#99 Why We Laugh: The Many Shapes and Forms of Laughter with Neuroscientist Sophie Scott

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Harvard University, Sophie Scott

Notable quotes from "#99 Why We Laugh: The Many Shapes and Forms of Laughter with Neuroscientist Sophie Scott"

• Learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to…

  about Harvard University · at 0:15

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People

• Sophie Scott — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:28
  Tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with neuroscience is Sophie Scott she studies the science of laughter it turns out that…

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• Harvard University — Company · 1 mention · first at 0:18

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Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with neuroscience is Sophie Scott she studies the science of laughter it turns out that everything we think we know about laughter is wrong laughter is not even primarily a response to humor I'm excited to learn more welcome Sophie and thanks so much for our conversation today hello and thank you very much for inviting me why is laughter worth taking seriously I think because it's probably one of the more important emotional Expressions that we use socially if you

1:02 ask people about what makes them laugh they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humor but if you actually look at people what they do is they laugh when they're in company laughter is a social behavior you are 30 three Z times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own and you'll laugh more if you know those people and you'll laugh more if you like those people and that's why you shouldn't think of it as an expression of amusement actually because most of the time laughter has got nothing whatsoever to do with jokes it's a social Joy it's an joy that you experience when you're with other people so I think you can think of laughter as being an expression of a sort of playful socially delightful Joy it's something you experience when you're with other people now that might be on a screen or it might be in real life but it there has to be that sense of a social connection for it to start

1:48 happening it's possible to laugh on your own it's just much less likely so I think from that perspective it's really worth valuing laughter and taking laughter seriously because it's an emotion it's an emotional expression but it's one that lives in social interactions and that makes it very very interesting because unlike emotions like say fear and disgust or surprise I was once walking down the street and slipped on some ice I didn't completely fall over but I slipped enough that I completely produced an involuntary vocalization of surprise oh like that absolutely involuntary and there's nothing social about that at all that was just an emotion yeah that was just being driven off because don't know quite where this is going something's happening which laughter doesn't work that way laughter primarily as I say you do find that people laugh when they're on their own but it's much much less

2:38 likely it is primarily happening in these social interactions and it's happening in a highly communicative way as well as a sort of basic emotional expression way so people will use laughter to show that they know and they're affiliated with the people that they're talking to and it also it's worth taking seriously because it works people will use laughter for lots of different reasons but a really important reason why humans will use laughter is to reduce stress and it's very effective at that as long as everybody joins in if you share laughter together you will feel better together we can actually use it to negotiate a better mood together which makes it very important emotion so if you want people to laugh what do you do it's interesting because there's no one thing that everybody finds funny and that's like a almost like a truism for humor there is no one joke everybody finds funny there's no one comedian

3:28 everybody finds funny even slapick humor which is much more Broad in its reach there'll be somebody somewhere going oh that's not funny my brother died that way there's no one thing so I don't try to get people laughing nowadays when I'm doing things in the lab I don't bother trying to use humor at all what we use are videos of normally television presenters who get the giggles while they're broadcasting and they have to keep talking cuz they're on air and that's actually very effective because that just leans into the fact the laughter is highly contagious a lot of the laughter we produce is happening just because we've heard or seen somebody else laughing and if you watch a video of somebody desperately trying to do a broadcast while they're really trying not to laugh but the laughter keeps coming through there's a strong clues that that's spontaneous laughter that is authentic laughter but also

4:19 they're desperately trying to cover it up which makes it almost funnier than if they just started laughing so that works very very well to get people laughing and it doesn't require you to find anything funny and it doesn't require you to know any of the people involved so a lot of the ones we use are actually from the US so the people in the UK don't know who those people are but they still laugh when they start laughing so interesting are people who laugh a lot happier very very hard to know so everybody underestimates how often they laugh there aren't many studies on this but every study that has said got people to give up rating of how often they laugh and then actually observes them finds it everybody is Under reporting their laughter it's like we don't remember it almost so it's difficult because you can't rely on people's self-report we've been developing a questionnaire about laughter and we

5:09 found that the single biggest factor that sort of varies across certainly adults in the UK and in China about laughter is how much people think they laugh so it is a big thing that people think about their laughter and how much they do or don't laugh a lot but we can't find any predictive value of that so there's no relationship that we so far between how much people think they laugh and how much they actually do laugh but I think the other thing that's true is if you remember that laughter doesn't happen randomly laughter happens when you're in certain social situations and people won't laugh if they're feeling really uncomfortable even if they're with other people and they won't laugh if they're feeling very kind of exposed or like they're on show so one of the easiest ways to get people to stop laughing is to get them into the lab and say now laugh they just don't do it they won't do it so I think it's

5:58 possible that people who are are happier laugh more it's also possible that people who laugh more are happier the direction of causality is probably more like a virtuous circle both affects the other but all of it only possible because of the people that you're laughing with that's going to be affecting your mood as well I can remember when I was a child my father was a Salesman and I used to he was very good at using laughter socially he was funny and people liked him CU he was funny and he would make people laugh he was a funny witty man but I used to genuinely worry that people were buying he carpets I was really worried that people would end up buying more carpets than they wanted to because he was making them laugh oh don't worried about this but i' noticed even from a young age that he laughed completely differently when he was with his friends mostly female friends but he had a handful most people do you don't have

6:46 all that many really close friends and he laughed totally differently when he was with his close friends almost kittenish there was none of that kind of dominating controlling the room sort of element of his laughter he was just delighted at being with his friends and I think everyone sort of has that you're laughing with a lot of different people but you're laughing really intensely and in a really relaxed way I think not with just anybody and I think that's again where some of the power of laughter comes because if you think of laughter as being a really effective way of making and maintaining social bonds and that's again one of the things you find about laughter wherever you find it is often playing this role do people in conversation mirror each other in laughter also I think they do if you think about contagion as being like that so contagion behavioral contagion it's actually quite common in Social animals

7:34 so if you look at a behavior like yawning yawning is very very common in animals many animals yawn but lots of animals also yawn contagiously so they yawn just because they have seen or heard another conspecific yawning and it's a social signal it's a sign of affiliation and you find it in humans you find it in dogs and chimps you find it in Turtles and budger rard so it's really that's really really widespread and there are quite a lot of behaviors that work this way so blinking is quite contagious coughing is contagious scratching is contagious and it's pretty complex so if you look at orangutangs they scratch contagiously and actually it's a sign of anxiety in orangutang so if an orangutang is scratching itself that means it's anxious and if another orangutang picks up that it mirrors back that scratching they're basically indicating oh yeah I know what you mean this is M that doesn't great so you have

8:30 this whole world of sort of contagious behaviors and they tend to have this affiliative element to them and it's also true for laughter however humans are the only animals where contagious laughter has been shown so other animals laugh but they don't laugh contagiously they don't just catch a laugh which makes it very interesting partly also because it's something we learn to do so contagious behaviors are not things we're born doing babies don't blink unless they need to refresh their eyes they don't yawn when somebody else yawns they don't laugh when somebody else laughs so we teach babies to do these contagious behaviors and then that becomes a very actually it's a very important aspect of social interactions the ability to mirror laughter back at each other very effectively is a great way for laughter to spread in a group of people and it's also a great way of if you think about it as having this very

9:19 important affiliative role it's a great way of sort of getting that affiliative mirroring running in a very unconscious way people very rarely notice that they're doing it if you ask them why they're doing it they will come up with a reason they'll say oh that was funny but in fact it wasn't it was just contagion so if laughter helps develop social ties and connections are there people that use laughter transactionally definitely if you think of that use of laughter to sort of show to regulate emotions so to deal with stressful situations that's actually quite a common use of laughter in we don't worry about it when it works but it can be a way that some people will laugh to deal with sometimes with situations that are quite serious when the Roger I going to say his name wrong that man at Fox who was had been a Serial harasser of female colleagues they made the film bombshell about it and then like 2016 lots of

10:16 women started to tell their stories and he had quite a formal way of sort of propositioning women and the number of women who said when he' proposition them that they'd laughed and they were laughing to try and deescalate that situ situation to say I know you don't mean it I know that you're just kidding and to give him a plausible out like I was just messing around but of course he can say oh they're laughing they're fine they're enjoying it there's a real complexity there that people's interpretation of laughter is as important as the intention somebody has with their laugh it can be something that people will also use to try and cover up other things that are more serious lie to you for example and use the laughter as aort of cloak to say well none of this matters this is all just fun so definitely that's possible and I think it's like a Hall of Mirrors laughter the complexity of it in terms

11:06 of both why it's being produced and how it is perceived is very very nonfixed just because you want to laugh to be interpreted in a positive way doesn't mean to say somebody necessarily will do so so I had a I had a horrible situation at work just horrible when a colleague rang up a colleague with whom I already had quite a difficult relationship ship not someone I knew well but I relied on facilities associated with this person so I had to keep them sweet and they called up to complain about something and while they were calling up to complain someone in the room with me started laughing and nothing I could say could prevent them from believing that not only had I offended them and they were complaining about it but now we were all laughing at them there nothing I could and there now they were anticipating negativity they were not in a good mood with me but that's not why the laughter happened in fact the

12:01 laughter was me looking at a student going what have you done like seriously what's going on here and the student laughed because she was embarrassed but it didn't matter didn't matter no didn't matter what I said so the complexity is manifold it's complex in terms of where we produce it and it's complex in terms of how somebody perceives it and how they choose to interpret it for spontaneous laughter how does that affect both the person laughing and any listener I suspect probably one of the nice things about spontaneous laughter because you feel really good when you've been laughing anyway but spontaneous laughter you do it sounds like the sun coming out and it feels wonderful you do get big physiological changes when you laugh full stop but particularly if you start laughing hard like a real spontaneous laugh so you get a change in the uptake of the body's naturally circulating painkillers which are

12:51 endorphins and that's why you feel Buzzy and good when you've been laughing it's exactly the same as anything you might do after exercise which is when you also get an endorphin hit you get a run as high and you've been laughing you also get a reduction in Adrenaline and that's so that actually that endorphin buzz you get from any kind of laughter even really fakes laughter it seems to be to do with how you're engaging your rib cage you also get a change in adrenaline adrenaline is that fital flight hormone that makes your heart start racing and you're scared and that is lower after you've been laughing than it was before you were laughing while you're actually laughing it tends to go up because you're doing quite a lot of work it's quite stressful for your heart when you're laughing you also get a reduction in cortisol associated with laughter cortisol's a stress hormone it's what wakes you up in the morning it's why

13:41 waking up in the morning can sometimes feel a bit grim and it's also the hormone that runs at high levels when you are feeling stressed and you sleep badly and your appetite goes over and you don't feel right that's cortisol at work high levels of cortisol running chronically it's not good for your mental health it's not good for your physical health it has a slower lag than adrenaline which works really quickly so it works much more slowly cortisol but you find cortisol levels drop off when people have been laughing so you're feeling less stressed you're feeling more relaxed that is wonderful so we should all laugh more definitely definitely in high stress situations or jobs like police officers or doctors and nurses and hospitals is laughter different is there more laughter to d-stress there does seem to be so this has been studied less about laughter but more about jokes but of because the jokes are

14:35 an attempt to get laughter going what you find in high stress professions like the police or the fire service or Medics or nurses do you tend to find that there are professional jokes things around which people joke so in the UK Apparently one of the things that the police laugh about in the UK is the fire service they make jokes about the fire service I'm presumably Vice Versa and they also will make jokes about the things that they have to deal with which can make their humor seem very dark but actually I think that's doing several things all at once so it's giving people a reason to laugh together you're doing a high stress job in a team you're going to improve your sense of bonding by getting a chance to laugh together you are going to be able to deal with some of the stressful things you have to deal with by expressly laughing at it you are going to feel better together by laughing at things you are keeping other

15:33 people out you're excluding people with the darkness of the thing that you're laughing at and the really specific job related aspects of that it's I don't think that's random it's meant to be a bit shocking to other people because this is actually you're the team that has to work together they are The Outsiders they don't understand there's been a couple of cases there is a l to describing this and over the past couple of years there's been a number of cases in the UK where whatsappp groups between police officers have been made public and revealing awful things like some horrible crime scene where two sisters were killed in a park in the middle of London in a very public place and it was a very very horrible thing and one of the police officers who had to stand guard over the scene took inappropriate photographs and put them on the WhatsApp group of this crime scene I absolutely guarantee you they were trying to be

16:26 funny doesn't make it funny but I'm certain that's what the intent was and that's one of the reasons why it was so shocking I'm not saying it's right at all but that's I think an extreme example of this what you find in high stress jobs which often is this very dark sense of humor which is still aimed at getting laughter but also really an exaggerated way keeping other people out before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with is there anything else that's important about laughter that you would like to mention what should I have asked you that I did not people always want to know if it's different between men and women and pretty much everything I've talked about here is the same for men and women the different kinds of laughter the way that we hear laughter the effects of laughter on the body the ways that we use laughter socially the only thing that comes up a bit is that everybody laughs

17:18 more contagiously with someone they know than someone they don't know male and female familiarity absolutely rules for contagious laughter I think women may have learned to use laughter was perhaps a way of managing situations with unfamiliar men who can be something of a little bit of a mixed bag Sophie this has been great what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today well they are all about laughter and they do some of it I probably already said then the first one is laughter is never neutral and that's why it can sometimes be something that alarms you or amuses you but it always has meaning and your brain is always trying to work out that meaning it's a very good tell about when things feel a little bit off if laughter is wrong or if laughter is absent so I think that's an important thing to remember I would say listen to your own laughter who do you laugh with who makes you laugh who

18:12 doesn't make you laugh if you know someone who seems to laugh in a really irritating way I bet you don't like them because actually it's you not joining in with the laughter as often as anything and you're not laughing along don't we have that kind of relationship so listen to your laughter and I think I value your laughter it's often cuz laughter maybe it feels childlike it feels trivial it doesn't feel sort of civilized and sophisticated and comedies never win Oscars and people who are comedians are always sort of assumed to be improvising on the spot rather than incredibly polished artists but actually love really matters in your day-to-day life is probably one of the most important things you do in your day is the time when you're just chatting to colleagues with a cup of coffee and having a laugh about something that happen in a meeting that feels like wasted time but it's actually probably

19:02 some of the most important time in your day so value your laughter make time for it that's wonderful advice thank you Sophie this has been terrific that's absolutely pleasure lovely to meet you thank you if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at 3 takeaway.com

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "#99 Why We Laugh: The Many Shapes and Forms of Laughter with Neuroscientist Sophie Scott"?

In order: 0:00 Harvard University, Sophie Scott.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

3 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Harvard University, Sophie Scott. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#99 Why We Laugh: The Many Shapes and Forms of Laughter with Neuroscientist Sophie Scott"?

The episode runs 20 min; the transcript is about 3,766 words in 23 timestamped sections.

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