. So Disa did several trips with Frank Eisner out to Namibia
- where she was working in northern Namibia - they were working in northern Namibia - with members
- of the Himba community. These were not people who had any contact with people from Europe at all.
- They don't have a written culture, they don't have electricity. They haven't seen or heard
- anybody from our culture before, so they haven't been contaminated by the way we express emotions.
- So if these guys recognise emotions from the voice, from people recorded back in London, and
- vice versa, it might suggest that, much as Darwin had suggested, there is some shared evolutionary
- history that's leading to these being common vocalisations across humans wherever you grow up.
- A lot of work has been done on this with the face. We were the first to try and do it with
- the voice. I say we like I went. I was part of it, but sitting back in London coming up with
- ideas. 'You go to Namibia and do this.' So we also recorded the Himba giving emotional vocalisations,
- and I want you to see if you can tell what emotion this guy is expressing with his voice.
- [Vocalisation]
- So no points for spotting at the end there he started laughing.
- Anybody take a guess at what's happening before then? I have to say there is somebody from
- the Himba here. Please don't spoil it. This has happened to me before. Anybody guess? Did it sound
- positive? Did it sound negative? It's positive. Did it sound like high energy or low in energy?
- He's actually expressing triumph. So this is an example of an emotion that's not so culturally
- specific that another culture doesn't understand it. He knows what it means to feel triumphant.
- That makes sense to him. When he expresses it, it's not recognisable to us as triumph. That's a
- culturally specific expression of emotion. That's not one of the things Darwin was talking about.
- Then at the end he starts laughing. If you listen very carefully, it's because he's surrounded by
- other people who are laughing at him and he joins in, and that's immediately recognisable.
- That looks, certainly from this, like we're seeing something that looks a lot more recognisable in
- both directions. The English recognise the Himba. Do the Himba recognise the English? Well, yes,
- they do. So the emotions that have been studied from the face, fear, anger, disgust and sadness,
- we also found could be recognised from the voice both by the Himba and by the English.
- So if you're in the middle of the Namibian desert and you get vomit on your hand and
- you go, 'Eeurgh,' they would know exactly what you meant. There's a shared recognition there,
- again along the lines of Darwin's suggestion. The only positive emotion that we tested which was
- showing that everybody's recognising everybody was laughter. So this emotion of joy, of invitation to
- play is looking like a universal human emotion. Something else that looked surprising to us about
- laughter was a study we did with my colleague Jane Warren and Disa Sauter, and this was… A
- lot of what I do is really boring stuff on how the brain processes speech and sound. We just thought,
- 'What happens when instead of hearing speech you hear these emotional vocalisations?' So we
- had people listening to laughter, triumph sounds, fearful sounds and disgust sounds. We chose those
- because they're all very recognisable and they're not confusable. What we found was actually a lot
- of activity in parts of the brain, shown up there in green, which you would use to produce
- sounds when you hear them. So this looks like what scientists call mirror systems.
- These are brain areas activated both by perception and by production, so you're
- kind of mirroring what you're hearing as part of your trying to understand what that thing is.
- The thing that was very striking was that this wasn't the case for all the emotions.
- The emotion that was really driving this sort of mirroring response was laughter. We thought,
- 'That's interesting, because laughter is very contagious. Laughter is a behaviour that you can
- catch from other people. Is that what we're seeing here?' Even if you're having your brain scanned,
- which is monumentally unamusing, when you hear somebody laugh, you get ready to laugh a bit,
- even if you don't make a sound, and we were trying to make sure people didn't
- make any sounds. So there's some sort of automatic engagement, like a priming.
- This turns out to be something that is quite interesting. So I'm going to show
- you a very brief clip of this. I'm going to show you a clip of two people broadcasting.
- There are two men in this clip. The man on the right, he is going to hear something that
- makes him laugh, so he's going to start laughing pretty helplessly. This man does not laugh at the
- thing that is heard, but is quite worried because they're broadcasting live and now his colleague is
- laughing at someone who's called in, and he keeps looking quite worried. The other thing to notice
- is, he also keeps laughing and smiling, and that's just contagion. So even though he doesn't want to,
- he is joining in when his friend laughs, and you might have a sense of why that is as well. So now
- we're going to see the whole clip. So these two men have quite different reactions, but even the
- worried man keeps smiling and laughing.
- in the [unclear 0:20:52.0], but we're just going to sing for you.'
- He's already trying not to laugh.
- 'Okay.'
- [Singing]
- Worried. Holding it together.
- [Singing]
- Something's happening.
- [Singing]
- Worried.
- 'I was asking…'
- This is why.
- [Laughing]
- 'I certainly did enjoy that.'
- Lots of smiles, lots of laughs.
- 'He's caught up in the spirit. He's getting the
- Holy Ghost over here. Anyway, we want… He has his favourite…
- He still loves you. We want to give you the address. Give us the address, and
- we want to give you a t shirt here.'
- 'Oh!'
- 'Send him a t shirt right here. Right. Moral consciousness. Enjoy that. Danny from Florida.'
- 'Oh, I'll never be the same. Oh, it broke me up. Oh.'
- So there's two different kinds of laughter going on there, one absolutely helpless,
- the other being continuously being caught, all those little smiles and laughs, in between which
- he was looking quite worried. That's the power of contagious laughter, and the really striking thing
- about contagious laughter, which I will come back to, is that it's something we learn to do. Babies
- don't laugh contagiously. When babies laugh, parents laugh. When a parent laughs, the baby
- doesn't laugh. We teach babies to do this. It's something that actually may be specific to humans.
- It's possible actually other animals don't laugh contagiously. I'll come back to this. So if we
- zoom into humans in a bit more detail, there's some really interesting work by the late… I've
- got to say, everybody in my talk on laughter has died over the past few years. I mean every… I'm
- worried about the people in the French clip now, because… They've got to… Hold, on guys.
- So the late scientist, the psychologist Robert Provine, did this really beautiful work in
- the '70s, '80s and '90s about laughter, and he pointed out that if you ask people about laughter,
- 'What makes you laugh?' they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humour. Of course,
- we do laugh at comedy and jokes and humour, but actually if you look at people and you
- follow them around, as Robert Provine liked to do, what you find is that laughter is
- primarily a social behaviour. So actually most laughter happens just because of social reasons.
- You are 30 times, three zero times, more likely to laugh, he found, if there is somebody else
- with you than if you're on your own, and you'll laugh more if you know them and you'll laugh
- more if you like them. Some of that is contagion, but there's also other reasons why people laugh.
- Children like other animals will laugh when they are playing. They will laugh to show
- that this is a game. This is fun. Adults will laugh when they are playing. They will laugh
- to show that this is a game, that this is fun. In fact, just like with other animals,
- we will use laughter to show that our intentions are playful, even if superficially it might
- look like what's happening is simply violent. It's really striking. Work with de-vocalised
- rats shows that the rats, they're de-vocalised. They can't make any sounds. They will play with
- other rats. Rats are very social and the other rats want to play with them, and they will go
- and have these playful interactions. However, they are more likely to be bitten during play
- than the normal rats because they can't make the sounds that indicate they're playing. They
- can't make these play vocalisations, and the play runs out of control. The interpretations change.
- So if laughter is immensely complex in rats, think what that must mean for humans.
- We all laugh more than we think we do. There are not many studies of this, but every study that's
- compared how often people say they laugh with how often people actually laugh finds that everybody
- across the board underestimates the frequency with which they laugh. I don't know why this
- is. I sometimes wonder if it's because in a lot of social situations laughter is so normal that
- you don't notice it, per se. You notice it if it's not there and you were expecting it, for example,
- but it's certainly… Never trust any study that says, 'Oh, three-year-olds laugh more than
- 60-year-olds,' because what they will have done is ask those 60-year-olds how often they laugh,
- and they don't know because nobody knows. All of us are terrible at this.
- So laughter is incredibly sensitive to social context. You will laugh more if you know other
- people. You'll laugh more if you like those people. You can tell. Greg Bryant has shown
- this. If you play people recordings of two people having a conversation and laughing together,
- people can tell how close those friends are from the way that they laugh together. So it's
- unbelievably sensitive. It happens in particular contexts, and you show with your laughter and the
- way you laugh how you feel about the people that you're with. We will use laughter to
- make and maintain social bonds, but we will also use it to improve mood and the mood of others,
- our own and other people's mood. If you think about it in this bonding way, it actually
- creates intimacy. So work from Robin Dunbar has shown that if you get people laughing they will
- tell you more intimate things about themselves. People feel closer together as a result of this.
- I have to take a brief aside here and say my father was a carpet salesman,
- and he was very funny. I used to worry, genuinely worry a great deal, when I was a child that he
- made people laugh and then they would want carpets they didn't really need, and they would be left
- with unnecessary carpeting as a result of all this sort of giddy closeness caused by the laughter.
- It has very interesting cultural effects. So we can see that laughter is recognised
- across all human cultures, and it can have different uses in different human cultures,
- but also actually the amount of laughter does vary with human cultures. So countries in the
- world that have a more varied history of migration, so just over their history,
- more people, more different people have moved through that country, what you find
- is that the people in those countries produce laughs and smiles that are more easily decoded
- and recognised by other people, they're less ambiguous things, and also they do it more.
- So there's something about laughter, possibly because if you are in an environment where you
- can't assume everybody speaks the same language as you, then laughter becomes an even more important
- way that you can communicate in a non-verbal way, in a way that will probably be understood.
- We laugh have to show that we're okay. We laugh to mask other emotions. Laughter is a very,
- very effective way of covering up other emotions. I'm not going to show it here,
- but do go onto YouTube and watch Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey after he'd been
- found cheating and taking drugs. He looks furious and like he does not want to be there,
- but he continuously laughs and smiles in a way that doesn't quite reach his eyes, but he's really
- trying to use laughter to go, 'I'm fine with this. This is brilliant and very much what I was hoping
- would happen,' as possibly this man is very happy he's been covered in a yellow goo. Possibly not.
- Actually, this becomes one of the most important uses of laughter. We will use
- laughter to deal with stressful situations. Robert Levinson, still alive in the US,
- has done really interesting work with married couples where he finds that married couples who
- deal with stressful situations… He puts them in a stressful situation by asking them to
- discuss a problem in their marriage together. Everybody feels stressful when that happens.
- He measures this with a polygraph so you can see people getting more stressed. Their bodies
- change. The couples who deal with that with what he calls positive affect - but he means
- laughter and smiling - not only in the moment get less stressed, but also they feel better.
- They're able to get over this difficult thing. They laugh about what's happening,
- but they also are the couples who stay together for longer and are happier in their relationship.
- It's not because laughter is a bit of magic dust that makes everything okay,
- because this only works if the laughter is shared. If one person's going, 'I do snore terribly,
- don't I?' and the other person's going, 'It's a massive problem and I'd like you to stop,'
- no one feels better now. Robert Levinson's doing this beautiful work with married couples,
- which is great. It's amazing because it's longitudinal studies over years and years.
- I don't think this is limited to romantic relationships. I think a lot of what we call
- friendship, people with whom we can deal with a stressful situation by negotiating our way
- to a better mood. One of the best examples I can give you of this in a public field is
- this difficult and stormy relationship between Yeltsin at the end of the USSR and the starting
- of the Russian Federation, and the situation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was having a series
- of ill-tempered meetings with the rest of the world, culminating in a meeting with Bill Clinton.
- He came out from this and started haranguing the press,
- and Bill Clinton watched him like a hawk. Then, when he got the first reason why he could laugh,
- he did laugh. His name was mentioned and he just started laughing. He's like, 'Ha, ha, yes,
- that's my name.' At first Boris Yeltsin just smiled and carried on, and then Bill Clinton
- laughed again. Then Yeltsin starts saying, 'Oh, you're the disaster,' to the press, at which
- point Clinton's on the floor like, 'This guy is just hilarious,' and this makes Yeltsin laugh.
- The really clever thing was that Clinton didn't look like he was laughing at him at any point.
- He was like, 'This guy is just brilliant,' and so Yeltsin's like, 'I am brilliant, I'm hilarious.'
- So a difficult situation very skilfully defused with laughter to a less stressful situation,
- but again the key was the laughter was shared. Laughter seems to have its power for letting us
- negotiate ourselves to a less stressful situation by laughing together. Levinson's couples, it
- worked when they laughed together. Here it worked when they laughed together. If he'd just laughed
- at Yeltsin, it would have been, if anything, a diplomatic disaster. So what we have is this very,
- very complex behaviour and interestingly, because it happens in social interactions,
- it's an emotion that lives when we are with other people. We do laugh when we're on our own. We're
- just so much more likely to laugh when we're with other people. In fact, where you find laughter
- happening most frequently is during conversation. So if you look at laughter in conversation,
- you'll find we do laugh at jokes, but most of the time we're still not laughing at jokes. We're
- laughing to show affection and affiliation, but we're also laughing to show agreement,
- understanding, recognition. In fact, at any one point in time Provine found that the person who
- laughs most is the person who's talking. We're using the laughter to get other people to show
- they agree, they recognise, they remember. So it's an incredibly communicative behaviour.
- What you have to think of as laughter is this really complex nonverbal communication which is
- a play vocalisation for our ape cousins, but which we've kind of evolved in this extremely complex,
- really nuanced way of doing a lot of the heavy emotional work in the middle of human speech,
- which is the most complex form of sound, certainly that you can find on Earth normally. We drop
- continuously into this ancient play vocalisation to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting.
- Laughter is never neutral. In other words, when you hear laughter we're always trying to
- understand it, and we can see that in people's brains if we play people different kinds of
- laughter. So we've got people laughing completely helplessly like this. Oh, are you going to play?
- [Laugh]
- So that's me laughing helplessly. My voice goes ridiculously high,
- or somebody's laughing more communicatively like might happen in a conversation.
- [Laugh]
- Now, people are good at telling the difference between those two different kinds of laughs. In
- fact, when we put people into the scanner - and this was a study done by my colleague Carolyn
- McGettigan when she was working with me - what you find, is even if you just don't tell people
- to do anything with the sounds, they're just listening to sounds, we put loads of other sounds
- in there as well, when you hear the laughter people are trying to work out what's going on.
- When you hear somebody laughing helplessly you get lots of activation shown in blue
- in auditory parts of the brain, possibly because you hear sounds you don't hear in
- any other context. When you hear somebody laughing in that more communicative way,
- you get loads more activation now in parts of the brain to do with working out what somebody
- else's intentions are. So even if again you're just having your brain scanned, you are trying
- to work out when you hear somebody clearly laughing in a more communicative way [laughs]
- maybe they're trying to cover up being angry. Maybe they're trying to get someone to like
- them. Maybe they're trying to show that they like somebody. Maybe they're trying to cover
- up being in pain. Maybe they're trying to deal with stress. There's all these different reasons
- why people laugh, and you're trying to work it out all the time. It's that important.
- Interestingly, that priming response that I showed you before, that kind of contagion,
- you get to any laughter. It doesn't matter what the kind of laughter is. What does make
- a difference to the priming response we see in the brain was actually how good people
- were at telling the difference between the two different kinds of laughter. So we scanned people
- and then we got them out and we gave them a test discriminating these different kinds of laughs,
- and what we find is, the better they are at that, the more they showed a priming response when we
- scanned them earlier. So it's not just contagion. When you're getting ready to join in, when you
- hear laughter, it actually helps you understand what that laughter means, and there's significant
- variation across people in this. Some people are better, and we'd like to know why that is.
- One reason might be neurodiversity. So we did a study with Essi Viding's lab with boys at risk of
- psychopathy. So these are boys who are teenagers who are high in callous and unemotional traits,
- and they are also showing profiles of conduct disorders compared to boys who are not at risk of
- psychopathy. What you find is those boys at risk of psychopathy do not find laughter as contagious.
- Remember, contagious laughter is something we learn to do. They don't show that. They just
- don't find the laughter makes them want to join in as much. When we scan them they don't show
- that same brain response. So there is something really interesting going on here. I'm not saying
- psychopathy is a problem of laughter, and we don't know what the direction of causality here is,
- that there's something different about these boys that means they can't learn how to laugh,
- laugh contagiously, or is it that they haven't had the opportunity to laugh,
- to learn to laugh contagiously, bearing in mind it's something we all learn to do.
- So at the end of the talk, I just want to think a little bit about laughter and other animals and
- humour. So similarities between humans and other mammals is, laughter is associated with tickling
- for all of us. It's associated with play for all of us. The de-vocalised rats, very similarly to
- us, if you can't make a sound that indicates that your intentions are playful, then that behaviour
- can be misunderstood. In fact, chimpanzees have two different kinds of laughs. They
- laugh differently if they're laughing when they're being tickled than if they're trying to make play
- last longer, which is very like our helpless laughter and our more communicative laughter.
- There are really interesting differences. So human laughter is louder. We want other people to hear
- when we are laughing. We broadcast our laughter. Human babies will laugh at being tickled, but
- they'll also laugh at things that don't require physical contact. All other mammals, when you find
- laughter, or parrots, it's to do with physical contact. There's a physical element. We don't
- need that. Right from when laughter first appears we will laugh at other things, perhaps because
- babies are picking up on a playful intention that's leading them to laugh. Only humans learn
- to laugh contagiously, so laughter seems to be able to jump the gap between humans. It doesn't
- require physical contact for it to be there, and it has to be said there are no convincing examples
- of humour in wild mammals of any kind. You find laughter in other animals. You do not find humour.
- I think, just to briefly touch on humour, one of the things that's very interesting about humour
- is our ability to again read intentions. I'm just going to show you a very quick clip. This is from
- the theatre group Told By An Idiot, who did a lovely investigation of old black-and-white
- slapstick and why people find it funny when people fall over, and they recreated some scenes from
- Charlie Chaplin. I just want you to watch this recreation and look how the actors are pointing
- you to where the points are, the funny points, by signalling their intentions. They're not
- behaving like people… Charlie Chaplin is about to try and steal food. This is not how people
- behave when they're stealing food. Something else is going on. It's a performance for you.
- [Music
- plays]
- So I sometimes wonder if humour is built on this ability to sort of have laughter and play happen
- a distance. You don't have to have the physical contact. It's also true that the two interact.
- So we found that laughter makes things funnier. If you add laughter onto jokes, as my PhD student
- Ceci Cai did a couple of years ago, jokes are rated as funnier. This is just showing you lots
- of different jokes. They were stinkers, these jokes. What's the best day for cooking? Friday.
- Add laughter onto it, people rate them as funnier, and the more spontaneous the laughter the funnier
- it makes the joke, which of course we then… A couple of weeks almost after we did this,
- we went into lockdown and lots of comedians were trying to do comedy on Zoom, where you didn't have
- the laughter and it felt different. It felt wrong. So I just want to finish by circling back to this
- point about laughter and intimacy. So laughter has been described as the shortest distance between
- two people. I've always loved this quote for the sense it gives you of the closeness that it gives
- you, the sense of bonding. I want to go back to one last example of laughter. So this is just over
- 30 years old now. Laughter from Brian Johnson and Jonathan Agnew trying to do a recording
- of Test Match Special after the second day at The Oval. Here we've got Ian Botham who tried to jump
- over the wickets and didn't make it. I'm going to show you… I'm going to play it to you. What
- I want you to do, because obviously I've done an acoustic analysis of this - I'm not a wild
- animal - this is showing you the pitch of their voices. You can see what happens after the joke.
- As soon as the joke happens Brian Johnson's voice goes up, and then when you've got the periods in
- red, that's when they're both laughing. look at how high the pitches of their voices go.
- I just want to take one listen to ,this and then just see what we can learn from this
- that might tie it all together about laughter. So over to Jonathan Agnew and Brian Johnson.
- 'He knew exactly what was going to happen. He tried to step over the
- stumps and just flicked a bail with his with his right hand.' 'He tried to do the
- splits over it, and unfortunately the inner part of his side must have just removed the
- bail.' 'He just didn't quite get his leg over.' 'Anyhow, he did very well indeed,
- batting 131 minutes and hit three fours, and then we had Lewis playing extremely well.'
- Pitch of his voice has gone up because he's smiling.
- 'Forty-seven not out. Aggers, do stop it. And he was joined by DeFreitas who was in for 40 minutes,
- a useful little partnership there. They put on 35 in 40 minutes and then he was caught by Dujon
- off Walsh. Lawrence, always entertaining, batting for 35 [laughs] 35 minutes, hit a
- four over the wicketkeeper's [laughs]… Aggers, for goodness' sake, stop it. Yes. Lawrence…'
- He tries to speak.
- 'Did extremely well. [Laughing] He hit a four over the wicketkeeper's head and he
- was out for nine. Tufnell came in, batted for 12 minutes, and then was caught by Haines off
- [unclear word 0:42:08.4] for two,
- and there were 54 extras and they were all out for 419. I've stopped laughing now.'
- So I think this just makes so many of the points that I'm talking about. So first of all,
- the main reason that they start laughing is that they're both there. If they'd been on their own,
- even if they had thought, 'Didn't quite get his leg over,' they would have been very unlikely
- to start laughing like this. Then very quickly they're not laughing because the joke is funny.
- They're laughing just because of contagion. So it takes about 30 seconds from the joke for Brian
- Johnson to be finally completely overwhelmed by laughter, but that's it really starting to have
- its effect. I think there's something else interesting going on. I mean. Some of it's
- he keeps saying, 'Oh Aggers, do stop it,' or 'I've stopped laughing now,' and basically he was saying
- this to explain to the listeners why they were laughing. Apparently the producer was standing
- in front of them staring at them by the end of this like, 'Stop doing it. You'll get in trouble.'
- They didn't want it to happen. Also I think one of the reasons why people
- like this clip - it's the second most popular non-musical clip that gets used on Desert Island
- Discs, people really love it - is because I think one of the things you're hearing is friendship.
- If those two men had detested each other, they would not have been laughing that way. You're
- hearing that in the laughter, even 31 years later. So I think it's a really interesting behaviour,
- and I think it's definitely something that scientists should take more seriously. We
- should have paid more attention to Charles Darwin. I'd just very quickly like to say thank you to a
- few people. I'd like to say thank you, though not everybody is listed here, but all the different
- scientists I've worked with, particularly on laughter, particularly Andy Calder, Zarinah Agnew,
- Carolyn McGettigan, Jane Warren, Disa Sauter and Fran, Cesar Lima, Sinead Chen, Ceci Cai and
- Addison Billing, Nermin Karmosia, Essi Viding. They've all been amazing. Kyle Jasmine. It's
- been an amazing group of people to work with. I'd like to say thank you very much to my partner
- Tom and our son Hector, because they make me laugh a lot and are great people. I'd like to say thank
- you very much to my parents, Colin and Christine Scott, for laughing a great deal - you can see it
- starting to happen there with my father wearing a hat - and supporting their hapless daughter
- and her interest in science. I'd like to say thank you to UCL for genuine support for public
- engagement. They take it very seriously and I'm very grateful to them for that. They value it.
- I would like to say thank you very much to the Royal Institution for giving me the opportunity
- to do the Christmas lectures, which were just awesome and I really enjoyed every moment of it,
- even though I sometimes was running away and being sick because it was so anxiety-provoking.
- It was just amazing. I say thank you very much to the Royal Society for this amazing opportunity
- and for everything they do to encourage scientists and science engagement. Thank you.
- Thank you very much, Sophie. I was sitting there trying to keep a straight face because the Royal
- Society is a serious place. I don't think it has heard as much laughter in 350 years as we had
- this evening. Don't start laughing, Sophie. So we have time for a few questions. There are questions
- from the audience here. If you have a question, please put your hand up and then just wait for
- a microphone to come to where you are. Then we also have questions for people who are online.
- There is a… What you need to do, I've got the instructions here. So if you go to the website…
- Is it back there? No. So www.slido.com. If you go to that website and then you enter the code
- hash F1110, you can write a question there. So www.slido.com and the code is hash F1110.
- So let's start with the questions here from the audience. I can see lots of hands up. I'm
- not surprised. So let's start over there, because those hands went up first I think.
- Thank you. My question is, are there any civilisations which
- engage in ritual laughter, for example in religious ceremonies?
- It's a good question and I don't know. Robin Dunbar thinks that group laughter,
- potentially in a more formal way, was a really important precursor to human language,
- laughing in groups and the ability to laugh in that way,
- and that could have had something that had a more formal element to it. I wouldn't
- be surprised if there weren't examples of this, but I'm not aware of any. I'm sorry.
- Yes.
- Can I take away from this lecture that it's perfectly okay for me to laugh at my own jokes?
- Definitely. It makes them funnier, David.
- Thank you.
- Over there, and then we take that one, that one, one over here and then the ones online.
- Just curious to know if there's any studies of what happens when people laugh on their own,
- which I catch myself doing sometimes, but I don't
- have the neuroimaging equipment to hand to look at what's happening.
- Well, you know the dirty secret about a lot of what I've talked about here is, we don't
- actually know the precise thing that happens in your brain when laughter is triggered. So that
- woman I showed you laughing, we've really tried to capture what was happening in her brain at the
- same. It's hard. It's hard to do that. So I think that would probably be the same. It's
- just that you would be much more likely to laugh intensely if there would be other people there.
- There was one over there.
- Sophie, the first time you showed me that clip, the audio clip,
- I wondered whether there was something about the fact that they weren't allowed to,
- and the Charlotte Green one's the same. So I just wondered what is going on with the idea
- that you're not allowed, and of course if you tell somebody, 'Stop laughing,'
- of course they laugh more. Do we have any idea of what's happening there?
- No. It's very interesting, and because laughter primes laughter,
- one of the worst things you can do is think, 'I really should stop laughing,' because that's not
- going to help at all. It's interesting if you watch actors who… It's bad form to laugh on
- stage. Corpsing is not generally considered to be amusing. They seem to prepare a great deal
- by keeping laughter away from them. They're not mucking around backstage. They're getting into
- a more serious mode. Just don't let it around. If it creeps in, then you're lost. So it's more like
- trying to push it out than to think, 'Oh no, I'd better stop it,' because that won't work.
- Right. Let's take two more just in order for the… Oh,
- the microphone is over there. Good. Yes, please. You had your hand up a long time.
- I'm really disappointed to discover that the very, very funny circus act with a grumpy
- monkey I saw many years ago in Budapest was not spontaneous humour by the monkey. So are
- you sure? That's a side thing. What I was wondering about was,
- you were talking about people being very unlikely to laugh on their own, but
- some of my social media interactions are quite a quick exchange of jokes and building on jokes
- and responding to jokes, and I do find myself literally laughing out loud, as the kids say.
- So are we just adapting to a social situation that is mediated by technology, or am I peculiar?
- No, I don't think… First of all, I think your point about the monkey, I didn't go into this,
- but there is something interesting that happens to apes when they are around humans. There are
- monkeys in zoos, chimps in zoos who have been reported to do things to deliberately get the
- attention of humans, and then when they've got the human's attention, they hurl faeces at them and
- the humans run away, but they laugh. It's the laughter that seems to cause it. The chimps
- don't laugh. They're like, 'Oh, this is going to be brilliant, but we're not laughing.' So
- human laughter seems to be interesting to other apes. They don't do humorous things, but they do
- behave differently around human laughter. Remind me of your second point, sorry. It was about the…
- About laughing alone at jokes on social media.
- So there is some work on this. Laughter lives in interactions,
- so if you look at different kinds of human interactions, the more social information there
- is, the more laughter there'll be. So you get most when it's face to face, in person, less when it's
- face to face but you're on a computer screen, less when you're on a phone, less when you're on text,
- but you still don't get none on text. There's still an interaction. It's interesting the ways
- people try and put laughter back in with GIFs or roflcopters, or whatever the different… To mark
- myself out from the Ascii era. That's always evolving. There's a whole use of emojis around
- laughter that I don't understand because I'm old. There's a crying emoji that people use. I'm very
- aware I would probably use it to say, 'Very sad news today, crying emoji,' and I know that that's
- wrong, is all I know. I don't really know when it would be right. You're getting a lot of that
- same sense of the fun of the interaction and the humour. It's just will be still less laughter than
- there probably would be if you were in person, but there's still some because it's an interaction.
- Okay. I'd like to just take a couple of questions from the questions I have online. There's quite
- a lot of those, but we only have time for a couple of them. So one is from John Evans,
- and the question is, can we use laughter to overcome pain, and if so how?
- It definitely does, because when you laugh you get an increased
- uptake of the naturally circulating endorphins, and they're the body's natural painkillers.
- It's exactly the same thing that would happen if you did exercise of any kind. You get this.
- It's possibly the case that you get more endorphin effects from laughter without
- having to expend the same amount of calories and energy, but that certainly happens and it
- does give you measurable differences. So even really fake laughter gives you big
- measurable changes in pain tolerance, within limits. I don't think your surgeon saying,
- 'Brilliant idea. Why don't I make you laugh? You won't need an anaesthetic,' I suspect
- probably wouldn't happen, but it definitely has a measurable effect on pain tolerance.
- Right. So last question, very intriguing question, which is from somebody called
- Avi. And the question is why do we cry when we laugh uncontrollably?
- It's a very good question. Humans are the only animals that produce emotional tears.
- I don't know if that's because we have hairless faces and tears show up on our faces,
- but we use them. Most people produce tears when they sob with sadness.
- Quite a lot of people… Put your hand up if you cry when you get angry.
- Mostly women. A lot of people… Put your hand up if you cry when you're laughing. It's a great deal
- of people. What links across that, because you don't cry when you're disgusted and you don't cry
- when you're frightened, you don't cry when you're surprised, is… I wonder if there's something about
- a sort of helplessness, that you're helpless with sadness, or you're feeling helpless when you're
- angry if that's what's happening. When I feel angry and I don't feel helpless, I don't cry.
- When I laugh, it's almost the first thing that starts happening. So there's a sort
- of incapacity that you're signalling with it. That's our best guess. We don't really know.
- Well very good. So there's lots of questions, but unfortunately we almost run out of time. I'm glad
- we haven't completely run out of time because there's one last thing I need to do before we
- thank Sophie again. So, Sophie, if you can come over here with me, I have something for you there.
- So this is the Michael Faraday price, and this is a medal that I'm told you mustn't pawn or sell,
- but it's worth a lot. Sophie, it's a great honour for me on behalf of the
- Royal Society present you the 2021 Michael Faraday Prize. Here it is.
- Thank you very much.
- Congratulations.
- Congratulations.
- Thank you so much. Thank you.
- Thank you, and thank you so much for everyone who came up,
- who came to the lecture, and in particular to Sophie for a really, really memorable lecture.
- I'm going to be laughing all the way home. She who laughs last laughs best. Thank you Sophie.
Join us for the Michael Faraday Prize Lecture 2021 given by Professor Sophie Scott.
In this prize lecture, Professor Sophie Scott will explore the science of laughter - how laughter has evolved, its functions in mammals, and the ways that humans use laughter. Professor Scott will show how laughter is used to communicate much more than humour, and the importance of laughter in our social interactions. We will also explore the neural basis of laughter, and the possible ways that we vary in the ways that we process laughter.
91TV Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture is awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary. The award is named after Michael Faraday FRS, the influential inventor and electrical pioneer who was prominent in the public communication of science and founded the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution. In 2021, the prize was awarded to Professor Sophie Scott CBE FBA FMedSci, for her work in engaging the public with neuroscience through events, talks, TV and radio, and exemplifying how science communication can enhance scientific excellence.
About the Royal Society
91TV is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.
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