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The origins of laughter are ancient and wordless, a behavior whose roots run a good deal deeper than the evolutionary wellsprings of language. It is related to play and feeling good, although it isn’t simply about fun. Darwin observed that it can also show up when we are feeling anger, shame, or nervousness, acting to mask, rather than display emotion. At other times it may communicate appeasement or submission. Or as Dante put it, “He is not always at ease who laughs.”
May be this explains laughter’s universality. Everyone laughs, no matter where he lives, no matter what her race or background, whether he hunts corporate heads among the skyscrapers of Manhattan or real ones in the rain forests of Borneo. …….
Despite its familiarity and universality, we are almost entirely clueless about how we have become the laughing creature. There is no obvious, practical reason for laughing. If evolution resolutely favors the emergence of the eminently practical, what possible purpose could laughter serve? ……
As far back as 1905, Freud made a similar observation about jokes. He said they masked or released, in a socially acceptable way, fears and feelings that might be otherwise inappropriate. And a laugh, he speculated, physically revealed and relief felt when something disturbing was expressed. This, he said, was similar to what we do in our dreaming – unconsciously conveying what we are not entirely comfortable with consciously. …….. But the joke itself made the expression of that darkness acceptable because it disguised it as positive. And the final result was that elusive feeling we call funny.
The scans found that humor and laughter are scattered throughout the brain. There is – cerebrally speaking, at least – to comedy central. We have clusters of neurons devoted exclusively to all sorts of different aspects of laughter and humor – areas for hearing, seeing, and recognizing the laugh of someone else, sectors that distinguish between puns and slapstick humor, and special neurons that send signals to our lungs and pharynx so that we don’t simply feel amused but actually laugh. ……
If people find a joke funny, LaughLab’s MRIs revealed that a very precise area of the brain just above the right eyebrow called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lit up. This cluster of neurons is as close as the brain gets to a funny bone. Several brain-scanning experiments have shown that this is where we “see” incongruity, and then register the surprise that makes us laugh. It’s the part of the brain that “gets” the joke.
It is not, however, the part of the brain that experiences the sensation we call funny. That is situated in still another place, far away, near the base of the brain in an area called the nucleus accumbens, a location logically enough, associated with positive emotions in animals and identified as a key site in moderating drug addition. Its location is so close to that area, in fact, that some researchers have wondered if it might help explain why we can never get too much of a good laugh. Fun has its addictive qualities too, after all.
There is a final sector of the brain that actually triggers laughter. And it resides in still another location – the selfsame area, in fact, that helps us direct our thumbs and fingers to make tools, and our lungs, throats, and tongues to make words. Scientists call it the supplemental motor area, or SMA. ……..
Darwin noticed that facial expression of a person laughing often looked identical to someone who is crying. But it was the British zoologist Desmond Morris who first speculated in his popular book ‘The Naked Ape’ that the origin of laughter might actually be directly linked to crying.
In the earliest months of life we have one primary way of expressing fear, loneliness, pain, or any other discomfort: We bawl, long and loudly. It is a simple way of making our points, but highly effective. ….
But then around the fourth month, at some very basic level, the brain begins to wire up connections that enable us to recognize the primary care-givers in our lives. This is also the age at which we begin to smile and giggle, an immense milestone in human relationships. …..
Province (Robert) says we have been able to commandeer these breathing muscles because upright walking releases us from the one-step, one-breath formula. If he is right, this means that speech has left its signature on the sounds and rhythms of our laughter; even though they have very separate origins. We sound the way we do when we laugh, partly because we evolved the ability to speak. And not only that, we speak and laugh the way we do because our big toes enabled us to stand upright and learn to breathe differently in the first place. (Selected excerpts from Page 143 to 153)
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