December 4, 2012 • 35 mins
They say laughter is the best medicine, but is there any science to back that up? In this episode, Julie and Robert discuss what laughter does to us physically and neurologically. And maybe, just maybe, Julie will grow to love laughter yoga.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Cameray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
From how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamp and
my name is Julie Douglas. We are back in Atlanta
(00:23):
after a little little side trip where we went on
up to Minnesota. Yes, indeed, we presented at the E
four Elementary Education Conference and it was awesome. It was
It's just infectious energy, a lot of enthusiasm from the
teachers present all, you know, just really gung ho about science,
about teaching about engineering and mathematics. And we gave our
(00:45):
spiel about about how we're all scientists just from the
get go, where we crawl out of the wound. Why
don't guess we don't crawl out of the wound, but
we're fee a lot more convenient for women if that
were the case. We're ripped from the womb, with ripped
a little strong your coherce coerced from the wound, I guess,
from the womb with math, with engineering and science already
(01:06):
born into you. And uh we've discussed this in the
podcast and we we shared it with everyone there and
it's just a grand time. So we may have some
new listeners now who were present at our speech. And
so if if any of your teachers are tuning in,
welcome to the podcast. Yeah. And actually I have a
little tidbit that relates not just to the education conference,
but also to our topic today here about laughter, because
(01:30):
I can help but giggle into her later on when
I when I remembered us rehearsing our keynote speech in
front of a giant uh Lucy character from Peanuts, giant
sculpture of her. They were all over the hotel and
we got there the night before, so it's like Sunday
evening and we we just want to rehearse the material
(01:52):
a few more times. So what we need an audience, right,
but not a living audience because they have better things
to do on a Sunday night. So we found ourselves
this giant Lucy idle, I guess you would call it,
and with a giant plate of cake. I think it
had something because we also found a candy store down
the road that had some Peanuts characters out front with candy,
(02:12):
so I guess they were related somehow. And looking back,
just the two of us in front of this giant sculpture,
gesturing to Lucy and giving the keynote just made me laugh. Um.
But of course, if if I had remembered this, um, this,
this memory with other people with you, turns out I
would have laughed a lot more. And we'll talk about
that in a moment. Yeah, we've we've talked about humor before,
(02:35):
and we talked a little bit about laughter. This episode
is all about the healing power of laughter, which is
it's become something of a cliche over the past few decades.
You have, of course, like Patch Adams, you have you
shaking your head. Ye, Pat Adams, you have Have you
seen it? I have not, but I have seen Children's
(02:56):
Hospital the Adult Swim Show where they have a character
and they're played by Rob Cordrey. He plays Dr Blake Downs,
who is a healing clown. That the funny part of
this is that he takes the healing power of laughter
deadly seriously, like he's he's wearing clown makeup that kind
of kind of looks like John Lynne Gacy esque, you know,
like that kind of slightly scary clown makeup, and he's
(03:17):
not really he never does much in the way that
of actual humor for the sick, Like he's he's just
very serious about yeah, very intense. Yeah, I could get
behind that, the intense clown. Intense clown. But yeah, like
I say, it's becomes something of a cliche for all
of us. But you go back to around the nineteen
in the d a guy by the name of Norman Cousins,
and he was a writer and magazine editor for The
(03:39):
Saturday Review, and he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease,
and at the time that the theory was making the
rounds that stress could worsen such a condition. So he
asked himself, well, what about it? What if I use
the opposite of stress? So he thought about humor. So
he goes to his doctor and uh, he gets his
doctor's okay, and then prescribes himself a regime of humorous videos,
(04:03):
shows like Candid Camera, which was I guess was big
in the seventies at the time. But he's gonna take
these videos, he's gonna watch them along with his other treatments.
And the disease went into remission, and Cousins wrote a
paper for the New England Journal of Medicine as well
as a book titled Anatomy of an Illness, A Patient's Perspective,
and I was posted in nine became a best seller,
and it led to a lot of actual researchers looking
(04:25):
into the matter. Most notably, you had this guy Lee Burke,
a preventative care specialist from Loma Linda University in Low Melinda, California.
And then also from Lo Melinda, you had Stanley tan
who was an m D, pH d and a diabetes specialist.
So they were curious does mirthful laughter helped individuals with diabetes?
(04:46):
And so short version of this as they took a
group of twenty high risk diabetic patients. They had a
group C, which was control, and they had group L,
which was laughter. So twelve months later they found significant
improvement in group L HDL cholesterol. The good cholesterol had
risen by in group E, the laughter group, and only
three percent in groups see the control group. Harmful C
(05:06):
reactive proteins decrease sixty in the laughter group versus in
the control group. So this is a big study that
actually pushed the idea even more that laughter is maybe
maybe there's something too laughter, the laughter it can actually
heal us in some way, shape or form. So that's
what we're talking about in this episode. But we need
a backtrack a little and say, all right, what is
(05:29):
laughter before we start prescribing it willy nilly? What's going
on when we laugh? Well, okay, one of the things
I wanted to point out is that you can tell
that it's central and very important to us when you
look across species and you see that other species do it.
You know, we know that chimps do it. We know
that if tickled raps will giggle. There's an actual study
on this, and from a new article on how stuff
(05:51):
works called ten Surprising Behaviors and Non Human Animals by
Kate Kirshner, we know that guerrillas also engage in antiq
um and laughter. In fact, she gives this example of
a gorilla that got his kicks by running beside his
trainer along the length of his cage at full speed,
and then the gorilla would suddenly stop and start laughing
(06:13):
uncontrollably as the human kept running past him, And she
said it was great because the gorilla figured out a
stupid human trick. So chimps, gorilla's rats, they're all laughing
at us. They're all laughing at us. But what happens
when we are laughing? What's going on in our own bodies?
Because this is great. We can look at the chance
when we can look at rats and we can see
them giggling, But we can of course turn turn the
(06:35):
focus to ourselves and say, you know, just at a
mechanical level, what's happening to spur on all of these
different chemical changes in our body. Well, the thing about laughter,
like true laughter, like hearty laughter, not just a little
snicker or or or what have you. But full laughter
is a is it's a full body experience. Like your
face is moving a lot, your jaws moving, but also
(06:56):
your torso, even your arms and legs, your trunk, muscles,
everything's getting in on the joke. Um fifteen facial muscles contract,
and you also have stimulation of the zygomatic major muscles.
These are the main lifting mechanisms of your upper lift lip.
And then you also have the respiratory system is getting
in on the action. You have half closing the larnix,
(07:16):
so air intake occurs at regularly, making you gasp. And
in extreme circumstances, what happens something is just extremely funny.
You start crying. With laughter. Yeah, yeah, and you might
you might pee a little. I've heard about this. Yeah, well,
I think on Dirty rock Wislam and calls it lizing,
where if you you laugh so hard that you start
(07:36):
peeing yourself. I have you you ever done this? Have
you ever laughed so hard that you really? And I
would admit to it even though I because you know,
I have no problem with that, But no, have not.
My wife sometimes will be watching something and she'll she'll
warn that that she's about to pee herself if if
she laughs any harder or more. If I was to say, say,
like come over and tickler while she was laughing, then
(07:58):
she might pee. That's that's the warning. I don't know,
maybe a false threat. I've never pushed, pushed, pushed around
that one. I have made friends do it, though, and
they'll be like sap, and I can't help myself. Can
they start crossing their legs and just go in for
the kill? Um? But yeah, I mean that's extreme circumstances
for sure. Um. Also, your mouth is opening and closing
(08:20):
and so there's still that struggle for oxygen, and of
course your face becomes moist and you know, flushed. Yeah,
I mean it's a great feeling. Like I watched a
lot of humorous content. I imagine you do as well.
You like funny things. Correct, yes, it's true, but I
still find it's rare that I watched something where it
just completely overtakes me, where it's like you're you're possessed
(08:42):
by a demon for a good minute or two and
it's just you just can't control yourself. And it's it's
overstatement the obvious here, but it's a wonderful feeling because
it's it's like you're no longer in control of your
body or your senses in the most delightful way possible.
It is great. And it's kind of funny too, because
you're psychologically when you're watching something like that, you start
(09:03):
to feel that rise and you're like, yeah, it's like
a roller coaster. It's like I'm writing something a wave
and I'm not completely in control, but I'm loving it. So, Okay,
let's break down the actual sonic structure of what a
laugh sounds like. And before we do it, let's listen
to a clip of what I think is a great,
full bodied laugh. Well, that's that's a full body laugh.
(09:38):
In the actual video of the YouTube, the individual's laughing
really hard, and he's kind of an older gentleman to
the point where you're got a bunch of beer bottles
behind them. Yeah, but you're a little concern You're like, whoa,
you're laughing a little hard, Grandpa, you need to slow
it down. But it's just I love it because it's
such a joyful laugh and it's just um, the structure
(09:58):
of it just builds in. You can just tell that
this guy is having so much fun, and it really
is infectious. In fact, I think if you watch it,
you probably are a little bit more invested in it
that rather than just hearing it. But even just hearing it,
you can't help but smile to yourself a little bit.
So let's talk about the sonic structure laughter. Researcher Robert
Provine discovered that all human laughter consists of variations on
(10:21):
a basic form that consists of short vowel like notes repeated.
What he says is every two and ten milliseconds. So
I didn't time it in that clip. The first part
of that, though, was the expert weigh in and said,
when we laugh, we tend to go ha ha or
ho ho. That's right. He said, there's one of two.
It's either ha ha ha or I'm glad we have
scientists on these things. I know, I wonder if that
(10:42):
was an ig noble and think that clip that we
played is definitely representative of the more like ha ha ha.
But vrty or do is that? Is that a myth
at I've never really heard, unless like they were intentionally saying, yeah,
you know, I guess it's or like a wood sprite
kind of a thing. Yeah, I know. I don't think
(11:02):
it's something that would come natural to you when you're laughing,
like full on body laughing. Yeah, because full on body
laughing it, I mean it reaches the point of borderline
disgusting at times like where I feel like he he
is maybe a more of a social laughter, which we'll
get into it a little bit, but more of a
look at me, I am laughing and I am a
wood sprite, as opposed to I'm laughing so hard that
(11:23):
urine is flooding through my pants my face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Provine also suggests that humans have a detector that responds
to laughter by triggering other neural circuits in the brain,
which in turn generates even more laughter. And that's just
one explanation for why laughter is contagious. We'll talk a
little bit more about that, But here's the question, why
(11:45):
why do we laugh in the first place? I even
do it? Well, this is a valid question. We've touched
on this a little bit when we've discussed humor in
the past, because on a very basic level, you can
say that laughter is a response to humor or about
the then that that's a tricky answer too, because then
you then you get into the question what is humor?
What makes something humorous? One thing that we've discussed in
(12:07):
the past is the is the benign violation theory? Just
a quick run through this, this is the idea that
you encounter, oh back on the primordial wilds, or when
you go to a haunted house, haunted attraction in the
modern day, you're something jumps out at you, scares the
living daylights out of you, and for a second you
think you're gonna die. Then you realize you're not because
(12:29):
it wasn't a saber tooth tiger. It was your cousin
ug uh decided to have some fun with you. Or
it was just some dude, Yeah, cousin ug he said,
he's quite the trickster. Or it's or it's some some
person in a Google mask at the haunted attraction. You
realize you're not going to die, and the body's response
then is to laugh, which arguably and then, according to
this theory, is then a queue, a social queue to
(12:51):
those around you just say we are not actually going
to die. Please disregard that blood curdling scream that I
issued earlier. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that that
the basis of this is really stress, right, because it
is a release, and you talked about the social implications
of it. Um. Some people say that laughter may even
serve as a conciliatory gesture at times when things get
(13:13):
very stressful. Yes, um, that there's a way to deflect anger.
It's interesting. I found a two thousand and ten North
Carolina State University study that looked at the role laughter
plays injury the liberation. And in fact, the case they
study was a capital murder case, so it was it
wasn't like they just they decided, oh, it's like a
(13:33):
grandma was arrested for jaywalking and you know, or something
more mundane. It was a life and death scenario. And
they made some interesting observations about how humor among the jurors.
It helped her to release the tension, and it also
allowed them to acknowledge when they made errors and then
they could correct them because you know, if you just
sort of laugh off your mistakes, which as we've all
(13:55):
I hope we've all encountered that. You know, when when
something it gets a little stressful at work, maybe you
screwed something up. You can stick to your guns and
let your ego command it and refuse to back down,
or you can sort of laugh it off and everyone forgets.
Like whenever I pronounced Michael Carton as Michael Creton, just
laugh at me, do I? You kind of do? It's
(14:16):
a laugh Mark. I appreciate it because then I'm like, God,
there goes that tick again. Um. But yeah, I mean,
laughter occurs when people are comfortable with one another. We've
found this out and cultural anthropologist my head Dave opt
says that, um, you know, when you feel open and
free and comfortable, the more you laugh, the more you laugh,
the more you bond within a group. And this is
(14:38):
really important because there's this other desire to not be
outside of the group, and so you want to participate
and laugh. And we've talked about this before. Within this
social contract that we're always signing. Um that where we
are kind of hardwired to cooperate with one another anyway
because it's to our benefit. So what happens is you
(14:59):
have a feed, a loop of bonding and laughing going on. Well,
it's interesting you mentioned individuals on the outside because you
also get into that that idea when you look at
the theory of what humor is and how it works,
the idea that all laughter then has to do with Well,
put it this way, with any given joke, you could
argue that you're either on the inside or on the
(15:20):
outside of that joke. Which side are you standing on?
Are you on the side holding the hose on the
side getting hose down by the humor? Uh? And then
you can argue that the humor is about maintaining that
barrier between self and otherness, between normal and strange. Um.
I mean, you can really run wild with it. I
was having a conversation with my friend Matt the other day,
(15:41):
and he was he was making the argument that all
racial humor is intrinsically racist. I don't know, I leave
that to everyone else to think about. But but but,
but certainly you get into some some tricky moral areas.
But it's why you see comedian after comedian getting the
hot water, because they end up joking about a topic
that some else takes too seriously. Because there's a certain
(16:02):
amount there is a certain amount of meanness to do
a lot, if not most humor. You know, I thought
about that with Peter Segel because I was listening to him.
I'm wait, wait, don't tell me the other day. Yes,
a cruel he's not. He's not cruel, but he's very
funny most of the time. But this guy will just
he'll just kind of throw whatever out there sometimes, and
(16:23):
I admire that because it doesn't always stick. And I
have actually heard the audience boo him before, Yeah, because
he didn't play with the audience. The audience was a
little bit offended. So anyways, it is interesting to see
that kind of dynamic can play. Yeah, take Louisa k
for instance. I mean, Louisa k Will does not seem
really to have much of a filter, but he approaches
(16:44):
it from a certain point of honesty. So he'll say
something that's really offensive or really gross, but he approaches
it in such an honesty where he's where he kind
of says, this is what humor is, and I'm trying
to make sense of it as well as you guys are.
So you know, I have to say that in season
two of Louis that I nearly stopped watching because one
of his bits to stand up bits was so offensive
(17:06):
and it's really really hard to offend me. And I
was like, oh no, I can't get back on this,
but thankfully I did because it is a great show.
But back to to uh, laughter and what's going on
with the group dynamic. The researcher Robert Provine, who we mentioned,
also found that laughter is thirty times more frequent in
groups compared to private settings. So again there's this idea
(17:27):
that that's the feedback loop in place, and that's why
there's a huge difference between watching a comedy by yourself
in the quiet living room, watching it with a loved
one or a small group of friends, versus watching it
in amidst an audience that's like super into the movie
or the improv show or what happened. And this is
(17:47):
from our article how laughter Works. The studies have also
found that dominant individuals, the boss, the tribal chief, or
the family family patriarch used humor more than their subordinates.
And that's where we get into some interesting social area
as well, because zero psychological and behavioral studies revealed that
laughter can be more than just a spontaneous response to stimula. Obviously,
(18:08):
it's not just a matter of tiger jumped out at
me and I didn't die. But about two million years
ago we started developing willful control over our facial motor systems.
So you can almost think of this as kind of
a birth of deception and a birth of lies. That
was kind of a Garden of Eden moment because and
certainly is micro expressions reveal and you know not everyone's
a great liar, and you can often tell the difference
(18:29):
between fake laughter and real laughter. And the example that
comes to mind is your boss makes a joke, what
do you do? You laugh at that joke. That's even
if your boss is a great guy. And maybe even
if even if your boss is actually funny, our boss
is actually funny. Is pretty larious, it's pretty hilarious. But
I still find myself falling into fake laughter sometimes, and
hopefully I'm pretty good at it and no one's noticed it,
(18:51):
but we still find ourselves knowing when to laugh sometimes.
When I found myself doing this at the teacher's conference
because I'm suddenly interacting with a lot of people that
I haven't interacted before, be it teachers or discovery personnel
that we're there with us, and I find myself falling
into the pattern of using a little fake laughter sprinkled
in my conversation, you know, and just you know, smiling
(19:13):
and kind of laughing a little bit as part of
the way that I'm communicating with them. That's interesting because
some I read that UM in order to try to
gain control social control over a situation that the people
who are trying to gain social control over it tend
to laugh more than the person who is listening. So
you know, it's a way to engage people, right and
(19:35):
to get people to pay attention UM using laughter. And
as you as you had pointed out, this part of
the brain is actually called the pre motor cortical region,
and this is the reason that's activated, and it is
the part of the brain that is standing at the
ready and listening to conversations and lighting up just before
it begins to contort your your facial muscles to react
(19:59):
to this situation. And of course we always have to
bring up mirror neurons. When it comes to this kind
of stuff. Stephen Small, who is a professor in neurology
and psychology, argues that the contagious nature of laughter is
caused by mirror neurons, or he says, brain cells that
become active when an organism is watching an expression or
(20:20):
behavior that they themselves can perform. And we've seen this
again and again and again. Um, so it's no surprise
there that when you're watching another person laughing, you begin
to mimic that that you actually have those neurons in
your brains that are saying, hey, laugh now it's funny. Yes, well,
which comes right back around to the idea of laughter yoga,
(20:40):
which I know you hate. I don't know that I hate.
And let me let me say I have never taken, well,
I've never meant to take a laughter yoga class, but
some yoga instructor yeah yeah, uh, you know. I think
for me, I was there for yoga, not for laughing.
So perhaps I just wasn't in the right mindset. But
I hate the idea of it. Yea. Just to explain
(21:02):
this to anyone who hasn't had any actual experience with
laughter yoga, this involves you being in a yoga classroom
and the yoga instructor who's leading you in various physical
activities will also lead you in about of basically fake laughter,
where you the teacher will start going off and everyone
(21:22):
else has to join in with lots of fake laughter.
But what you're in opposed by the way. Sometimes I've
order to involve sort of hand gestures, Like there's one
that we do in my yoga class called the laughter milkshake.
We have like a pretend milkshake and you move it
from one mug to the other and then you pour
it on your head and then you laugh really hard. Um,
And it's it always ends with legitimate laughter, at least
(21:44):
from me and people I noticed in the room. It
starts fake and then it becomes contained aus it, it
becomes authentic. It's true. It's one of the things was
the whole fake it till you make it and you
become right. So if you laugh, even when you're faking it,
we're going to actually start to laugh. Sometimes I'm out
throwing a little sardonic laughter, you know. Well that's what
I did to try to counter it because it was
(22:06):
driving me crazy. So I was like, but that's interesting.
The sardonic laughter is another interesting thing to bring up
because what I don't know that anyone actually does it.
I have I guess I'm just not around like severely
evil individuals. But if it exists legitimately and not just
in movies, and I don't know that anyone's ever actually
uh looked into this. If we have any evil listeners
(22:28):
out there, maybe they can tell us. But if it exists,
then it's an example of this social hijacking of the
left of the use of laughter to where we're faking it.
I guess too belittle someone or we're just unhinged. I
guess is the whole deal that you find humor in
things that are not humorous, like taking over the world
or or creating a robot guerilla hybrid that will help
(22:49):
you take over the world. It was just my way
of saying, like, hey, I didn't sign up for the
left class. I signed up for the regular, regular yoga class.
But what does all all of this laughing due to us?
What what are the actual physical effects and the benefits,
so the healing power of laughter. We We've talked about
a lot about what what laughter is and some of
(23:10):
the things that going in the human body. So to
what extent can it actually heal us? Well? Okay, um,
let's talk about what is happening at the physical level, right,
because let's just lay this groundwork so we can see
if there's a possibility that it could have some sort
of long term healing effects. When we laugh, our bodies
respond really positively. There is a decrease in stress hormones
of cortisol, adrenaline, and dopac, and an increased in beta
(23:35):
endorphins which lower feelings of depression, and then human growth
hormone UM also which helps protect us against disease and infection.
So it's not just the act of laughter that changes
our body's chemistry, because you know, even the mirror anticipation
of laughing does this too. So if you see, um
(23:56):
a funny movie, or rather if you're on your way
to see a funny movie, you're already primed. Your body
is ready to go ahead and release those feel good endorphins.
Just on a physical level, of course, you're the repeated
forceful exhalations of breath, it occur. Uh, They really give
your give your lungs of workout, gives your the muscles
of your diaphragm, will workout. So there's a lot of
(24:18):
a lot of breathing and h and chest movements going on.
Um and laughter also prompts our bodies to produce more
T cells and globulins. And this is where it becomes
very important to our immune system because what they found
is that higher levels of an antibody called salivary immenium
globulin A when you laugh, this is released and that
is what fights infectious organisms entering into the respiratory tract.
(24:42):
So that is what they found in the saliva of people,
this increase of this antibody for people who watched humorous videos.
And the idea is that the benefits of this could
actually be linked to longevity because people who report a
general feeling of happiness and of course laughter would help
with that, tend to be healthier overall, live longer rather
(25:04):
than unhappy people. And there's a two thousand eleven study
that says that three out of a people aged fifty
two to seventy five, they found that those who rated
their happiness higher were significantly less likely to die in
the following five years. Uh So you know, there you go,
is this is another reason to laugh. There's a great
(25:26):
study that we ran across in researching. There's a two
thousand twelve Oxford University study You're not in your head? Yes, okay,
you're not laughing. I laughed when I read this one
because basically this is what it consisted of. They had
subjects watch videos, either funny ones or dry documentaries, and
then they were also tortured, which is to say they
(25:46):
were they put their wrists arms inside blood pressure cuffs
or frozen cooling sleeves. Yeah, we should say why they
did this because because you had mentioned the what is
happening physically like your you know, with your abdomen and
the amount of the air that you're inhaling exhaling, they
wanted to know if if laughing could be considered actual exercise.
And we know that when we exercise were we release
(26:09):
endorphins which helped to manage pain. Right, so you need
to inject a little pain into the scenario to see
if the laughter is actually helping with it. And sure enough,
in the experiments, pain thresholds did go up after people
watch the funny videos, but not after they viewed the
factual documentaries. So and belly laughter was also the key here,
(26:29):
like full blown not just snickering a little, but ken
burns hair. Uh, you're watching a documentary, but actual full
bodied laughter, like if you're watching airplane or something. Yeah,
that's right. They were looking at the amount of contractions
of their bellies were doing, which reminds me. It brings
me back to Burdo Eco's Name of the Rose, because
a lot of that book and in the movie, which
(26:49):
is also quite good, uh deals with the nature of
laughter and what the what the church's view on laughter is.
And Brother William in the book brings up an example
of a saint uh Well who supposedly used laughter, employed
laughter want being tortured and tricked one of his tortures
and just dipping his hand into the boiling water that
he was immersed in. It made me think it's like, oh, well,
(27:11):
if you had a sit maybe that's the way you
could to a certain extent but not really counteract torturous
pain by just going into it with a sense of humor,
just tickling people instead of torturing them. No, no, no,
I'm saying that while being tortured, if you found enough
humor in the scenario, could you know, I guess you
could conceivably reduce the level of pain. You could up
your pains, right, I wouldn't actually work, but I can't
(27:35):
help but go there with my mind. And you can't
self tickle, right, that's a problem. Yeah, I just I
think David Eagleman was just talking about that on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah.
It has to do with it like anticipation. And if
you find someone who can self tickle, they are faking
it totally. Yeah, right, and they're weird for its probably
a whole movement of self ticklers out there. Um. So
(27:57):
here's this idea that came out of that studied though,
is that exercise and laughter could have the same benefits, right,
this this rise and endorphins. So then it became well, okay,
if we know from laughing that laughing is increased in
a group situation, could endorphins be increased in an exercise situation.
(28:19):
So I think it's interesting how they took one data
set and tried to apply it to that to the other. Um.
I think it was a two thousand and nine study. Yeah,
it was two thousand nine study that Dunbar, same guy
um from the Laughing Experiment and his colleagues studied a
group of elite Oxford rowers asking them to work out
either on an isolated rowing machine separated from one another
(28:40):
in a gym, or on a machine that simulated full
synchronized crew rowing um and in that case, the rowers
were exerting themselves in synchrony as a united group. And
after they exercised together, the rowers pain thresholds and presumably
their endorphin levels right um were significantly higher than they
had been at the start, but also higher than when
(29:01):
they rode alone. So even just thinking that you are
participating in this group activity apparently helped in terms of
the release of endorphins, which is very interesting, which which
brings back to the idea of going to a group
exercise class such as a group yoga class, but where
then you then also engage in group laughing. Right, I'm
(29:21):
gonna saying, of course all roads leave to lead to
laugh for yoga in this case, because that is the
culmination of what we've described here. Yeah, the universe is saying,
Julie Douglas, give this universe is not talking to me,
and if it is, I'm insane. Another quick study that
I found was the one from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital,
(29:41):
and they found that patients use laughter to communicate emotionally
with their psychotherapists, like using a lot like an exclamation
point at the end of a sentence, and that laughing
together also helped seal the bond. So I found that
interesting as well in terms of not only physical healing,
but emotional healing. Laughter ends up playing a role in
therapy session, which uh a few times that I've I've
(30:02):
seen a therapist. I mean, I do remember laughing a little,
partially because I ended up accidentally going to a children's
therapist and there was a sandbox full of toys in
the room. She was great, but there was a sandbox
full of toys. She have a clown news on. No,
thank God, just have to check all right, well, before
we go to our mail should we just listen to
(30:24):
that clip one more? Yeah, play the laugh one time,
and I actually I encourage everyone to laugh. Try laughing
with this man. Laugh aloud. If you're in the car,
you're out running, cycling, if you're alone in the truck, whatever,
if you're on mass transit, for sure, yes, to start laughing,
laugh with this man. All right, here we go, Yeah,
(30:59):
good stuff. What do we have in the mail bag? Yes,
let me grab the mail, Uh, the robot will be
kind enough to bring it over all right, here's one
from our listener Murphy Murphy Rights, and it says, Aloha,
Robert and Julie. I just finished the podcast about the
Ordovician period. Blew my mind, naturally, but I am here
(31:19):
to talk about the listener mail at the end. About maps.
One day, I was at a family friend's house when
I saw a poster of a map that looked like this,
and she included this image. And it's a It's basically
the map of the world as we typically see it inverted, Okay,
It's a map of the world, only upside down from
its traditional orientation. It got me thinking about how arbitrary
(31:40):
north and south were, and how easily our Earth could
have eastern and western snowcaps and orbited around the Sun
vertically rather than horizontally. It's all about the map maker's
perspective and whatever sticks. On the topic of science fiction
and mapps. I also came across this map. Somebody on
the Internet mapped out the location of all the Star
Wars planet's ever man in the films, games, novels, and
(32:01):
comic books. I think they call that the extended universe.
There are quite a lot of them, just thought you
would appreciate that. And she also included this map, which
is really awesome includes all of these star systems and
so forth. So, yeah, that's one of the things we
talked about in that episode, the creation of maps that
thought all the details of our fantasy settings as well
as the bias of our maps regarding the world as
(32:24):
it is or the world as we experience it, and
its effects on how we experience it. Because again, you
have that map of the of the of the world
and you basically have the United States, they're in the
center of it, or or europe western ist. Yeah, this
is the center of the map. This is the center
of the of the place in the world in space.
(32:44):
So thanks for us sending that, Tis Murphy. Here's one
from a listener by the name of Alberto from Puerto Rico.
Alberto Retsina says, hi, Julian Robert, I just finished listening
to the three Map podcast and remembered a weird high
school experience I had with maps and wanted to share
it with you. In a Puerto Rican history class, the
teacher to side did that the best thing we could
do was make a lot of maps. The thing is
that he had some weird map hypotheses. The first is
(33:06):
that each map had a capital or central point, and
that if it didn't, the owner or user of the
map was the main point of the map. Second, every
representation of space was a map, so every representation of
any space had a main point. The assignment required that
I localized myself on the ever bigger maps, starting with
our house. We had to do maps with the star
(33:28):
of for where I lived as a capital of our house,
our barrio, neighborhood, reward, our town, our country, Puerto Rico,
our area Caribbean, our continent, our planet, and our solar system.
I never understood the reasoning behind this, and he never
made the connection between this exercise in the history of
Puerto Rico. The rest of the assignments of the class
(33:48):
were maps related. But we're map related, but not so
far away from the history is this one? Thank you
for making my commute entertaining. Well, I think it's an
interesting experiment that the class engaged in because it was
getting down to what is the nature of the map
and what does it say about where I am on
the map and where I position myself in the map? Well,
I like it too, because it gives kids the idea
(34:09):
that they are citizens of the universe, that, of course,
this is the specific street that they live on, specific
neighborhood and specific city and so on, and keep going out.
It's almost like the powers of ten, right, yeah, yeah, exactly,
so yeah, I really like that one. Certainly of any
of the other listeners have any cool map experiences and
map activities from school like that right in, we'd love
(34:30):
to hear about them. But more importantly, if you have
something about the healing power of laughter you would like
to share, we'd love to hear any stories you have
of of how laughter has affected your physical healing or
emotional healing during trying times in your in your life. Uh,
if you are employed in the medical profession in any way,
shape or form, we'd also love to hear from you
about your thoughts on the nature of humor and if
(34:52):
any of your comedians share it as well. You can
find us on Facebook and you can find us on Tumbler.
On both of those we go by the names have
to Blow Your Mind, and on Twitter we used to
handle blow the Mind, and you can drop us a
line at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for
(35:13):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff Works dot Com brought to you by the
two twelve Toyota Camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Cameray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
From how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamp and
my name is Julie Douglas. We are back in Atlanta
(00:23):
after a little little side trip where we went on
up to Minnesota. Yes, indeed, we presented at the E
four Elementary Education Conference and it was awesome. It was
It's just infectious energy, a lot of enthusiasm from the
teachers present all, you know, just really gung ho about science,
about teaching about engineering and mathematics. And we gave our
(00:45):
spiel about about how we're all scientists just from the
get go, where we crawl out of the wound. Why
don't guess we don't crawl out of the wound, but
we're fee a lot more convenient for women if that
were the case. We're ripped from the womb, with ripped
a little strong your coherce coerced from the wound, I guess,
from the womb with math, with engineering and science already
(01:06):
born into you. And uh we've discussed this in the
podcast and we we shared it with everyone there and
it's just a grand time. So we may have some
new listeners now who were present at our speech. And
so if if any of your teachers are tuning in,
welcome to the podcast. Yeah. And actually I have a
little tidbit that relates not just to the education conference,
but also to our topic today here about laughter, because
(01:30):
I can help but giggle into her later on when
I when I remembered us rehearsing our keynote speech in
front of a giant uh Lucy character from Peanuts, giant
sculpture of her. They were all over the hotel and
we got there the night before, so it's like Sunday
evening and we we just want to rehearse the material
(01:52):
a few more times. So what we need an audience, right,
but not a living audience because they have better things
to do on a Sunday night. So we found ourselves
this giant Lucy idle, I guess you would call it,
and with a giant plate of cake. I think it
had something because we also found a candy store down
the road that had some Peanuts characters out front with candy,
(02:12):
so I guess they were related somehow. And looking back,
just the two of us in front of this giant sculpture,
gesturing to Lucy and giving the keynote just made me laugh. Um.
But of course, if if I had remembered this, um, this,
this memory with other people with you, turns out I
would have laughed a lot more. And we'll talk about
that in a moment. Yeah, we've we've talked about humor before,
(02:35):
and we talked a little bit about laughter. This episode
is all about the healing power of laughter, which is
it's become something of a cliche over the past few decades.
You have, of course, like Patch Adams, you have you
shaking your head. Ye, Pat Adams, you have Have you
seen it? I have not, but I have seen Children's
(02:56):
Hospital the Adult Swim Show where they have a character
and they're played by Rob Cordrey. He plays Dr Blake Downs,
who is a healing clown. That the funny part of
this is that he takes the healing power of laughter
deadly seriously, like he's he's wearing clown makeup that kind
of kind of looks like John Lynne Gacy esque, you know,
like that kind of slightly scary clown makeup, and he's
(03:17):
not really he never does much in the way that
of actual humor for the sick, Like he's he's just
very serious about yeah, very intense. Yeah, I could get
behind that, the intense clown. Intense clown. But yeah, like
I say, it's becomes something of a cliche for all
of us. But you go back to around the nineteen
in the d a guy by the name of Norman Cousins,
and he was a writer and magazine editor for The
(03:39):
Saturday Review, and he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease,
and at the time that the theory was making the
rounds that stress could worsen such a condition. So he
asked himself, well, what about it? What if I use
the opposite of stress? So he thought about humor. So
he goes to his doctor and uh, he gets his
doctor's okay, and then prescribes himself a regime of humorous videos,
(04:03):
shows like Candid Camera, which was I guess was big
in the seventies at the time. But he's gonna take
these videos, he's gonna watch them along with his other treatments.
And the disease went into remission, and Cousins wrote a
paper for the New England Journal of Medicine as well
as a book titled Anatomy of an Illness, A Patient's Perspective,
and I was posted in nine became a best seller,
and it led to a lot of actual researchers looking
(04:25):
into the matter. Most notably, you had this guy Lee Burke,
a preventative care specialist from Loma Linda University in Low Melinda, California.
And then also from Lo Melinda, you had Stanley tan
who was an m D, pH d and a diabetes specialist.
So they were curious does mirthful laughter helped individuals with diabetes?
(04:46):
And so short version of this as they took a
group of twenty high risk diabetic patients. They had a
group C, which was control, and they had group L,
which was laughter. So twelve months later they found significant
improvement in group L HDL cholesterol. The good cholesterol had
risen by in group E, the laughter group, and only
three percent in groups see the control group. Harmful C
(05:06):
reactive proteins decrease sixty in the laughter group versus in
the control group. So this is a big study that
actually pushed the idea even more that laughter is maybe
maybe there's something too laughter, the laughter it can actually
heal us in some way, shape or form. So that's
what we're talking about in this episode. But we need
a backtrack a little and say, all right, what is
(05:29):
laughter before we start prescribing it willy nilly? What's going
on when we laugh? Well, okay, one of the things
I wanted to point out is that you can tell
that it's central and very important to us when you
look across species and you see that other species do it.
You know, we know that chimps do it. We know
that if tickled raps will giggle. There's an actual study
on this, and from a new article on how stuff
(05:51):
works called ten Surprising Behaviors and Non Human Animals by
Kate Kirshner, we know that guerrillas also engage in antiq
um and laughter. In fact, she gives this example of
a gorilla that got his kicks by running beside his
trainer along the length of his cage at full speed,
and then the gorilla would suddenly stop and start laughing
(06:13):
uncontrollably as the human kept running past him, And she
said it was great because the gorilla figured out a
stupid human trick. So chimps, gorilla's rats, they're all laughing
at us. They're all laughing at us. But what happens
when we are laughing? What's going on in our own bodies?
Because this is great. We can look at the chance
when we can look at rats and we can see
them giggling, But we can of course turn turn the
(06:35):
focus to ourselves and say, you know, just at a
mechanical level, what's happening to spur on all of these
different chemical changes in our body. Well, the thing about laughter,
like true laughter, like hearty laughter, not just a little
snicker or or or what have you. But full laughter
is a is it's a full body experience. Like your
face is moving a lot, your jaws moving, but also
(06:56):
your torso, even your arms and legs, your trunk, muscles,
everything's getting in on the joke. Um fifteen facial muscles contract,
and you also have stimulation of the zygomatic major muscles.
These are the main lifting mechanisms of your upper lift lip.
And then you also have the respiratory system is getting
in on the action. You have half closing the larnix,
(07:16):
so air intake occurs at regularly, making you gasp. And
in extreme circumstances, what happens something is just extremely funny.
You start crying. With laughter. Yeah, yeah, and you might
you might pee a little. I've heard about this. Yeah, well,
I think on Dirty rock Wislam and calls it lizing,
where if you you laugh so hard that you start
(07:36):
peeing yourself. I have you you ever done this? Have
you ever laughed so hard that you really? And I
would admit to it even though I because you know,
I have no problem with that, But no, have not.
My wife sometimes will be watching something and she'll she'll
warn that that she's about to pee herself if if
she laughs any harder or more. If I was to say, say,
like come over and tickler while she was laughing, then
(07:58):
she might pee. That's that's the warning. I don't know,
maybe a false threat. I've never pushed, pushed, pushed around
that one. I have made friends do it, though, and
they'll be like sap, and I can't help myself. Can
they start crossing their legs and just go in for
the kill? Um? But yeah, I mean that's extreme circumstances
for sure. Um. Also, your mouth is opening and closing
(08:20):
and so there's still that struggle for oxygen, and of
course your face becomes moist and you know, flushed. Yeah,
I mean it's a great feeling. Like I watched a
lot of humorous content. I imagine you do as well.
You like funny things. Correct, yes, it's true, but I
still find it's rare that I watched something where it
just completely overtakes me, where it's like you're you're possessed
(08:42):
by a demon for a good minute or two and
it's just you just can't control yourself. And it's it's
overstatement the obvious here, but it's a wonderful feeling because
it's it's like you're no longer in control of your
body or your senses in the most delightful way possible.
It is great. And it's kind of funny too, because
you're psychologically when you're watching something like that, you start
(09:03):
to feel that rise and you're like, yeah, it's like
a roller coaster. It's like I'm writing something a wave
and I'm not completely in control, but I'm loving it. So, Okay,
let's break down the actual sonic structure of what a
laugh sounds like. And before we do it, let's listen
to a clip of what I think is a great,
full bodied laugh. Well, that's that's a full body laugh.
(09:38):
In the actual video of the YouTube, the individual's laughing
really hard, and he's kind of an older gentleman to
the point where you're got a bunch of beer bottles
behind them. Yeah, but you're a little concern You're like, whoa,
you're laughing a little hard, Grandpa, you need to slow
it down. But it's just I love it because it's
such a joyful laugh and it's just um, the structure
(09:58):
of it just builds in. You can just tell that
this guy is having so much fun, and it really
is infectious. In fact, I think if you watch it,
you probably are a little bit more invested in it
that rather than just hearing it. But even just hearing it,
you can't help but smile to yourself a little bit.
So let's talk about the sonic structure laughter. Researcher Robert
Provine discovered that all human laughter consists of variations on
(10:21):
a basic form that consists of short vowel like notes repeated.
What he says is every two and ten milliseconds. So
I didn't time it in that clip. The first part
of that, though, was the expert weigh in and said,
when we laugh, we tend to go ha ha or
ho ho. That's right. He said, there's one of two.
It's either ha ha ha or I'm glad we have
scientists on these things. I know, I wonder if that
(10:42):
was an ig noble and think that clip that we
played is definitely representative of the more like ha ha ha.
But vrty or do is that? Is that a myth
at I've never really heard, unless like they were intentionally saying, yeah,
you know, I guess it's or like a wood sprite
kind of a thing. Yeah, I know. I don't think
(11:02):
it's something that would come natural to you when you're laughing,
like full on body laughing. Yeah, because full on body
laughing it, I mean it reaches the point of borderline
disgusting at times like where I feel like he he
is maybe a more of a social laughter, which we'll
get into it a little bit, but more of a
look at me, I am laughing and I am a
wood sprite, as opposed to I'm laughing so hard that
(11:23):
urine is flooding through my pants my face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Provine also suggests that humans have a detector that responds
to laughter by triggering other neural circuits in the brain,
which in turn generates even more laughter. And that's just
one explanation for why laughter is contagious. We'll talk a
little bit more about that, But here's the question, why
(11:45):
why do we laugh in the first place? I even
do it? Well, this is a valid question. We've touched
on this a little bit when we've discussed humor in
the past, because on a very basic level, you can
say that laughter is a response to humor or about
the then that that's a tricky answer too, because then
you then you get into the question what is humor?
What makes something humorous? One thing that we've discussed in
(12:07):
the past is the is the benign violation theory? Just
a quick run through this, this is the idea that
you encounter, oh back on the primordial wilds, or when
you go to a haunted house, haunted attraction in the
modern day, you're something jumps out at you, scares the
living daylights out of you, and for a second you
think you're gonna die. Then you realize you're not because
(12:29):
it wasn't a saber tooth tiger. It was your cousin
ug uh decided to have some fun with you. Or
it was just some dude, Yeah, cousin ug he said,
he's quite the trickster. Or it's or it's some some
person in a Google mask at the haunted attraction. You
realize you're not going to die, and the body's response
then is to laugh, which arguably and then, according to
this theory, is then a queue, a social queue to
(12:51):
those around you just say we are not actually going
to die. Please disregard that blood curdling scream that I
issued earlier. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that that
the basis of this is really stress, right, because it
is a release, and you talked about the social implications
of it. Um. Some people say that laughter may even
serve as a conciliatory gesture at times when things get
(13:13):
very stressful. Yes, um, that there's a way to deflect anger.
It's interesting. I found a two thousand and ten North
Carolina State University study that looked at the role laughter
plays injury the liberation. And in fact, the case they
study was a capital murder case, so it was it
wasn't like they just they decided, oh, it's like a
(13:33):
grandma was arrested for jaywalking and you know, or something
more mundane. It was a life and death scenario. And
they made some interesting observations about how humor among the jurors.
It helped her to release the tension, and it also
allowed them to acknowledge when they made errors and then
they could correct them because you know, if you just
sort of laugh off your mistakes, which as we've all
(13:55):
I hope we've all encountered that. You know, when when
something it gets a little stressful at work, maybe you
screwed something up. You can stick to your guns and
let your ego command it and refuse to back down,
or you can sort of laugh it off and everyone forgets.
Like whenever I pronounced Michael Carton as Michael Creton, just
laugh at me, do I? You kind of do? It's
(14:16):
a laugh Mark. I appreciate it because then I'm like, God,
there goes that tick again. Um. But yeah, I mean,
laughter occurs when people are comfortable with one another. We've
found this out and cultural anthropologist my head Dave opt
says that, um, you know, when you feel open and
free and comfortable, the more you laugh, the more you laugh,
the more you bond within a group. And this is
(14:38):
really important because there's this other desire to not be
outside of the group, and so you want to participate
and laugh. And we've talked about this before. Within this
social contract that we're always signing. Um that where we
are kind of hardwired to cooperate with one another anyway
because it's to our benefit. So what happens is you
(14:59):
have a feed, a loop of bonding and laughing going on. Well,
it's interesting you mentioned individuals on the outside because you
also get into that that idea when you look at
the theory of what humor is and how it works,
the idea that all laughter then has to do with Well,
put it this way, with any given joke, you could
argue that you're either on the inside or on the
(15:20):
outside of that joke. Which side are you standing on?
Are you on the side holding the hose on the
side getting hose down by the humor? Uh? And then
you can argue that the humor is about maintaining that
barrier between self and otherness, between normal and strange. Um.
I mean, you can really run wild with it. I
was having a conversation with my friend Matt the other day,
(15:41):
and he was he was making the argument that all
racial humor is intrinsically racist. I don't know, I leave
that to everyone else to think about. But but but,
but certainly you get into some some tricky moral areas.
But it's why you see comedian after comedian getting the
hot water, because they end up joking about a topic
that some else takes too seriously. Because there's a certain
(16:02):
amount there is a certain amount of meanness to do
a lot, if not most humor. You know, I thought
about that with Peter Segel because I was listening to him.
I'm wait, wait, don't tell me the other day. Yes,
a cruel he's not. He's not cruel, but he's very
funny most of the time. But this guy will just
he'll just kind of throw whatever out there sometimes, and
(16:23):
I admire that because it doesn't always stick. And I
have actually heard the audience boo him before, Yeah, because
he didn't play with the audience. The audience was a
little bit offended. So anyways, it is interesting to see
that kind of dynamic can play. Yeah, take Louisa k
for instance. I mean, Louisa k Will does not seem
really to have much of a filter, but he approaches
(16:44):
it from a certain point of honesty. So he'll say
something that's really offensive or really gross, but he approaches
it in such an honesty where he's where he kind
of says, this is what humor is, and I'm trying
to make sense of it as well as you guys are.
So you know, I have to say that in season
two of Louis that I nearly stopped watching because one
of his bits to stand up bits was so offensive
(17:06):
and it's really really hard to offend me. And I
was like, oh no, I can't get back on this,
but thankfully I did because it is a great show.
But back to to uh, laughter and what's going on
with the group dynamic. The researcher Robert Provine, who we mentioned,
also found that laughter is thirty times more frequent in
groups compared to private settings. So again there's this idea
(17:27):
that that's the feedback loop in place, and that's why
there's a huge difference between watching a comedy by yourself
in the quiet living room, watching it with a loved
one or a small group of friends, versus watching it
in amidst an audience that's like super into the movie
or the improv show or what happened. And this is
(17:47):
from our article how laughter Works. The studies have also
found that dominant individuals, the boss, the tribal chief, or
the family family patriarch used humor more than their subordinates.
And that's where we get into some interesting social area
as well, because zero psychological and behavioral studies revealed that
laughter can be more than just a spontaneous response to stimula. Obviously,
(18:08):
it's not just a matter of tiger jumped out at
me and I didn't die. But about two million years
ago we started developing willful control over our facial motor systems.
So you can almost think of this as kind of
a birth of deception and a birth of lies. That
was kind of a Garden of Eden moment because and
certainly is micro expressions reveal and you know not everyone's
a great liar, and you can often tell the difference
(18:29):
between fake laughter and real laughter. And the example that
comes to mind is your boss makes a joke, what
do you do? You laugh at that joke. That's even
if your boss is a great guy. And maybe even
if even if your boss is actually funny, our boss
is actually funny. Is pretty larious, it's pretty hilarious. But
I still find myself falling into fake laughter sometimes, and
hopefully I'm pretty good at it and no one's noticed it,
(18:51):
but we still find ourselves knowing when to laugh sometimes.
When I found myself doing this at the teacher's conference
because I'm suddenly interacting with a lot of people that
I haven't interacted before, be it teachers or discovery personnel
that we're there with us, and I find myself falling
into the pattern of using a little fake laughter sprinkled
in my conversation, you know, and just you know, smiling
(19:13):
and kind of laughing a little bit as part of
the way that I'm communicating with them. That's interesting because
some I read that UM in order to try to
gain control social control over a situation that the people
who are trying to gain social control over it tend
to laugh more than the person who is listening. So
you know, it's a way to engage people, right and
(19:35):
to get people to pay attention UM using laughter. And
as you as you had pointed out, this part of
the brain is actually called the pre motor cortical region,
and this is the reason that's activated, and it is
the part of the brain that is standing at the
ready and listening to conversations and lighting up just before
it begins to contort your your facial muscles to react
(19:59):
to this situation. And of course we always have to
bring up mirror neurons. When it comes to this kind
of stuff. Stephen Small, who is a professor in neurology
and psychology, argues that the contagious nature of laughter is
caused by mirror neurons, or he says, brain cells that
become active when an organism is watching an expression or
(20:20):
behavior that they themselves can perform. And we've seen this
again and again and again. Um, so it's no surprise
there that when you're watching another person laughing, you begin
to mimic that that you actually have those neurons in
your brains that are saying, hey, laugh now it's funny. Yes, well,
which comes right back around to the idea of laughter yoga,
(20:40):
which I know you hate. I don't know that I hate.
And let me let me say I have never taken, well,
I've never meant to take a laughter yoga class, but
some yoga instructor yeah yeah, uh, you know. I think
for me, I was there for yoga, not for laughing.
So perhaps I just wasn't in the right mindset. But
I hate the idea of it. Yea. Just to explain
(21:02):
this to anyone who hasn't had any actual experience with
laughter yoga, this involves you being in a yoga classroom
and the yoga instructor who's leading you in various physical
activities will also lead you in about of basically fake laughter,
where you the teacher will start going off and everyone
(21:22):
else has to join in with lots of fake laughter.
But what you're in opposed by the way. Sometimes I've
order to involve sort of hand gestures, Like there's one
that we do in my yoga class called the laughter milkshake.
We have like a pretend milkshake and you move it
from one mug to the other and then you pour
it on your head and then you laugh really hard. Um,
And it's it always ends with legitimate laughter, at least
(21:44):
from me and people I noticed in the room. It
starts fake and then it becomes contained aus it, it
becomes authentic. It's true. It's one of the things was
the whole fake it till you make it and you
become right. So if you laugh, even when you're faking it,
we're going to actually start to laugh. Sometimes I'm out
throwing a little sardonic laughter, you know. Well that's what
I did to try to counter it because it was
(22:06):
driving me crazy. So I was like, but that's interesting.
The sardonic laughter is another interesting thing to bring up
because what I don't know that anyone actually does it.
I have I guess I'm just not around like severely
evil individuals. But if it exists legitimately and not just
in movies, and I don't know that anyone's ever actually
uh looked into this. If we have any evil listeners
(22:28):
out there, maybe they can tell us. But if it exists,
then it's an example of this social hijacking of the
left of the use of laughter to where we're faking it.
I guess too belittle someone or we're just unhinged. I
guess is the whole deal that you find humor in
things that are not humorous, like taking over the world
or or creating a robot guerilla hybrid that will help
(22:49):
you take over the world. It was just my way
of saying, like, hey, I didn't sign up for the
left class. I signed up for the regular, regular yoga class.
But what does all all of this laughing due to us?
What what are the actual physical effects and the benefits,
so the healing power of laughter. We We've talked about
a lot about what what laughter is and some of
(23:10):
the things that going in the human body. So to
what extent can it actually heal us? Well? Okay, um,
let's talk about what is happening at the physical level, right,
because let's just lay this groundwork so we can see
if there's a possibility that it could have some sort
of long term healing effects. When we laugh, our bodies
respond really positively. There is a decrease in stress hormones
of cortisol, adrenaline, and dopac, and an increased in beta
(23:35):
endorphins which lower feelings of depression, and then human growth
hormone UM also which helps protect us against disease and infection.
So it's not just the act of laughter that changes
our body's chemistry, because you know, even the mirror anticipation
of laughing does this too. So if you see, um
(23:56):
a funny movie, or rather if you're on your way
to see a funny movie, you're already primed. Your body
is ready to go ahead and release those feel good endorphins.
Just on a physical level, of course, you're the repeated
forceful exhalations of breath, it occur. Uh, They really give
your give your lungs of workout, gives your the muscles
of your diaphragm, will workout. So there's a lot of
(24:18):
a lot of breathing and h and chest movements going on.
Um and laughter also prompts our bodies to produce more
T cells and globulins. And this is where it becomes
very important to our immune system because what they found
is that higher levels of an antibody called salivary immenium
globulin A when you laugh, this is released and that
is what fights infectious organisms entering into the respiratory tract.
(24:42):
So that is what they found in the saliva of people,
this increase of this antibody for people who watched humorous videos.
And the idea is that the benefits of this could
actually be linked to longevity because people who report a
general feeling of happiness and of course laughter would help
with that, tend to be healthier overall, live longer rather
(25:04):
than unhappy people. And there's a two thousand eleven study
that says that three out of a people aged fifty
two to seventy five, they found that those who rated
their happiness higher were significantly less likely to die in
the following five years. Uh So you know, there you go,
is this is another reason to laugh. There's a great
(25:26):
study that we ran across in researching. There's a two
thousand twelve Oxford University study You're not in your head? Yes, okay,
you're not laughing. I laughed when I read this one
because basically this is what it consisted of. They had
subjects watch videos, either funny ones or dry documentaries, and
then they were also tortured, which is to say they
(25:46):
were they put their wrists arms inside blood pressure cuffs
or frozen cooling sleeves. Yeah, we should say why they
did this because because you had mentioned the what is
happening physically like your you know, with your abdomen and
the amount of the air that you're inhaling exhaling, they
wanted to know if if laughing could be considered actual exercise.
And we know that when we exercise were we release
(26:09):
endorphins which helped to manage pain. Right, so you need
to inject a little pain into the scenario to see
if the laughter is actually helping with it. And sure enough,
in the experiments, pain thresholds did go up after people
watch the funny videos, but not after they viewed the
factual documentaries. So and belly laughter was also the key here,
(26:29):
like full blown not just snickering a little, but ken
burns hair. Uh, you're watching a documentary, but actual full
bodied laughter, like if you're watching airplane or something. Yeah,
that's right. They were looking at the amount of contractions
of their bellies were doing, which reminds me. It brings
me back to Burdo Eco's Name of the Rose, because
a lot of that book and in the movie, which
(26:49):
is also quite good, uh deals with the nature of
laughter and what the what the church's view on laughter is.
And Brother William in the book brings up an example
of a saint uh Well who supposedly used laughter, employed
laughter want being tortured and tricked one of his tortures
and just dipping his hand into the boiling water that
he was immersed in. It made me think it's like, oh, well,
(27:11):
if you had a sit maybe that's the way you
could to a certain extent but not really counteract torturous
pain by just going into it with a sense of humor,
just tickling people instead of torturing them. No, no, no,
I'm saying that while being tortured, if you found enough
humor in the scenario, could you know, I guess you
could conceivably reduce the level of pain. You could up
your pains, right, I wouldn't actually work, but I can't
(27:35):
help but go there with my mind. And you can't
self tickle, right, that's a problem. Yeah, I just I
think David Eagleman was just talking about that on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah.
It has to do with it like anticipation. And if
you find someone who can self tickle, they are faking
it totally. Yeah, right, and they're weird for its probably
a whole movement of self ticklers out there. Um. So
(27:57):
here's this idea that came out of that studied though,
is that exercise and laughter could have the same benefits, right,
this this rise and endorphins. So then it became well, okay,
if we know from laughing that laughing is increased in
a group situation, could endorphins be increased in an exercise situation.
(28:19):
So I think it's interesting how they took one data
set and tried to apply it to that to the other. Um.
I think it was a two thousand and nine study. Yeah,
it was two thousand nine study that Dunbar, same guy
um from the Laughing Experiment and his colleagues studied a
group of elite Oxford rowers asking them to work out
either on an isolated rowing machine separated from one another
(28:40):
in a gym, or on a machine that simulated full
synchronized crew rowing um and in that case, the rowers
were exerting themselves in synchrony as a united group. And
after they exercised together, the rowers pain thresholds and presumably
their endorphin levels right um were significantly higher than they
had been at the start, but also higher than when
(29:01):
they rode alone. So even just thinking that you are
participating in this group activity apparently helped in terms of
the release of endorphins, which is very interesting, which which
brings back to the idea of going to a group
exercise class such as a group yoga class, but where
then you then also engage in group laughing. Right, I'm
(29:21):
gonna saying, of course all roads leave to lead to
laugh for yoga in this case, because that is the
culmination of what we've described here. Yeah, the universe is saying,
Julie Douglas, give this universe is not talking to me,
and if it is, I'm insane. Another quick study that
I found was the one from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital,
(29:41):
and they found that patients use laughter to communicate emotionally
with their psychotherapists, like using a lot like an exclamation
point at the end of a sentence, and that laughing
together also helped seal the bond. So I found that
interesting as well in terms of not only physical healing,
but emotional healing. Laughter ends up playing a role in
therapy session, which uh a few times that I've I've
(30:02):
seen a therapist. I mean, I do remember laughing a little,
partially because I ended up accidentally going to a children's
therapist and there was a sandbox full of toys in
the room. She was great, but there was a sandbox
full of toys. She have a clown news on. No,
thank God, just have to check all right, well, before
we go to our mail should we just listen to
(30:24):
that clip one more? Yeah, play the laugh one time,
and I actually I encourage everyone to laugh. Try laughing
with this man. Laugh aloud. If you're in the car,
you're out running, cycling, if you're alone in the truck, whatever,
if you're on mass transit, for sure, yes, to start laughing,
laugh with this man. All right, here we go, Yeah,
(30:59):
good stuff. What do we have in the mail bag? Yes,
let me grab the mail, Uh, the robot will be
kind enough to bring it over all right, here's one
from our listener Murphy Murphy Rights, and it says, Aloha,
Robert and Julie. I just finished the podcast about the
Ordovician period. Blew my mind, naturally, but I am here
(31:19):
to talk about the listener mail at the end. About maps.
One day, I was at a family friend's house when
I saw a poster of a map that looked like this,
and she included this image. And it's a It's basically
the map of the world as we typically see it inverted, Okay,
It's a map of the world, only upside down from
its traditional orientation. It got me thinking about how arbitrary
(31:40):
north and south were, and how easily our Earth could
have eastern and western snowcaps and orbited around the Sun
vertically rather than horizontally. It's all about the map maker's
perspective and whatever sticks. On the topic of science fiction
and mapps. I also came across this map. Somebody on
the Internet mapped out the location of all the Star
Wars planet's ever man in the films, games, novels, and
(32:01):
comic books. I think they call that the extended universe.
There are quite a lot of them, just thought you
would appreciate that. And she also included this map, which
is really awesome includes all of these star systems and
so forth. So, yeah, that's one of the things we
talked about in that episode, the creation of maps that
thought all the details of our fantasy settings as well
as the bias of our maps regarding the world as
(32:24):
it is or the world as we experience it, and
its effects on how we experience it. Because again, you
have that map of the of the of the world
and you basically have the United States, they're in the
center of it, or or europe western ist. Yeah, this
is the center of the map. This is the center
of the of the place in the world in space.
(32:44):
So thanks for us sending that, Tis Murphy. Here's one
from a listener by the name of Alberto from Puerto Rico.
Alberto Retsina says, hi, Julian Robert, I just finished listening
to the three Map podcast and remembered a weird high
school experience I had with maps and wanted to share
it with you. In a Puerto Rican history class, the
teacher to side did that the best thing we could
do was make a lot of maps. The thing is
that he had some weird map hypotheses. The first is
(33:06):
that each map had a capital or central point, and
that if it didn't, the owner or user of the
map was the main point of the map. Second, every
representation of space was a map, so every representation of
any space had a main point. The assignment required that
I localized myself on the ever bigger maps, starting with
our house. We had to do maps with the star
(33:28):
of for where I lived as a capital of our house,
our barrio, neighborhood, reward, our town, our country, Puerto Rico,
our area Caribbean, our continent, our planet, and our solar system.
I never understood the reasoning behind this, and he never
made the connection between this exercise in the history of
Puerto Rico. The rest of the assignments of the class
(33:48):
were maps related. But we're map related, but not so
far away from the history is this one? Thank you
for making my commute entertaining. Well, I think it's an
interesting experiment that the class engaged in because it was
getting down to what is the nature of the map
and what does it say about where I am on
the map and where I position myself in the map? Well,
I like it too, because it gives kids the idea
(34:09):
that they are citizens of the universe, that, of course,
this is the specific street that they live on, specific
neighborhood and specific city and so on, and keep going out.
It's almost like the powers of ten, right, yeah, yeah, exactly,
so yeah, I really like that one. Certainly of any
of the other listeners have any cool map experiences and
map activities from school like that right in, we'd love
(34:30):
to hear about them. But more importantly, if you have
something about the healing power of laughter you would like
to share, we'd love to hear any stories you have
of of how laughter has affected your physical healing or
emotional healing during trying times in your in your life. Uh,
if you are employed in the medical profession in any way,
shape or form, we'd also love to hear from you
about your thoughts on the nature of humor and if
(34:52):
any of your comedians share it as well. You can
find us on Facebook and you can find us on Tumbler.
On both of those we go by the names have
to Blow Your Mind, and on Twitter we used to
handle blow the Mind, and you can drop us a
line at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for
(35:13):
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