Suzanne's Mom's Blog

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Ha ha ha ha ha.

Back in the 1990s, I had a stint as the editor of a publication called Minnesota Physician, where I interviewed a local physician who referred to himself as “the laugh doctor.” He convinced me that even forcing yourself to laugh can create endorphins in your body that are good for your health.

More recently, I saw research about this at the Washington Post. Daryl Austin has the story.

“My three young daughters like to watch pets doing silly things. Almost daily, they ask to see animal video clips on my phone and are quickly entertained. But once my 7-year-old lets out a belly laugh, the laughter floodgates are opened and her two sisters double over as well.

“This is just what science would predict.

“ ‘Laughter is a social phenomenon,’ says Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied laughter and other human reactions for more than two decades. Scott co-wrote a study showing how the brain responds to the sound of laughter by preparing one’s facial muscles to join in, laying the foundation for laughs to spread from person to person.

‘Contagious laughter demonstrates affection and affiliation,’ Scott says. ‘Even being in the presence of people you expect to be funny will prime laughter within you.’

“Scientists have yet to definitively find a funny bone, but they are revealing nuances about the laugh impulse. Laughter’s positive psychological and physiological responses include lessening depression and anxiety symptoms, increasing feelings of relaxation, improving cardiovascular health, releasing endorphins that boost mood and even increasing tolerance for pain.

“Laughing has also been shown to lower stress levels. ‘Cortisol is a stress hormone that laughter lowers,’ says Scott, adding that anticipation of laughter also ‘drops your adrenaline’ and the body’s heightened fight-or-flight response. ‘All of these things contribute to you feeling better when you’ve been laughing,’ she says.

“Because humans are wired to mirror one another, laughs spread around a room just like yawns, says Lauri Nummenmaa, a brain researcher and professor at Aalto University School of Science in Finland whose work appears in a recent special issue on laughter in the journal Royal Society.

“ ‘We simply copy the behavior and laughter of others,’ Nummenmaa says. ‘Someone else’s act of laughing is first perceived when seen or heard, and this sensory information is then converted into the same area of the observers’ brain.’

“Studies also indicate that laughter can strengthen relationship connections. This happens, in part, because people naturally want to be around those who make them feel good the way laughing does. ‘We crave the company of the individuals who can give us such feelings,’ Nummenmaa says. …

“Contagious laughter isn’t necessarily a phenomenon unique to humans. Great apes, for instance, have been documented behaving similarly.

“ ‘Laughter is a play signal in humans and many other animals,’ says Disa Sauter, a social behavior professor at the University of Amsterdam. ‘It is used in rough-and-tumble play across species.’ …

“ ‘Vocal play signals frequently accompany other nonvocal behaviors, such as the play face in primates … or the play bow in dogs,’ according to a 2021 study in the journal Bioacoustics. The cues help differentiate threatening actions from play fighting and wrestling. …

“You can, of course, laugh alone, but the contagious nature of laughter means we’re more likely to laugh harder and longer in groups, as at a comedy club or in a movie theater.

“Psychologist Robert Provine showed that ‘you’re 30 times more likely to laugh with other people than you are on your own,’ Scott says. In his seminal book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine wrote that the ‘contagious laugh response is immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: brain to brain.’ …

“ ‘Laughter has many subtle rules that make adults highly attuned to when it’s socially appropriate,’ says Harry Witchel, a physiologist and neuroscientist at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in Brighton, England.

“There are circumstances, he notes, when people laugh at something that is not humorous: ‘Laughter is regularly linked to joy, relief, tickling, sudden incongruity, social discomfort, dominance, humiliating another and many other causes.’ …

“In Laughter, Provine described ‘laugh epidemics’ [like] the plague of laughter’ that befell numerous Central African schools starting in 1962: Contagious ‘laugh attacks’ among several groups of students lasted several hours to many days and continued until two schools had to close for extended periods of time. …

“Although scientists have uncovered much about laughter’s health benefits and its contagious element, there remain many unknowns, including how contagious laughter is learned in the first place.” More at the Post, here.

I wonder how blogger Laurie Graves — whose fictional characters can communicate through thoughts — reacts to the idea that “contagious laugh response [is] the most direct communication possible between people: brain to brain.” Might be something to use.

Contagious laugh response in Mongolia.