Giggles, guffaws, or belly laughs — whenever we crack up, we’re communicating more than we realize. Laughter, says Dr. Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London as well as a standup comic, is pretty complicated.
It’s a way of expressing group membership and affection (as long as nobody is laughing AT you) and involves a physical reaction as well as an emotional one.
Scott can make you laugh — and then explain why you did.
Phil Stieg: Hello, I’d like to welcome Professor Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist and director of the University College of London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Scott studies the science of laughter. She investigates how and why we laugh, as well as its contagious nature and its role in maintaining social bonds. And in her spare time, she is also involved in laughter in her personal life as a stand-up comedian. Let’s find out why laughter is so important in our lives. Sophie, thank you for being with us today.
Sophie Scott: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Phil Stieg: So you study the science of laughter. So I guess I’m asking what questions are you asking about human communication and speech as it relates to laughter?
Sophie Scott: I never set out to study laughter specifically. I started back in the’90’s I was already looking at speech on the brain and I was looking at nonverbal emotional vocalizations, things like screams and the sound of somebody sobbing. And those work quite well, they are much more analogous to faces in terms of kind of pure way of expressing an emotion. And I got into laughter because laughter is actually quite a commonly produced nonverbal emotional vocalization.
I thought when I first came across it, like everybody does, that it was something about jokes and comedy. So I thought, oh, here’s the emotion that we produce when we’re amused by something. And then the more I looked at laughter, the more it just behaved differently from a lot of the other emotions we were working with. It’s universally recognized, it’s very contagious. When you hear laughter, people will very often or start laughing. A great deal of the laughter people produce is happening just because somebody else is laughing.
Now, emotions are meant to be emotionally contagious. That’s the job of an emotion quite often is to make somebody else react emotionally to what you’re doing. Laughter is behaviorally contagious. So people will laugh even if they don’t know why they’re laughing And it also happens very, very frequently. It’s happening really commonly in people’s conversations and much, much more frequently than other nonverbal emotional vocalizations. And it started to make itself clear to me that laughter was actually something worth going into in a lot more detail, because it seems to have much more of a communicative role than an emotion like fear, which is a very important emotion, but we don’t encounter it very frequently in conversations, whereas laughter we’re encountering all the time.
Phil Stieg: Unless you go to a lot of horror movies.
Sophie Scott: Yeah…
Phil Stieg: So I would assume the vast majority of our listeners believe that laughter is a good thing and it’s part of their life. But what questions are you specifically trying to answer in regard to laughter? What are you questioning?
Sophie Scott: I’m very interested in one really concrete thing. I really want to get to grips with what when you start to laugh. If you think back to the last time you were laughing and you couldn’t stop – when you get completely overwhelmed by laughter, it stops you from doing anything else. It does.
Phil Stieg: So you’re looking at the motor component of laughter and not the emotional?
Sophie Scott: I’m very interested in the emotional side of it as well, but one really big concrete part that is very hard to study, because this is difficult to do in scanners is actually what are the sequence of events that actually results in that? And we are getting closer to looking at that. We’re getting better with our scanning techniques. It’s difficult because people move so much when they laugh and also they won’t just laugh to command.
Phil Stieg: So you can’t laugh and chew gum at the same time?
Sophie Scott: And I found the hard way that you just cannot put people into a scanner and say, now laugh, they just don’t do it.
Phil Stieg: Yeah, that was what I was going to ask. How do you study it?
Sophie Scott: Well, for the laughter production, what I tend to use are actually films and recordings of people trying to broadcast when they get the giggles and they can’t stop laughing because they’re often desperately trying to stop and the laughter comes through.
So you’re not trying to make people laugh by giving them something humorous, because people’s sense of humor can be very, very different, but you’ve definitely kind of relying basically on very strong contagion. This sounds really silly until you think about it. When people are laughing and you laugh along, you’ve already gone through a couple of decisions in terms of, am I included in this laughter? Am I part of it? Are these people nothing to do with me? Are they laughing at me? And these are all things that you line up very swiftly when you are starting to sort of understand what laughter means. So that kind of what laughter means and what it means for you.
Phil Stieg: But I would think that if you put a person in a functional MRI scanner and you get them to laugh, we’ll assume you can do that. I would think that there would be a part of the brain that lights up, as you said, related to the mechanical. Your throat’s moving, you’re making sound, but then there’s also the emotional component and what parts of the brain are activated there and how you dissect that out. So tell me, do you do that? Can you
Sophie Scott: It’s limited when you do this with fMRI. And that’s why another technique that I use with collaborators is to use positron emission tomography, because that.
Phil Stieg: Say that again And explain it in English.
Sophie Scott: Positron Emission Tomography is a way of you basically inject a radio tracer into somebody’s blood.
Phil Stieg: So it’s a PET scan?
Sophie Scott: It’s a PET scan. Yeah. What kind of tracer you use and exactly how you’re using it? The ones that we use will do things like, for example, sit on the endorphin receptors in the brain.
Phil Stieg: And the endorphin receptors are responsible for, like, the post runners high.
Sophie Scott: Correct, exactly. So when you get that really nice feeling after exercise. That’s because those receptors have been working harder and picking up more. The body’s naturally circulating painkillers, these endorphins. And so my collaborators in Finland inject these into people and then get them laughing and then scan them. The scanning period, is picking up what’s been happening in those receptors after the injection of the tracer, and that’s a way of looking at the neurochemistry of changes in the brain. And I think to understand the emotional impact
Phil Stieg: That’s looking really at the emotional component of it, then.
Sophie Scott: Right, exactly.
Phil Stieg: What about dopamine and serotonin? Are you tracing that as well?
Sophie Scott: Exactly. You can do the exact same thing, and you get big effects of endorphins. You also get dopamine responses.
Phil Stieg: So what you’re saying then is that we’re assuming, then, that laughter gives you pleasure and makes you happy by talking about dopamine, serotonin and the endorphins. Can laughter make you unhappy?
Sophie Scott: I suspect in a couple of ways it can do. So if you laugh at something that you know you shouldn’t have done. I was listening to a podcast this morning and somebody was talking about a program they’d made where they’d been sending up a politician, and on the recording, the comedian who’d done this was laughing a lot and I sort of thought, that’s funny. And then I thought, oh, but actually sounds that bit horrible, I felt there was a definite sort of mismatch . And because laughter can be so automatic. You can find yourself laughing at something before you thought, oh, is that right? No, that’s not for me.
Something else is, of course, when you’re always trying to work out are you being laughed at? You’re always trying to work out your relationship to laughter. Am I included? Am I excluded? Am I being laughed at? And being laughed at is absolutely horrible.
So the same laughter for the people laughing could be all positive and lovely and doing all that warm stuff and bonding them together, but for the person they’re laughing at, it’s absolutely appalling. It is ghastly and it’s happened to me. It’s awful. It’s a sort of a hall of mirrors laughter. Your reaction to it will be, and whether or not you laugh will be kind of driven not just by the sort of social understanding of what’s going on, but your relationships to the people within that.
And if you know somebody doesn’t like you, or you’re sort of uncertain about their motives, you might be a lot more suspicious of their laughter than if a friend is laughing when you think “it’s my friend. They’re laughing because they love me. Let’s all laugh”. There’s a lot of complexity and nuance in how we understand laughter and what laughter can mean to us. It’s really hard to tease apart the fact of laughter or the fact that you were in a situation where you felt safe to laugh. And with the right people who you wanted to laugh with, you can’t dissociate the social element from that.
Phil Stieg: I would think there’s a spectrum of laughter, the uncontrollable laughter, the laughing out loud, and I’m kind of interested in the individual, you know, when they talk and they do that little giggle, is that a nervous response? Is that kind of like a tick? Or is that on the spectrum of laughing?
Sophie Scott: I think it is on the spectrum of laughter. People will use laughter in lots of different ways when they’re having conversations. So people will use laughter just to sort of show that they know each other and like each other, but they’ll also use laughter to show that they recognize an allusion someone’s made or they agree with something someone said, or they understand something that’s been said.
So you’ve got this kind of affiliative laughter. You’ve got conversational laughter being used in quite a complex way and then you’ve got the fact that people will use laughter to try and deal with stressful situations. Robert Levinson in California, he’s shown that if you get married couples and you put them in stressful situations where they have to talk about a problem in their relationship and then you measure their physiological responses what you see is everybody gets stressed out from doing that because it’s stressful.
The couples who deal with that stress, with what he calls positive affect (he means smiling and laughter) immediately get less stressed. And they’re also the couples who stay together for longer and they’re happier together. But really critically, it only works if they both laugh, if they both smile. If one person is laughing and smiling and the other isn’t, nobody feels better. So there’s something about the kind of using laughter to deal with stress works when other people do it as well. If you do it on your own, it is less successful and that I think might lead you into often what we call nervous laughter is people trying to get other people to join in in that stressful situation and other people aren’t joining in so it remains nervous because it’s not working.
Phil Stieg: It kind of gets back to what you were talking about earlier. If you are a couple and one is laughing at the other one as you said, that’s miserable but if you’re laughing together I’m presuming it can be variable degrees but why is that so important to long term relationships?
Sophie Scott: I think it’s that the laughter is an index of the fact that you are both prepared to navigate your way to a different emotional state together. The worst case scenario is if the man is laughing and the woman doesn’t laugh and she’s already kind of halfway out the door.
Phil Stieg: Then you know you’re in trouble!
Sophie Scott: That’s exactly it. Now that sometimes gets interpreted while people saying oh, so women have got it all the heavy lifting but I think it’s not I think by the time a woman’s not bothering to join in with the laughter, she’s already sort of disengaging. So, as I say, the laughter is an index of something that’s like an emotional connection that people are prepared to engage on together. And I don’t think it’s limited to romantic relationships. I think that’s often what we mean by friendship is people with whom you can navigate a better mood together.
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Narrator: In addition to studying laughter, Dr. Scott also helps create it – by taking to the stage as a stand-up comedian and storyteller. Here’s a story from a set she did a few years back about one of the tools of her trade…Sophie Scott (stand-up act): My name is Sophie Scott, and I’m a cognitive neuroscientist from University College, London. And it’s very hard to say this without sounding like you’re, I don’t know, the undead, but I like brains, and I work with brains. And I’m very lucky because I get to use a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brains. And this is essentially a technique that lets us look both at the structure of brains and look at the brains working. You you’ll have noticed that I’ve talked about magnetic resonance imaging, and of course, there’s an enormous magnet involved in this. We can’t just do this with the horseshoe things. You need these massive, massive magnets, which are on the entire time.
So the magnets that we use are routinely up to 60,000 times greater in strength than the earth’s magnetic field. They’re very, very strong magnets. This places unbelievably tight safety constraints on what we do, because any bit of loose metal anywhere near the magnet will fly through the air and into the magnet, which is where you put your subject, and that will smart. You don’t want to do that. That’s bad. Don’t let the metal loose. Don’t let the metal loose.
And obviously, you have to pat them down. You have to make sure they’ve got, like, no metal anywhere near them before they themselves go in there. We make sure we take off jewelry. We take off everything. If you’re working with, say, film crews, you have to be really, really careful, because you’re working with people who aren’t used to being around the magnet. So we did a thing a couple of years ago where we had a very famous actress in the scanner, and there were a couple of film crews who came along to film the scanning of this actress, and you really don’t want to be responsible for the death of somebody on camera.
So we’re being particularly careful. Really, really careful. “De-metal” all the crew, and because they’ve got to carry around the kit. You sort of standing there. You can’t go any further than this with that. You stop there. What’s this? Everybody’s de-metaled – everything’s got everything out of their pocket.
A BBC cameraman comes tooling past me, and I saw something in his shirt pocket, and I went, what’s that? And I put my finger on it, and it was his nipple! …. Okay, on your way. Well done. It is cold in here, isn’t it?
Thank you.
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Phil Stieg: So tell me, you’re a stand-up comedian. I don’t know where you have time amidst your research.
Sophie Scott: Yes.
Phil Stieg: So what have you learned by doing that, about laughter?
Sophie Scott: I learned that stand-up comedy isn’t just broadcasting your material to the audience and they laugh if they like it. It’s much more like a weird conversation where you say things that you hope will make people laugh and then you stop talking for them to make whatever reaction they want to. And that’s the main thing you have to learn when you do stand-up comedy, is not just to keep talking. If the audience laugh, you have to let them laugh. If you expect them to laugh, you’ve got to stop so that they will get some clues that this is time to laugh. And you’ll see people do all sorts of things like take a drink or smile themselves that indicate this is the punchline point. And it’s much more like orchestrating a group of people than it is just being funny, although you also still have to be funny.
Phil Stieg: When you go to a stand-up comedy act, you’re with people you don’t know, but you still find yourself either laughing spontaneously – actually hysterically.
Sophie Scott: Absolutely. And I think that the feature there is, of course, it’s being coordinated by the comedian. You’re not just in a room with people, you’re in an interaction with the person on the stage. I used to think that the person stand-up comedy was like people went on stage and said funny things and the audience are like, yeah, we think that’s funny. Ha. And it’s much more complex than that. There’s a real to-and-forth to it and the audience are reacting in a way that the comedian has to manage but is also sort of trying to kind of get in the rhythm of.
And in the UK, if an audience really like a joke, they don’t laugh, they clap. And I think in the US, you quite often cheer, so there is a lot of complexity to that. But I think that that’s the really big difference. And even then, you want to see the comedian with an audience around you. You don’t want to be in the room on your own with the comedian. You want that laughter. So I think there’s something it’s one of the things we enjoy about the live experience is being around other people, also enjoying the thing that you’re getting to enjoy.
Phil Stieg: Are there certain things that just make every culture laugh? I’m thinking of Charlie Chaplin, you know, this kind of slapstick stuff. Will every culture laugh at him?
Sophie Scott: The I mean, the only thing that we know for sure is that over time and place, there is no one thing that absolutely everybody finds funny. That being said, the fewer barriers there are to you to understand a comedic performance of whatever kind, the more likely you are to find it funny. So if I speak French well enough to watch television programs in French without having to be reliant on the subtitles, and there’s a program that was very popular a couple of years ago called it’s called Call My Agent in English – “Dix Pour-Cents “ – “Ten Percent” in French. And I watched that, and I could quite often tell that things were supposed to be funny, but I did not laugh at all because I knew enough French to be able to understand it was supposed to be funny, but I wasn’t getting any of the cultural illusions. I just don’t know that I don’t live in France.
Speaking a language isn’t enough to get you to those extra layers that you often need to understand jokes. And what that means is the less reliant on language humor is, the more likely it is that people will find it funnier. And the more generic the experiences are, like being hit on the head with a brick or falling off a bicycle, the more likely they are for people to find those things funny. So that’s, I think, why Charlie Chaplin is still enduringly funny. It’s still extremely popular. The performances are beautiful. Slapstick humor doesn’t need you to understand a lot about culture to get to that. You can get that to that easily, and that tends to lead to stuff that’s more commonly found amusing. Mr. Bean would be an example of that, or Benny Hill, another example — not very cerebral.
Phil Stieg: Do other mammals laugh?
Sophie Scott: They do. And in fact, other apes laugh in a way that is not that different from us. So we laugh on an exhalation. Ha. Other apes laugh going inhalation exhalation. So more like that.
Phil Stieg: You do that well!
Sophie Scott: If anybody remembers Wacky Races and Mutley chimpanzee laughter sounds a lot like Mutley kind of sound to it. But the situations when you find it is very similar to the way the humans laugh. So you see it in physical interactions like tickling. That’s where it first emerges for human babies and for other apes, and then it’s very strong part of play. So it’s a sound that means I am being playful, my intentions are playful. We are apes, so it’s not too surprising that you find laughter in orangutans and gorillas.
I can’t get over the complexity of how other animals laugh. So if you de-vocalize a rat so it can’t make any sounds, it will play with other rats. Rats are very social and other rats want to play with it. However, it’s much more likely to get bitten during play than a rap that can make vocalizations because it can’t make the sounds that show that it is being playful and it’s more likely that its behavior gets misinterpreted as violence and then a fight breaks out. We’ve all said that to children, haven’t we? Oh, there’ll be tears before bedtime. But that’s amazing to me how complex laughter can be for rats, how recognizable laughter could be for rats. And when you sort of scale that up to humans and other mammals, that’s kind of dizzying to me, actually.
Phil Stieg: What evolutionary advantage does laughter provide to humankind?
Sophie Scott: I think because we are social primates, and one of the successes of humans is how we are able to work together and communicate with each other. What laughter brings you is an incredibly efficient way of making and maintaining social bonds right from the first few months of life. This is something that it’s used in that way, so it’s used in all these other very complex ways as well. But at its heart, this social nature, this bonding, is incredibly valuable and it’s a way of just signifying group membership, signifying affection in a way that you can do very, very quickly and very effectively, and which then lets you enjoy all the advantages of being a coherent group of people.
Phil Stieg: Given the amount of abuse that goes on in the world and the wars that are going on, there’s obviously a spike in post-traumatic stress disorder. Can those individuals still laugh? Is laughter good therapy for them?
Sophie Scott: I think laughter is probably beneficial for people if you think about it again, as being the fact that it’s not the laughter on its own, it’s the fact that you are in a situation and with the people with whom you are feeling comfortable enough to laugh. I once met somebody who worked in therapy with people who’d been refugees and who’d been tortured, and he said, you wouldn’t believe how much laughter there was in those therapy rooms because people were using the laughter to sort of get on top of horrible memories. So I think there’s a number of complex ways, I think, that laughter can sort of interact with something like PTSD, but you’ve got to think about it in terms of the importance of it as a social emotional reaction. It’s not just that the laughter makes everything better.
Phil Stieg: You say that we should take laughing seriously.
Sophie Scott: Yes.
Phil Stieg: Why?
Sophie Scott: Because we tend to think that it’s a bit silly and a bit juvenile. We don’t respect it very much. Funny films don’t win Oscars. It doesn’t feel grown up.
But actually, the times in your day when you laugh and the people you laugh with are probably the most important points in your day. That’s when you are decompressing and forming bonds and reaffirming bonds with people. And when we were in lockdown in the UK, initially, we couldn’t go out of our house and the kids were home schooling and it was all very stressful and it was scary. And at the end of every day, I said, right, we’re all just going to put the computers down and sit down together and watch something funny. And it didn’t really matter what it was. I think in the end, we watched all of Brooklyn Nine Nine at least twice, all of Seinfeld, all of Modern Family twice. But it didn’t matter because what it actually mattered was that we just made time to sit down together as a family and laugh. And that was complete because I know we will feel better afterwards. And that’s what I mean about taking it seriously. Value it, listen to it, make space in your day for it.
Phil Stieg: Dr. Sophie Scott, thank you so much for spending this time with us. It’s been amazing to learn how laughter is important in terms of our human cognition, but more importantly, in terms of our interpersonal communication with each other. It’s been extremely enlightening, and I would love to have you come back again.
Sophie Scott: I would love to come back. Thank you very much.