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Hi. I'm going to talk 
to you today about laughter,

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and I just want to start 
by thinking about the first time

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I can ever remember noticing laughter.

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This is when I was a little girl.
I would've been about six,

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and I came across my parents
doing something unusual

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where they were laughing.

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They were laughing very, very hard.

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They were lying on the floor laughing.

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They were screaming with laughter.

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I did not know what they were 
laughing at, but I wanted in.

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I wanted to be part of that,

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and I kind of sat around
at the edge going , "Hoo hoo!"

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Now, incidentally,
what they were laughing at

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was a song which people used to sing

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which was based around
signs in toilets on trains

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telling you what you could
and could not do

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in toilets on trains.

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And the thing you have to remember
about the English is, of course,

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we do have an immensely
sophisticated sense of humor.

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(Laughter)

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At the time, though, I didn't
understand anything of that.

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I just cared about the laughter,

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and actually, as a neuroscientist,
I've come to care about it again.

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And it is a really weird thing to do.

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What I'm going to do now
is just play some examples

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of real human beings laughing,

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and I want you think about the sound
people make and how odd that can be,

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and in fact how primitive
laughter is as a sound.

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It's much more like an animal call
than it is like speech.

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So here we've got some laughter for you.
The first one is pretty joyful.

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(Audio recording of different people laughing)

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Now this next guy, I need him to breathe.

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There's a point in there
where I'm just, like,

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you've got to get some air in there, mate,

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because he just sounds
like he's breathing out.

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(Recording of laughter)

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This hasn't been edited, this is him.

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(Recording of laughter)
(Audience Laughter)

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And finally we have this,
the human female laughing.

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And laughter can take us to some pretty
odd places in terms of making noises.

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(Audio recording of laughter)

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(Laughter)

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She actually says, "Oh my God,
what is that?" in French.

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We're all kind of with her.
I have no idea.

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Now, to understand laughter,
you have to look at a part of the body

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that psychologists and neuroscientists
don't normally spend much time looking at,

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which is the ribcage,

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and it doesn't seem terribly exciting,

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but actually you're all using 
your ribcage all the time.

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What you're all doing 
at the moment with your ribcage,

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and don't stop doing it, is breathing.

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So you use the intercostal muscles,
the muscles between your ribs,

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to bring air in and out of your lungs

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just by expanding
and contracting your ribcage,

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and if I was to put a strap 
around the outside of your chest

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called a breath belt, and just look 
at that movement,

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you see a rather gentle sinusoidal
movement, so that's breathing.

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You're all doing it. Don't stop.

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As soon as you start talking,

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you start using your breathing
completely differently.

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So what I'm doing now is you see
something much more like this.

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In talking, you use a very fine
movement of the ribcage

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to squeeze the air out,

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and in fact, we're the only animals
that can do this.

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It's why we can talk at all.

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Now, both talking and breathing
has a mortal enemy,

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and that enemy is laughter,

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because what happens when you laugh

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is those same muscles
start to contract very regularly,

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and you get this very marked
sort of zig-zagging,

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and that's just squeezing
the air out of you.

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It literally is that basic a way
of making a sound.

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You could be stamping on somebody,
it's having the same effect,

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you're just squeezing air out,

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and each of those contractions
-- ha! -- gives you a sound.

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If the contractions run together,
you can get these spasms,

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and that's when you start getting
these "haaaaa" things happening.

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I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter)

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Now, in terms of the science of laughter,
there isn't very much,

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but it does turn out that pretty much
everything we think we know

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about laughter is wrong.

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So it's not at all unusual, for example,
to hear people to say,

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"Humans are the only animals that laugh."

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Nietzsche thought that humans
are the only animals that laugh.

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In fact, you find laughter
throughout the mammals.

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It's been well-described
and well-observed in primates,

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but you also see it in rats,

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and wherever you find it

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-- humans, primates, rats --

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you find it associated
with things like tickling.

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That's the same for humans.

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You find it associated with play,
and all mammals play.

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And wherever you find it,
it's associated with interactions.

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So Robert Provine, who has done
a lot of work on this,

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has pointed out that you are 30 times 
more likely to laugh

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if you are with somebody else
than if you're on your own,

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and where you find most laughter

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is in social interactions
like conversation.

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So if you ask human beings,
"When do you laugh?"

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they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk
about humor and they'll talk about jokes.

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If you look at when they laugh,
they're laughing with their friends.

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And when we laugh with people,
we're hardly ever laughing at jokes.

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You are laughing to show people
that you understand them,

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that you agree with them, that you're
part of the same group as them.

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You're laughing to show
that you like them.

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You might even love them.

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You're doing all that at the same time
as talking to them,

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and the laughter is doing a lot
of that emotional work for you.

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Something that Robert Provine
has pointed out, as you can see here,

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and the reason why we were laughing

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when we heard those
funny laughs at the start,

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and why I was laughing
when I found my parents laughing,

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is that it's an enormously
behaviorally contagious effect.

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You can catch laughter from somebody else,

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and you are more likely to catch laughter
off somebody else if you know them.

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So it's still modulated
by this social context.

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You have to put humor to one side


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and think about the social 
meaning of laughter

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because that's where its origins lie.

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Now, something I've got very interested in
is different kinds of laughter,

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and we have some neurobiological evidence
about how human beings vocalize

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that suggests there might be
two kinds of laughs that we have.

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So it seems possible that the neurobiology
for helpless, involuntary laughter,

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like my parents lying on the floor
screaming about a silly song,

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might have a different basis to it
than some of that more polite

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social laughter that you encounter,
which isn't horrible laughter,

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but it's behavior somebody is doing
as part of their communicative act to you,

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part of their interaction with you.
They are choosing to do this.

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In our evolution, we have developed
two different ways of vocalizing.

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involuntary vocalizations
are part of an older system

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than the more voluntary vocalizations
like the speech I'm doing now.

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So we might imagine that laughter
might actually have two different roots.

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So I've been looking at this
in more detail.

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To do this, we've had to make
recordings of people laughing,

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and we've had to do whatever it takes
to make people laugh,

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and we got those same people
to produce more posed, social laughter.

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So imagine your friend told a joke, and
you're laughing 'cos you like your friend,

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but not really because
the joke's all that.

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So I'm going to play you 
a couple of those.

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I want you to tell me if you think
this laughter is real laughter,

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or if you think it's posed.

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So is this involuntary laughter
or more voluntary laughter?

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(Audio laughter)

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What does that sound like to you?

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Posed? Posed.

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How about this one?

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(Audio laughter)

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(Audience Laughter)

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I'm the best.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Not really.

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No, that was helpless laughter,

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and in fact, to record that,
all they had to do was record me

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watching one of my friends listening
to something I knew she wants to laugh at,

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and I just started doing this.

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What you find is that people
are good at telling the difference

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between real and posed laughter.

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They seem to be different things to us.

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Interestingly, you see something
similar with chimpanzees.

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Chimpanzees laugh differently
if they're being tickled

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than if they're playing with each other,

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and we might be seeing
something like that here,

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involuntary laughter, tickling laughter,
being different from social laughter.

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They're acoustically very different.

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The real laughs are longer.
They're higher in pitch.

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When you start laughing hard,

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you start squeezing air out
from your lungs

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under much higher pressures
than you could ever produce voluntarily.

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For example, I could never
pitch my voice that high to sing.

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Also, you start to get these sort of
contractions and weird whistling sounds,

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all of which mean that real laughter
is extremely easy,

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or feels extremely easy to spot.

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In contrast, posed laughter,
we might think it sounds a bit fake.

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Actually, it's not, it's actually
an important social cue.

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We use it a lot, we're choosing
to laugh in a lot of situations,

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and it seems to be its own thing.

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So, for example, you find
nasality in posed laughter,

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that kind of "ha ha ha ha ha" sound

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that you never get, you could not do,
if you were laughing involuntarily.

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So they do seem to be genuinely
these two different sorts of things.

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We took it into the scanner
to see how brains respond

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when you hear laughter.

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And when you do this,
this is a really boring experiment.

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We just played people
real and posed laughs.

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We didn't tell them
it was a study on laughter.

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We put other sounds in there 
to distract them,

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and all they're doing
is listening to sounds.

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We don't tell them to do anything.

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Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter
and when you hear posed laughter,

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the brains are responding
completely differently,

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significantly differently.

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What you see in the regions in blue,
which lies in auditory cortex,

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are the brain areas that respond
more to the real laughs,

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and what seems to be the case,

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when you hear somebody
laughing involuntarily,

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you hear sounds you would never
hear in any other context.

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It's very unambiguous,

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and it seems to be associated
with greater auditory processing

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of these novel sounds.

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In contrast, when you hear somebody
laughing in a posed way,

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what you see are the regions in pink,

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which are occupying brain areas
associated with mentalizing,

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thinking about what
somebody else is thinking.

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And I think what that means is,

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even if you're having your brain scanned,
which is completely boring

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and not very interesting,

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when you hear somebody going,
"A ha ha ha ha ha,"

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you're trying to work out
why they're laughing.

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Laughter is always meaningful.

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You are always trying
to understand it in context,

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even if, as far as you are concerned,
at that point in time,

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it has not necessarily
anything to do with you,

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you still want to know
why those people are laughing.

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Now, we've had the opportunity to look 
at how people hear real and posed laughter

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across the age range.

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So this is an online experiment
we ran with the Royal Society,

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and here we just asked people
two questions.

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First of all, they heard some laughs,

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and they had to say, how real 
or posed do these laughs sound?

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The real laughs are shown in red
and the posed laughs are shown in blue.

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What you see is there is a rapid onset.

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As you get older, you get better
and better at spotting real laughter.

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So six year olds are at chance,
they can't really hear the difference.

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By the time you are older, you get better,

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but interestingly, you do not hit
peak performance in this dataset

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until you are in your
late 30s and early 40s.

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You don't understand laughter fully
by the time you hit puberty.

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You don't understand laughter fully
by the time your brain is matured

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at the end of your teens.

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You're learning about laughter
throughout your entire early adult life.

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If we turn the question around and now say
not what does the laughter sound like

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in terms of being real
or posed, but we say,

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"How much does this laughter
make you want to laugh?

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How contagious is this laughter to you?"
we see a different profile.

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And here, the younger you are,

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the more you want to join in
when you hear laughter.

237
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Remember me laughing with my parents
when I had no idea what was going on.

238
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You really can see this.

239
00:11:10,021 --> 00:11:12,416
Now everybody, young and old,
finds the real laughs

240
00:11:12,416 --> 00:11:14,261
more contagious than the posed laughs,

241
00:11:14,261 --> 00:11:17,171
but as you get older, it all becomes 
less contagious to you.

242
00:11:17,171 --> 00:11:21,375
Now either we're all just becoming
really grumpy as we get older,

243
00:11:21,375 --> 00:11:24,304
or it may mean that as you
understand laughter better,

244
00:11:24,304 --> 00:11:26,393
and you are getting better at doing that,

245
00:11:26,393 --> 00:11:29,339
you need more than just
hearing people laugh to want to laugh.

246
00:11:29,339 --> 00:11:31,986
You need the social stuff there.

247
00:11:31,986 --> 00:11:33,960
So we've got a very interesting behavior

248
00:11:33,960 --> 00:11:37,443
about which a lot of our
lay assumptions are incorrect,

249
00:11:37,443 --> 00:11:39,904
but I'm coming to see that actually

250
00:11:39,904 --> 00:11:43,085
there's even more to laughter
than it's an important social emotion

251
00:11:43,085 --> 00:11:46,614
we should look at, because it turns out
people are phenomenally nuanced

252
00:11:46,614 --> 00:11:48,221
in terms of how we use laughter.

253
00:11:48,221 --> 00:11:51,908
There's a really lovely set of studies
coming out from Robert Levenson's lab

254
00:11:51,908 --> 00:11:55,165
in California, where he's doing
a longitudinal study with couples.

255
00:11:55,165 --> 00:11:58,538
He gets married couples, men and women,
into the lab, and he gives them

256
00:11:58,538 --> 00:12:01,852
stressful conversations to have
while he wires them up to a polygraph

257
00:12:01,852 --> 00:12:03,634
so he can see them becoming stressed.

258
00:12:03,634 --> 00:12:06,899
So you've got the two of them in there,
and he'll say to the husband,

259
00:12:06,899 --> 00:12:09,681
"Tell me something that your wife does
that irritates you."

260
00:12:09,681 --> 00:12:11,187
And what you see is immediately

261
00:12:11,187 --> 00:12:14,624
-- just run that one through your head
briefly, you and your partner --

262
00:12:14,624 --> 00:12:18,772
you can imagine everybody gets a bit
more stressed as soon as that starts.

263
00:12:18,772 --> 00:12:21,396
You can see physically,
people become more stressed.

264
00:12:21,396 --> 00:12:27,178
What he finds is that the couples
who manage that feeling of stress

265
00:12:27,178 --> 00:12:30,684
with laughter,
positive emotions like laughter,

266
00:12:30,684 --> 00:12:34,492
not only immediately become less stressed,

267
00:12:34,492 --> 00:12:36,906
they can see them
physically feeling better,

268
00:12:36,906 --> 00:12:40,064
they're dealing with this
unpleasant situation better together,

269
00:12:40,064 --> 00:12:41,885
they are also the couples that report

270
00:12:41,885 --> 00:12:44,244
high levels of satisfaction
in their relationship

271
00:12:44,244 --> 00:12:45,915
and they stay together for longer.

272
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So in fact, when you look
at close relationships,

273
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laughter is a phenomenally useful index
of how people are regulating

274
00:12:51,474 --> 00:12:52,687
their emotions together.

275
00:12:52,687 --> 00:12:55,982
We're not just emitting at each other
to show that we like each other,

276
00:12:55,982 --> 00:12:58,057
we're making ourselves
feel better together.

277
00:12:58,057 --> 00:13:01,538
Now, I don't think this is going
to be limited to romantic relationships.

278
00:13:01,538 --> 00:13:04,011
I think this is probably
going to be a characteristic

279
00:13:04,011 --> 00:13:07,329
of close emotional relationships
such as you might have with friends,

280
00:13:07,329 --> 00:13:09,158
which explains my next clip,

281
00:13:09,158 --> 00:13:12,803
which is of a YouTube video of some
young men in the former East Germany

282
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on making a video to promote
their heavy metal band,

283
00:13:16,309 --> 00:13:19,211
and it's extremely macho,
and the mood is very serious,

284
00:13:19,211 --> 00:13:22,323
and I want to notice what happens
in terms of laughter

285
00:13:22,323 --> 00:13:24,273
when things go wrong

286
00:13:24,273 --> 00:13:28,125
and how quickly that happens,
and how that changes the mood.

287
00:13:29,869 --> 00:13:32,911
He's cold. He's about to get wet.
He's got swimming trunks on,

288
00:13:32,911 --> 00:13:36,649
got a towel.

289
00:13:36,649 --> 00:13:38,321
Ice.

290
00:13:38,321 --> 00:13:40,759
What might possibly happen?

291
00:13:42,593 --> 00:13:44,172
Video starts.

292
00:13:45,913 --> 00:13:47,562
Serious mood.

293
00:13:54,744 --> 00:13:59,249
And his friends are already laughing.
They are already laughing, hard.

294
00:13:59,249 --> 00:14:01,153
He's not laughing yet.

295
00:14:02,863 --> 00:14:04,512
(Laughter)

296
00:14:04,512 --> 00:14:06,723
He's starting to go now.

297
00:14:13,461 --> 00:14:15,518
And now they're all off.

298
00:14:15,518 --> 00:14:20,556
(Laughter)

299
00:14:32,653 --> 00:14:34,395
They're on the floor.

300
00:14:34,395 --> 00:14:38,017
(Laughter)

301
00:14:43,727 --> 00:14:47,039
The thing I really like about that
is it's all very kind of serious

302
00:14:47,039 --> 00:14:50,764
until he jumps onto the ice, and
as soon as he doesn't go through the ice,

303
00:14:50,764 --> 00:14:53,027
but also there isn't blood
and bone everywhere,

304
00:14:53,027 --> 00:14:54,600
his friends start laughing,

305
00:14:54,600 --> 00:14:57,992
and imagine that hadn't played him out
with him standing there, saying,

306
00:14:57,992 --> 00:15:00,436
"No seriously, Heinrich,
I think this is broken,"

307
00:15:00,436 --> 00:15:03,186
we wouldn't enjoy watching that.
That would be stressful.

308
00:15:03,186 --> 00:15:06,179
Or if he was running around
with a visibly broken leg laughing,

309
00:15:06,179 --> 00:15:10,010
and his friends are going, "Heinrich, I
think we need to go to the hospital now,"

310
00:15:10,010 --> 00:15:11,407
that also wouldn't be funny.

311
00:15:11,407 --> 00:15:13,069
The fact that the laughter works,

312
00:15:13,069 --> 00:15:16,031
it gets him from a painful,
embarrassing, difficult situation,

313
00:15:16,031 --> 00:15:19,116
into a funny situation, into what we're 
actually enjoying there,

314
00:15:19,116 --> 00:15:21,303
and I think that's 
a really interesting use,

315
00:15:21,303 --> 00:15:23,281
and it's actually happening all the time.

316
00:15:23,281 --> 00:15:25,972
For example, I can remember
something like this happening

317
00:15:25,972 --> 00:15:27,169
at my father's funeral.

318
00:15:27,169 --> 00:15:29,784
We weren't jumping round
on the ice in our underpants.

319
00:15:29,784 --> 00:15:32,425
We're not Canadian.

320
00:15:32,425 --> 00:15:34,880
But -- (Laughter) (Applause)

321
00:15:35,844 --> 00:15:39,747
These events are always difficult, I had
a relative who was being a bit difficult,

322
00:15:39,747 --> 00:15:41,247
my mum was not in a good place,

323
00:15:41,247 --> 00:15:44,771
and I can remember finding myself
just before the whole thing started

324
00:15:44,771 --> 00:15:48,108
telling this story about something
that happened in a 1970s sitcom,

325
00:15:48,108 --> 00:15:51,691
and I just thought,
I don't know why I'm doing this,

326
00:15:51,691 --> 00:15:55,432
and what I realized I was doing
was I was coming up with something

327
00:15:55,432 --> 00:15:59,821
from somewhere I could use
to make her laugh together with me.

328
00:15:59,821 --> 00:16:02,884
It was a very basic reaction
to shine some reason we can do this.

329
00:16:02,884 --> 00:16:05,569
We can laugh together.
We're going to get through this.

330
00:16:05,569 --> 00:16:07,065
We're going to be okay.

331
00:16:07,065 --> 00:16:09,496
And in fact, all of us
are doing this all the time.

332
00:16:09,496 --> 00:16:11,686
You do it so often,
you don't even notice it.

333
00:16:11,686 --> 00:16:14,101
Everybody underestimates
how often they laugh,

334
00:16:14,101 --> 00:16:17,119
and you're doing something,
when you laugh with people,

335
00:16:17,119 --> 00:16:21,949
that's actually letting you access
a really ancient evolutionary system

336
00:16:21,949 --> 00:16:25,756
that mammals have evolved
to make and maintain social bonds,

337
00:16:25,756 --> 00:16:29,146
and clearly to regulate emotions,
to make ourselves feel better.

338
00:16:29,146 --> 00:16:32,536
It's not something specific to humans.
It's a really ancient behavior

339
00:16:32,536 --> 00:16:36,600
which really helps us regulate how we feel
and makes us feel better.

340
00:16:36,600 --> 00:16:39,502
In other words, when it comes to laughter,

341
00:16:39,502 --> 00:16:42,172
you and me, baby,
ain't nothing but mammals.

342
00:16:42,172 --> 00:16:44,517
Thank you.

343
00:16:44,517 --> 00:16:51,763
Thank you. (Applause)