why do humans laugh What are the benefits of laughing?



The 'laughter' that is born at random moments in everyday life is very pleasant and makes life more wonderful. Various theories have been proposed as to why humans laugh and their evolutionary merits, one of which is explained by scientific media Nautilus.

Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0176

Why Is That Funny? - Nautilus
https://nautil.us/why-is-that-funny-243350/

When Nautilus writer Brian Gallagher was in elementary school, he was late for school and his teacher asked him in front of the whole class, 'Why are you late this time?' At that time, he suddenly smiled and said, 'My waffles were slow to bake!' Decades later, Jonathan Silvertown, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote a book called The Comedy of Error: Why Evolution Made Us Laugh. ) ” and thought about why he was able to make his classmates laugh at that time.

Laughter is a natural and unintentional response like breathing, but for thousands of years humans have been exploring what laughter is and how we can make others laugh. ``The search for the essence of humor predates the alchemist's quest for the philosopher's stone,'' Silvertown said in his book.

``Nothing can make you laugh if you're not in the mood for humor,'' Silvertown said. You may notice, 'he argues that laughter is not caused by one's own will alone.



Gallagher himself doesn't find the excuse he made when he was in elementary school particularly funny: 'I was slow to bake waffles,' and thinks that other people can come up with better excuses. . However, when applied to Mr. Silvertown's theory that ``human laughter is due to disharmony and dissolution of reactions'', the situation in which students make unexpected excuses when being scolded by the teacher is that the class It can be interpreted that it made Mate laugh.

Silvertown's laughter disharmony hypothesis is that various kinds of disharmony and mistakes make people laugh. For example, Swedish psychologist Göran Nerhardt once conducted the following experiment.

- Subjects were instructed to hold 6 levels of weight from 'very light (0.74 kg)' to 'very heavy (2.7 kg)' and to memorize each weight.
・Instruct them to guess the weight of the next weight they will have to carry.
・Hold a weight that is overwhelmingly lighter than any other weight you have ever held.

In this experiment, it was confirmed that the subjects started laughing when they were given an unexpectedly light weight. In this way, Mr. Silvertown argues that the disharmony of experienced events causes laughter.

``The first step in the evolution of humor probably started with the general mental ability to compare expectations with various sensory inputs, such as visual, auditory, and tactile,'' Silvertown said. There is an area in the brain that specializes in finding 'disharmony with expectations,' which is essential for survival. We propose the hypothesis that the realm processes this disharmony as a 'punchline'.



Another characteristic of laughter is that many people want to laugh more and prefer people who make them laugh. The tendency to like laughter suggests that laughter played a major role in human evolution. In this regard,

Robin Dunbar , an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, proposes the hypothesis that 'laughter is an extension of animal grooming to speech.'

In animals such as primates, the endorphin system in the brain is stimulated by hand movements that groom each other's bodies, and tension relaxation by endorphin release creates friendship between individuals. However, grooming has physical and time constraints, such as touching each other's bodies for a long time, and as the social group grows, the effort of grooming each other becomes enormous. Therefore, Mr. Dunbar argues that something that functions more efficiently as an alternative to grooming has been sought, and that 'laughter' using voice has developed.

``We needed something that could groom at a distance so that we could groom multiple individuals at the same time,'' Dunbar said in an interview with Gallagher. Laughing in a group triggers the endorphin system, which creates the same feeling of warmth and relaxation in the group. Mr. Dunbar cites ``social spontaneity'' as one of the characteristics of laughter, saying, ``It is very difficult not to laugh when someone else is laughing.'' Laughter can also be seen in great apes, but while laughter in apes is a repetition of exhalation and inhalation, there is a difference that human laughter continues exhalation without inhaling.

Mr. Gallagher says that the episode that made his teacher laugh when he was in elementary school was talked about several times among friends even after several months, and he was able to laugh each time. Such laughter seems to run counter to Silvertown's disharmony hypothesis, but he says, ``Jokes in these cases strengthen ties and serve as reminders of happy and memorable moments. Laughter doesn't just happen when you hear something funny, it happens when something makes you happy.'



in Science, Posted by log1h_ik