 ..y'n ddwy'n fawr i'r cyfnodd y Cyfnod Gweinidol... ..y'r cyfnodd hwn i'r cyfnodd, ac mae'r gwybod maen nhw'n ddweud... ..y'r cyfnodd oherwydd o'r byd yn gofio. Fyddwn i'n gweithio'r byd yn gofio'r byd... ..y cyfnodd a'r byd yn gweithio'r byd. Mae'n gofio byddwn i'r cyfrif... ..y'r cyfrif yma'r cyfrif yn gofio'r byd... ..dym ni'n gwybod ar y bydd ngyfynno... Fe oedd y TV programme yng Nghymru ar gyfer 1916, mae'n mynd i'r gwahog. Mae'r tifelly yn ymddyno yn ôl i ddweud. Yn amgylcheddoli sy'n mynd i ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud yn ymddyno'n mynd i ddweud. Yn ymddyno, mae wedi'n ddweud. Mae'r ddweud yn ceilibater, mae'n gwyllt yn ei ddweud. Mae'n gwyllt yn gwyllt yn gwyllt. Mae'n gwyllt yn ddweud, yn ymddyno. Felly, mae wedi tynnu achos byddwn i'r newid y Llafftor a yn dweud o'r cyffredinion i gyda'ch gynig yw ystyn nhw. Govech i'r cefnwyr hefyd. Y ddigon yng Nghymru yw'r newid yw'r ddigon y maen yn oed yn Fath Charles Darwin a mae'n wneud yn y cwestiynau ymaogio mewn amser yn gyflawn gwaith a gafol. Mae'n wneud yn cablechonion yn Llafftor. Mae'n eich valud o'r dweud o gyflawn wedi ddifu warchfodol ac mae'n ei tylu rhyngwneud o amdodol. On dweud y dyfodol yn myg y gwlad yn gweld nhw'n grwng, ac rwy'n credu'n yn gwybod eich credu allan yn gyfleter cyflyng. Mae'n gweld yr aeth gwyfledr yn gyflyg,au ychydig iddo yn ddysgu. Rwy'n rhoi'n gwybod y gallwn gwahanol cyflyng, mae'n lle economyn o'r cyflwyno llygwyr, oherwydd mae'n rhaid o'n mynd i chi ddaeth, oherwydd maen nhw'n amlŷ, oherwydd i chi'n gofynyd yng Nghymru i hyn o'r ymlogan sydd yn gweld ychydig sefydliadau newydd. felly rydw i'r cyfnodd, sy'n gyffredinol gyda'r cyfnodd ym 150 yw oedden nhw'n cyffredinol, y byd, y bydd, a'r byd yn ddysgu'n, rydym argynno'n gwybod, y bydd os ydym a chyfyddu'n amser hefyd, a rydw i'n gwybod yr unrhyw oherwydd i'r cyfnodd y ddweud o'r stryd yn gweithio'n gwybod dweud. Mae'n ddod o'r cyfnodd yn y gwirionedd yw'r cyfnodd, gyda'r cyfnod o'ch cyfrifatau syniadau, a gweithio'r cyfrifatau, sefmol, cyfrifatau a'r cyfrifatau. Mae'r cyfrifatau i'r 4731. Rydyn ni'n gwneud cyfrifatau i gyfrifatau, rydyn ni'r 259 cyfrifatau. Mae'n rhan i'r cyfrifatau. Mae'r cyfrifatau yn amlwg ddweud yn y cyfrifatau yw cyfrifatau syniadau yn y cyfrifatau yn y cyfrifatau yw'r problemau. Mae'r problemau neu'r problemau, mae'n cyfrifatau yn y cyfrifatau. Mae'n bwysig, mae'n ddigwsio gwybod i'w bod llunwg ac yn dweud yn ffwylu'n allan, ac mae'n bwysig yn defnyddio bod gennym i'w P pods yntech chi'n sefydlu ddiweddiau a ddim bywch rhaedin papurio arloc. Mae'n bwysig. Mr Marwm yn llwydo i'r lefydau yn lefydauogaeth newydd, ac mae'n amser oerdd eich parwydau oherwydd, oedd yn llwydo i lefydau newydd yn b transgurffau. Mae'n llywed o'r lefydau newydd, mae'n llygau. Mae'r clip here of the late comedian Robin Williams meeting the late gorilla Coco who lived in the US and who could sign. She did American Sign Language so she signs to him at the start to tickle me. It's really humilus, like just do it, you said you would tickle me. He does, he tickles her and it's hard, it's really hard to tickle a gorilla and it takes him a while. They've got a thick skin and when he gets in there you'll see what starts to look like the eyes are sparkling, she starts moving in a very familiar way, her face moves in a very familiar way and if we could hear it there's a very gentle sound. The other thing I have to point out is that Coco was extremely interested in human nipples, everybody's nipples and devoted a great deal of her time and attention to investigating them which explains some of the other things happening on this video. So here we go, tickle me and not working so what have you got going on here? Try harder, try harder and he manages it now and then she's just like let's not waste each other's time. What's going on there? But it turns out other apes are not the only animals that laugh. So laughter has actually been or a laughter like vocalisation has been very well described in rats, it doesn't sound like our laughter or sort of ape laughter, it's a very high-pitched squeaking sound but scientist at Yang Pagsep and his colleagues have studied this and this is just showing an example of a rat being tickled in the lab, when they take their hand away the rat is running around trying to get the person to tickle them again so this is an activity that the rat enjoys, the rat wants to be tickled, apparently if you tickle them every day in the lab they start making the sound when they see you come in, come on tickle me. And it turns out, I always used to say well there's probably more laughter out there, we're just not looking for it, if we look at laughter as an index of play and that's what I should say Darwin thought that laughter was an expression of joy, he thought it was an emotion expression of joy. Pagsep, working with the rats, thinks that laughter is an invitation to play, you can see those two things could be linked but it is interesting if you look at play it's a very interesting and important primate behaviour, all mammals in fact, all mammals play when they're juveniles and some continue playing their whole lives, it's a very important behaviour, you need to show that you're being playful so what you find is animals use a what's called play face, this very loose open unthreatening mouth that's play face going on there with the dogs, play is so important, play is so important to dogs in fact they have this thing called play bow and that's what the dog at the top here is doing and that basically says everything after this is a game, I might growl but I'm not mad at you because we're playing a game this is brilliant, so what this is all doing is saying this is playful so the same behaviour could be aggression or sort of unpleasant or sexual but now you're saying no this is playful it's all okay and a guy called Greg Bryant in the US did a much wider search on play vocalisations in mammals and found that the most unlikely mammals such as cows and weasels also make play vocalisations and that's it, laughter seems to be one of these sounds that you make during play to show that you're being playful so along with the play bow, along with the play face there is this sound, this sound that you make to say I'm being playful this is a game this is fun and so likely cows are laughing alongside the weasels, laughter like behaviour or certainly a play vocalisation has even been described in parrots suggesting that you might find it in other very social animals, you don't find it in all parrots you have to these are Kia parrots from New Zealand which are extremely sociable in New Zealand they're considered to be naughty parrots because they're slightly too playful if anything and when they play they make a sound so we're seeing this relationship between play and laughter in other animals possibly also a tree for us well let's take a bit look at humans and laughter in humans it's important to contrast laughter from other things that we can do with our voices so this is just a vocal tract image of somebody talking in our MRI scanner and this is just a glimpse of the complexity of what happens when human beings start speaking no other animal can make the sounds we make it's absolutely extraordinary the way that we can use our our tongue our lips our soft palate our voice box all of this moving continuously and shaping the sound that we're making and giving us these unparalleled complexity of the sounds that humans can make with their voices this is under a very distinct pattern of brain control brain areas that you don't find in other animals are recruited in humans to control the complexity of our speaking and if these brain areas are damaged then we have great difficulty talking but if these brain areas are damaged we can still make other kinds of sounds because we have another completely different way of producing vocalisations one that we share with other mammals that's older and it runs down under a different kind of neural control which I'll show you in a second and that's involved in emotional vocalisations like laughter so this is just showing you the same woman with a vocal tract imaging now instead of talking she's laughing in the scanner and you'll see all of those beautiful complex movements go away what's happening is she's opening her mouth the tongue staying at the bottom of the mouth and then she's making a lot of noise and that's laughter so this is extremely basic way of making a sound this is effectively more like an animal call than it is like speech and when we laugh in this involuntary way we think about the last time you were laughing and you couldn't stop laughing when you were laughing like this it's under this very different pattern of neural control so instead of these bits at the side of the brain they're controlling things that we voluntarily do with our voice there's this midline system that's going from the anterior cingulate down through the periaciductal grade to the brainstem nuclei and then directly controlling the articulators and in fact also the ribcage which we use a lot when we're doing things with our voice so that's why patients who have damage to that means they have difficulty speaking can do still still do things like laugh and cry but this this older network is undamaged just a glimpse here of what that's you could see she was moving a lot in the scanner although all her mouth was just opening and that's because when you laugh a great deal of stuff's going on down at the ribcage human ribcage is extremely interesting and very important you're all using it right now to do what scientists call staying alive very important don't stop doing that so to stay alive what you do is you do what's called metabolic breathing very important don't stop you take the muscles between the ribs and the diaphragm at the bottom of the ribcage and you use the intercostal muscles the muscles between the ribs you contract them it pulls the ribcage up and out and that creates negative pressure inside the lungs air is drawn in and then you relax the back out and it pushes the air out so that's metabolic breathing continue doing that and if i was to put a breath belt on you i would pick so just a measuring how your ribcage is moving in and out as you breathe i would see this sinusoidal pattern that you see up at the top here so that's what you're all doing at the moment as soon as we start talking we use the ribcage very differently and we use the ribcage to very finely control the flow of air out through the larynx it's extremely complex although it doesn't feel very hard and that's actually again something very unique to humans we have this ability to control how we breathe out using these same muscles and we see a very different pattern of movement of the ribcage as soon as we start laughing this gets different again and now for laughter you have these single very very large deflections of the ribcage and each one of those big deflections is just pushing air out of you so each of those ha ha ha sounds is one big movement just squeezing air out we don't have a good understanding of the way that this is happening at the brain level but if there is a competition between laughter and breathing and talking laughter will normally win it stops you from breathing it stops you from talking it's just squeezing air out of you it's trying to kill you and it's relatively dangerous in that respect it is a little bit stressful on the ribcage but um don't stop obviously now sometimes if you're really lucky when you're listening to radio four in the morning you hear the systems start to compete with each other so one of the things I really like to listen out for is when people who are doing live radio or live television start to laugh because you hear these two systems the speech production system which you're trying to use to talk and the laughter production system which has somehow got in there and is going to stop this you hear them duking it out and what you can often hear happening first is that people have difficulty controlling the pitch of their voice so I've got an example here from the today programme from a few years ago Charlotte Green is about to try and read the news the pitch of people's voices is shown down in the lower panel in blue you're going to hear somebody coming down the line first the replacement has now been dismissed with the army's popular chief of staff jack twatt taking over a 40 foot sperm whale which was stranded in the fourth of fourth for more than four days is now going to be swimming towards open waters again it freed itself late last night marine experts are hoping to establish this morning whether the whale is finally back at sea good luck to the whale 10 past eight of the time an investigation is underway at the meeting now if you're interested in laughter and voices and speech like I am this is gold dust there's everything here the guy coming down the line has got to say a bit of a rude word popular chief of staff jack twatt and he just goes for it nothing to see here popular chief of staff jack twatt and then back in the studio where Charlotte Green is crucially we'll get to this she's not on her own she somebody whispers to her just before she starts to read the news headlines and if you listen very very carefully what they whisper is jack twatt because they are doing one thing and one thing only they are trying to make her laugh Anna first she's okay she's doing all right the whale in the further fourth is coming out okay and then the laughter starts to get her and she's starting to lose control of what's happening at her voice box because she's losing control of what's happening at her rib cage and then her voice starts to shoot up in pitch and then at the end if you listen very carefully she continues to make squeaking noises after she has stopped talking because now she's fully laughing live on the radio now the BBC doesn't like this the BBC does not like their news or their sports broadcasters to show emotion when they are broadcasting because it's considered to be bad form that's her power of what's happening here she doesn't want to do it and it still happens so we've got this very interesting behaviour it can kind of creep up on you it seems to often be at least potentially under not under your voluntary control something else we were interested in when we laughed to kind of basically insisted we study it me and my phd student desa sota and then many other colleagues I'll come across we were interested in these emotional things in the voice but every time we looked at things that included laughter laugh decided to do something else interesting so for example we were very interested in the extent to which if you go outside of the UK and you study these non-verbal emotional vocalisations how many of them can be recognised when you go to a completely different culture so um desa did several trips with Frank Eisner out to Namibia where she was working in northern Namibia they were working in northern Namibia with members of the Himba community and these were not people who had any contact with people from Europe at all they don't have a written culture they don't have electricity they haven't seen or heard anybody from our culture before so there's no they haven't been contaminated by our the way we express emotions so these guys recognise emotions from the voice from people recorded back in London and vice versa it might suggest that much as Darwin had suggested there is some shared evolutionary history that's leading to these being kind of common vocalisations across humans wherever you grow up um a lot of work has been done on this with the face we were the first to try and do it with the voice I say we like I went I was part of it but sitting back in London coming up with ideas I go you go to Namibia and do this um so we also recorded the Himba giving emotional vocalisations and I want you to see if you can tell what emotion this guy is expressing with his voice no points for spotting at the end there he started laughing anybody taking guess of what's happening before then I have to say there's somebody from the Himba here please don't spoil it this has happened to me before anybody guess did it sound positive did it sound negative it's positive did it sound like high in energy or low in energy yeah he's actually expressing a triumph so this is an example of an emotion that's not so culturally specific that another culture doesn't understand it he knows what it means to feel triumphant that makes sense to him but when he expresses it it's not recognizable to us as triumph that's not that's a culturally specific expression of emotion that's not one of the things Darwin was talking about and then at the end he starts laughing and if you listen very carefully it's because he's surrounded by other people who are laughing at him and he joins in and that's immediately recognizable and that looks certainly from this like we're seeing something that looks a lot more recognizable in both directions the English recognize the Himba the Himba recognize the English well yes they do so the emotions that have been studied from the face fear anger disgust and sadness we also found could be recognised from the voice in both by the Himba and by the English so if you're in the middle of the Namibian desert and you get vomit on your hand and you go they would know exactly what you meant there's a shared recognition there again along the lines of Darwin's suggestion but the only positive emotion that we tested which was showing this sort of everybody's recognizing everybody was laughter so this emotion of joy of invitation to play is looking like a universal human emotion something else that looked surprising to us about laughter was a study we did with my colleague Jane Moran and Disa and Disa Sota and this was a lot of what I do is really boring stuff on how the brain processes speech and sound and we just thought what happens when instead of hearing speech you hear these emotional vocalizations so we had people listening to laughter triumph sounds sort of fearful sounds and disgust sounds and we chose those because they're all very recognizable and they're not confused and what we found was actually a lot of activity in parts of the brain showing up there in green which you would use to produce sounds when you hear them so this looks like what scientists call mirror systems these are brain areas activated both by perception and by production so you're kind of mirroring what you're hearing as part of your trying to understand what that thing is but the thing that was very striking was that this wasn't the case for all the emotions the emotion that was really driving this this sort of mirroring response was laughter and we thought that's interesting because laughter is very contagious laughter is a behaviour that you can catch from other people is that what we're seeing here even if you're having your brain scanned which is monumentally unamusing when you hear somebody laugh you get ready to laugh a bit even if you don't make a sound and we were trying to make sure people didn't make any sounds so there's some sort of automatic engagement so like a priming and so this is turns out to be something that is quite interesting so I'm going to show you a very brief clip of this I'm going to show you a clip of two again sorry two people broadcasting there are two men in this clip the man on the right he is going to hear something that makes him laugh so he's going to start laughing pretty helplessly this man does not laugh at the thing that is heard but is quite worried because they're broadcasting live and now his colleague is laughing at someone who's called in and he keeps looking quite worried but the other thing to notice is he also keeps laughing and smiling and that's just contagion so even though he doesn't want to he is joining in when his friend laughs and you might have a sense of why that is as well so now we're going to see the whole clip so what these two men have quite different reactions but want even the worried man keeps smiling and laughing we're really trying to get out there in the in the records in but but we're just going to thank you I'm really trying not to laugh okay I cried in the midnight hour yeah you heard my cry all of my tears this world by ground something's happening I was asking this is why in the spirit he's uh getting the holy ghost over here we want to uh they still love you we want to give uh give him that and uh we want to give you a t-shirt in oh sitting in my t-shirt right more conscious enjoy that Danny Florida oh I know I'll be saying there's two two different kinds of laughter going on there one absolutely helpless the other being continuously being caught all those little smiles and laughs or in between which he was looking quite worried um and that's the power of contagious laughter and the really striking thing about contagious laughter which I will come back to is that it's something we learn to do babies don't laugh contagiously when babies laugh parents laugh when a parent laughs the baby doesn't laugh we teach babies to do this and it's something that actually may be specific to humans it's possible actually other animals don't laugh contagiously I'll come back to this so if we zoom into humans in a bit more detail there's some really interesting work by the late I've got to say everybody in my talk on laughter has died over the past years I mean every I'm worried about the people in the french clip now because they've got to hold on guys so the late scientist um the the psychologist Robert Provine did this really beautiful work in the 70s 80s and 90s about laughter and he pointed out that if you ask people about laughter what makes you laugh they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humor and of course we do laugh at comedy and jokes and humor but actually if you look at people and you follow them round as Robert Provine liked to do what you find is that laughter is primarily a social behaviour so actually most laughter happens just because of social reasons you are 30 times three zero times more likely to laugh you found if there is somebody else with you then if you're on your own and you'll laugh more if you know them and you'll laugh more if you like them and some of that is contagion but there's also other reasons why people laugh children like other animals will laugh when they are playing they will laugh to show that this is this is a game this is fun um adults will laugh when they are playing they will laugh to show that this is a game that this is fun and in fact just like with other animals we will use laughter to show that our intentions are playful even if superficially what might look like what's happening is simply violent and this really striking so work with um devocalised rats shows that the rats they they're devocalised they can't make any sounds they will play with other rats rats are very social and the other rats want to play with them and they'll they'll go and have these playful interactions however they are more likely to be bitten during play than the normal rats because they can't make the sounds indicate they're playing they can't make this play vocalisations and the play runs out of control the the interpretations change so if if laughter is immensely complex in rats think what that must mean for humans we all laugh more than we think we do there are not many studies of this but every study that's compared how often people say they laugh with how often people actually laugh finds it everybody across the board underestimates the frequency with which they laugh i don't know why this is i sometimes wonder if because in a lot of social situations laughter is so normal that you don't notice it per se you notice it if it's not there and you were expecting it for example but it's certainly never trust any study that says oh three year olds laugh more than 60 year olds because what they will have done is ask those 60 year olds how often they laugh and they don't know because nobody knows all of us are terrible at this so laughter is incredibly sensitive to social context you will laugh more if you know other people you'll laugh more if you like those people you can tell greg brian to show this if you play people recordings or two people having a conversation and laughing together people can tell how close those friends are from the way that they laugh together so it's an unbelievably sensitive it happens in particular context and you show with your laughter and the way you laugh how you feel about the people that you're with we will use laughter to make and maintain social bonds but we'll also use it to improve mood and the mood of others our own and other people's mood and it's also has you think about it in this bonding way it actually kind of creates intimacy so work from robin dumbo has shown that if you get people laughing they will tell you more intimate things about themselves people feel closer together as a result of this i have to take a brief side here and say my father was a carpet salesman and he was very funny and i used to worry a genuinely worry a great deal when i was a child that he made people laugh and then they would want carpets they didn't really need and they would be left with unnecessary carpeting as a result of all this sort of giddy closeness caused by the laughter has very interesting cultural effect so we can see that all laughter is recognised across all human cultures and it has it can have different uses in different human cultures but also actually the amount of laughter does vary with human cultures so countries in the world that have a more varied history of migration so just a over their history more people more different people have moved to that country what you find is that the people in those countries produce laughs and smiles that are more easily decoded and recognised by other people or act they're kind of less ambiguous things and also they do it more so there's something about laughter possibly because if you are in an environment where you can't assume everybody speaks the same language as you then laughter becomes an even more important way that you can communicate in a non-verbal way in a way that will probably be understood we'll have to show that we're okay we'll have to mask other emotions laughter is a very very effective way of covering up other emotions i'm not going to show it here but do go on to google so onto youtube and watch um Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey after he'd been sort of found cheating and taking drugs and he looked furious and like he does not want to be there but he continuously laughs and smiles in a way that doesn't quite reach his eyes but he's really trying to use laughter to go i'm fine with this this is brilliant and very much what i was hoping would happen possibly this man is very happy he's been covered in a yellow goo possibly not and actually this becomes one of the most important uses of laughter we will use laughter to deal with stressful situations um Robert Levinson still alive in the US has done really interesting work with married couples where he finds that married couples who deal with stressful situations and he puts them in a stressful situation by asking them to discuss a problem in their marriage together everybody feels stressful when that happens he measures this with the polygraphs you can see people getting more stressed their bodies change the couples who deal with that with what he calls positive affect but he means laughter and smiling not only in the moment get less stressed but they are also they feel better they're able to get over this difficult thing they laugh about what's happening but they also are the couples who stay together for longer and are happier in their relationship and it's not because laughter is a bit of magic dust that makes everything okay because this only works if the laughter is shared if one person's going ha ha ha I do snore terribly don't I and the other person's going it's a massive problem and I'd like you to stop no one feels better now he's wrote levinson's doing this beautiful work with married couples which is great because it's it's it's amazing because it's longitudinal studies over years and years I don't think this is limited to romantic relationships I think a lot of what we call friendship it's people with whom we can sort of deal with a stressful situation by negotiating our way to a better mood one of the best examples I can give you this of this in a public field is when um the uh this difficult and sort of the stormy relationship between yelsin at the end of the USSR and starting at the sort of red of Russian Federation and the situation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was having a series of sort of ill-tempered meetings with the rest of the world culminating in a meeting with Bill Clinton and he came out from this and started haranguing the press and Bill Clinton watched him like a hawk and then when he got the first reason why he could laugh um he did laugh he made his name as mentioned and he just started laughing and he's like oh yeah that's my name and at first Boris Yeltsin just smiled and carried on and then Bill Clinton laughed again he then Bill Yeltsin started saying oh you're the disaster to the press at which point Clinton's on the floor like this guy is just hilarious and this makes Yeltsin laugh and the really clever thing was that Clinton didn't look like he was laughing at him at any point he was like this guy's just brilliant and so Yeltsin's like I am brilliant I'm hilarious everybody so a difficult situation very skillfully diffused with laughter to a less stressful situation but again the key was the laughter was shared laughter seems to have its power for in letting us negotiate ourselves to a less stressful situation by laughing together Levenson's couples it worked when they laughed together here it worked when it laughed together if he just laughed at Yeltsin it would have been if anything a diplomatic disaster so what we have is this very very complex behaviour and interestingly because it happens in social interactions it's an emotion that lives when we are with other people we do laugh when we're on on our own we're just so much more likely to laugh when we're with other people in fact where you find laughter happening most frequently is during conversation so if you look at laughter in conversation you'll find we do laugh at jokes but most of the time we're still not laughing at jokes we're laughing to show affection and and and affiliation but we're also laughing to show you know agreement understanding recognition and in fact to any one point in time Provine found that the person who laughs most is the person who's talking we're using the laughter to get other people to show they agree they recognize they remember so it's an incredibly communicative behaviour what you have to think of as laughter is this really complex nonverbal communication which is a play vocalization for our our ape cousins but which we've kind of involved in this extremely complex really nuanced way of doing a lot of the heavy emotional work in the middle of human speech which is the most complex form of sound sort of on certainly that you can find on earth normally we drop continuously into this ancient play vocalization to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting laughter is never neutral in other words when you hear laughter we're always trying to understand it and we can see that in people's brains if we play people different kinds of laughter so we've got people laughing completely helplessly like this oh you're gonna play so that's me laughing helplessly that's that my voice goes ridiculously high or somebody laughing more communicatively like it might might happen in a conversation now people are good at telling the difference between those two different kinds of laughs and in fact when we put people into the scanner and this was a study done by my colleague Carolyne Magescom and she was working with me what you find is even if you just don't tell people to do anything with the sound so just listening to sounds we put loads of other sounds in there as well when you hear the laughter people are trying to work out what's going on when you hear somebody laughing helplessly you get lots of activation shown in blue in auditory parts of the brain possibly because you hear sounds you don't hear in any other context when you hear somebody laughing in that more communicative way you get loads more activation now in parts of the brain to do with working out what somebody else's intentions are so even if again you're just having your brain scanned you are trying to work out when you hear somebody clearly laughing in a more communicative way maybe they're trying to cover up being angry maybe they're trying to get someone to like them maybe they're trying to show that they like somebody maybe they're trying to cover up being in pain maybe they're trying to deal with stress there's all these different reasons why people laugh and you're trying to work it out all the time it's that important interestingly that priming response that I showed you before that kind of contagion you get to any laughter it doesn't matter what the kind of laughter is what does make a difference to the priming response you see in the brain was actually how good people were at telling the difference between the two different kinds of laughter so we scanned people and then we got them out and we gave them a test discriminating these different kinds of laughs and what we find is the better they are at that the more they showed a priming response when we scanned them earlier so it's not just contagion when you're getting ready to join in when you hear laughter it actually helps you understand what that laughter means and there's significant variation across people in this some people are better and we'd like to know why that is one reason might be neurodiversity so we did a study with sviddings lab with boys at risk of psychopathy so these are boys who are teenagers who are high in callous and unemotional traits and they are also showing profiles of conduct disorders compared to boys who are not at risk of psychopathy and what you find is those boys at risk of psychopathy do not find laughter as contagious remember contagious laughter is something we learn to do they don't show that they just don't find the laughter makes them want to join in as much and when we scan them they don't show that same brain response so there is something really interesting going on here I'm not saying psychopathy is a problem of laughter and we don't know what the direction of causality here is that there's something different about these boys that means they can't learn how to laugh or laugh contagiously or is it that they haven't had the opportunity to laugh to learn to laugh contagiously bearing in mind it's something we all learn to do so with the end of the talk I just want to think a little bit about laughter and other animals and humour so similarities between humans and other mammals is laughter is associated with tickling for all of us it's associated with play for all of us the devocalised rats very similarly to us if you can't make a sound that indicates that your intentions are playful then that that behaviour can be misunderstood and in fact in chimpanzees have two different kinds of laughs they laugh differently if they're laughing when they're being tickled then if they're trying to make play last longer which is very like our helpless laughter and our um more uh sort of communicative laughter but there are really interesting differences so human laughter is louder we want other people to hear when we are laughing we broadcast our laughter human babies will laugh at being tickled but they'll also laugh at things that don't require physical contact all other mammals when you find laughter or parrots it's to do with physical contact there's a physical element we don't need that right from when laughter first appears we will laugh at other things perhaps because babies are picking up on a playful intention that's needing them to laugh only humans learn to laugh contagiously so laughter seems to be able to jump the gap between humans it doesn't require physical contact for it to be there and it has to be said there are no convincing examples of humour in wild mammals or of any kind you find laughter in other animals you do not find humour and I think just to briefly touch on humour one of the things that's very interesting about humour is our ability to again read intentions so if I want to I'm just going to show you a very quick clip this is from the theatre group uh told by an idiot who did a lovely um investigation of old black and white slapstick and why people find it funny when people fall over and they recreated some scenes from charlie chaplin I just want you to watch this recreation and look how the actors are pointing you to where the points are at the funny points by this sort of like signaling their intentions they're not behaving like people charlie chaplin's about to try and steal food this is not how people behave when they're stealing food something else is going on it's a performance for you so I sometimes wonder if humour is kind of built on this ability to sort of have laughter and play happen at a distance you don't have to have the physical contact it's also true that the two interact so we found that laughter makes things funnier if you add laughter onto jokes as my phd Susan sessi keck sessi chi did a couple of years ago jokes are rated as funnier and the more this is just showing you lots of different jokes they were stinkers these jokes what's the best day for cooking friday add laughter onto it people rate them as funnier and if you the more spontaneous the laughter the funnier it makes the joke which of course we then a couple of weeks off almost after we did this we went into lockdown and lots of comedians were trying to do comedy on zoom where you didn't have the laughter and it felt different it felt wrong so I just want to finish by circling back to this point about laughter and intimacy so laughter has been described as the shortest distance between two people and I've always loved this quote for the kind of the sense it gives you of a the kind of coasiness that it gives you the sense of bonding and I want to go back to one last example of laughter so this is just over 30 years old now laughter from Brian Johnson and Jonathan Agnew trying to do a recording of the test match special after the second day at the oval and here we've got him both of them who tried to jump over the wickets and didn't make it I'm going to show you and play it to you but I want you to do because obviously I've done an acoustic analysis of this I'm not a wild animal this is showing you the picture of their voices you can see what happens after the joke as soon as the joke the joke happens Brian Johnson's voice goes up and then when you've got the periods in red that's when they're both laughing and look at how high the pictures of their voices go I just want to take one listen to this and then see what we can learn from this that might tie it all together about laughter okay so over to Jonathan Agnew and Brian Johnson he knew exactly what's going to happen he tried to step over the stumps and just flipped a bale with his right molest to try to do the splits every now fortunately the inner part of his side must have just removed the bale just didn't quite get his leg over anyhow he did very well indeed about 131 minutes and hit three falls and then we had Lewis playing extremely well picture of his voice has gone up because he's smiling he was joined by defratus who was in for 40 minutes a useful little part ship there they put on 35 in 40 minutes and then he was caught by usual false Laurence always entertaining baddie for 35 35 minutes hit a four of the weight keepers there's Laurence I think this kind of just makes so many of the points that I'm talking about so first of all the main reason that they start laughing is that they're both there if they've been on their own even if they thought didn't quite get his leg over they would have been very unlikely to start laughing like this and then very quickly they're not laughing because the joke is funny they're laughing just because of contagion it takes about 30 seconds from the joke for Brian Johnson to be finally completely overwhelmed by the laughter but that's it really started to have its effect but I think there's something else interesting going on I mean some of it's he keeps saying oh agus do you stop it I've stopped laughing now and that was basically he was saying this to explain to the listeners why they were laughing apparently the producer was standing in front of them staring at them by the end of this like stop doing it got in trouble that they didn't want it to happen but also I think one of the reasons why people like this clip it's the second most popular non-musical clip that's ever been that gets used on desert island discs people really love it is because I think one of the things that you're hearing is is friendship if those two men had detested each other they would not have been laughing that way and you're hearing that in the laughter even 31 years later so I think it's a really interesting behaviour and I think it's definitely something that scientists should take more seriously we should have paid more attention to Charles Darwin um I'd just very quickly like to say thank you to a few people I'd say thank you they're not everybody's listed here but all the different scientists I've worked with on particularly on laughter particularly Andy Calder, Zarina Agnew, Carolyn McGatigan, Jane Warren, Disa Sotir and Frank, Cesar Lima, Sinead Chen, Sesi Kai and Addison Billing and Nomin Carmo Sir, Eddie Vidding um it's they've all been amazing, Carl Jasmine it's been an amazing group of people to work with I'd like to say thank you very much to my partner Tom and our son Hector because they make me laugh a lot and great people I'd like to say thank you very much to my parents Colin and Christine Scott for laughing a great deal you can see it starting to happen there with my father wearing a hat and and supporting their haplest daughter in her interest in science and I'd like to say thank you to UCL for genuine support for public engagement they take it very seriously and I'm very grateful to them for that they value it I'd like to say thank you very much to the Royal Institution for giving me the opportunity to do the Christmas lectures which were just awesome and I really enjoyed every moment of it even though I sometimes was running away and being sick because it was so anxiety provoking it was just amazing and I'd say thank you very much to the Royal Society for this amazing opportunity and for everything they do to encourage scientists and science engagement thank you thank you very much Sophie I was sitting there trying to keep a straight face because the Royal Society is a serious place I don't think it has heard as much laughter in 350 years as we had this evening now so so we have time for a few questions there are questions from from the audience here if you have a question please put your hand up and then just wait for a microphone to come to where you are and then we also have questions for people who are online there is a what you need to do I got the instructions here so if you go to the website is it back there now so www.slido.com so you go to that website and then you enter the code hash f1110 you can write a question there so www.slido.com and the code is hash f1110 so let's start with the questions here from the audience and I can see lots of hands up I'm not surprised so let's start over there because those hands went up first I think thank you my question is are there any civilizations which engage in ritual lobster for example in religious ceremonies it's a good question and I don't know Robin Dunbar thinks that group laughter potentially in a more formal way was a really important precursor to human language laughing in groups and the ability to laugh in that way and that that could have had something that had a more formal element to it and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't examples of this but I'm not aware of any I'm sorry oh yes can I take away from this lecture that it's perfectly okay for me to laugh at my own jokes definitely it makes them funny at David over there and then we take that one that one over here and then the ones online just curious to know if there's any studies of what happens when people laugh on their own which I catch myself doing sometimes but I don't have the neuro imaging equipment to hand to look at what's happened well do you know the dirty secret about a lot of what I've talked about here is we don't actually know the the precise thing that happens in your brain when laughter is triggered so that woman I showed you laughing we've really tried to capture what was happening in her brain at the same it's hard it's hard to do that so I think that would probably be the same it's just that you would be much more likely to laugh intensely if there would be other people there it was one of them so the first time you showed me that clip the the audio clip I wondered whether there was something about the fact that they weren't allowed to and the Charlotte green ones the same so I just wonder what is going on with the idea that you're not allowed because if you tell somebody to stop laughing of course they laugh more do we have any do you have any idea of what's happening there no it's very interesting and because laughter primes laughter one of the worst things you can do is think I really should stop laughing because that's that's not going to help at all it's interesting if you watch actors who it's bad form to laugh on stage corpsing is not not generally considered to be amusing they seem to prepare a great deal by kind of keeping laughter away from them they don't they're not mucking around backstage they're sort of getting into a more serious mode just don't let it around if it creeps in then you're lost so it's more like a trying to push it out than to think oh no I better stop it because that won't work right let's take two more just in order for the microphone is over there good yes please you had you hand up a long time I'm really disappointed to discover that the very very funny circus act with a grumpy monkey I saw many years ago in Budapest was not spontaneous humor by the monkey so I you should but that's that's a side thing what I was wondering about was you were talking about people being very like to laugh on their own but some of my social media interactions are quite a quick exchange of jokes and building on jokes and responding to jokes and I do find myself literally laughing out loud as as the kids say so are we just adapting to a social situation that is mediated by technology or am I peculiar no I don't think first of all I think your point about the monkey I didn't go into this but there is something interesting that happens to apes when they are around humans they do their monkeys in zoo chimps in zoos who have been reported to do things to deliberately get the attention of humans and then when they've got the human's attention they pearl feces at them and the humans run away but they laugh and it's the laughter that seems to cause it the chimps don't laugh they're like oh this is going to be brilliant but we're not laughing you know so they they they're a human laughter seems to be interesting to other apes they they don't they don't do humorous things but they do behave differently around human laughter remind me of your second point sorry it was about the so there is some work on this if you look at human so laughter lives in interactions so if you look at different kinds of human interactions the more social information there is the more laughter there'll be so you get most when it's face to face in person less when it's face to face but you're not you're on a computer screen less when you're on a phone less when you're on text but you still don't get none on text there's still an interaction and it's interesting how the ways people try and put laughter back in with gifts or ruffle copters or whatever the different kind of you know whatever the you know to mock myself out from the ascii era you know that that that's always evolving you know there's there's a whole use of emojis around laughter that I don't understand because I'm old there's a crying emoji that people use I'm very well very well I would probably use it to say all very sad news today crying emoji and I know that that's wrong is all I know I don't really know when it would be right so there's there's there and that's that you're getting a lot of that same you know kind of sense of the fun of the interaction and the humor it's just will be still less laughter than there probably would be if you were in person but there's still some because it's an interaction okay I'd like to just take a couple of questions from the questions I have online there's quite a lot of those but we only have time for a couple of them so one is from John Evans and the question is can we use laughter sorry can we use laughter to overcompane and if so how it definitely does because when you laugh you get a you get an increased uptake of the naturally circulating endorphins and there the body's natural painkillers it's exactly the same thing that would happen if you you know did exercise of any kind you get this this possibly the case that you get more you get more endorphin effects from laughter than without having to expend the same amount of sort of calories and energy but that certainly happens and it does give you measurable differences so even really fake laughter gives you big measurable changes in pain tolerance so it I mean within limits I don't think your surgery was saying brilliant idea why don't I make you laugh you won't need an anesthetic I suspect probably wouldn't happen that it is that it definitely it has a measurable effect on pain tolerance right so last question very intriguing question which is from somebody called Abby and the question is why do we cry when we laugh uncontrollably it's a very good question humans are the only animals that produce emotional tears I don't know if that's because we have hairless faces and tears show up on our faces but we use them we most people produce tears when they sob with sadness quite a lot of people put your hand up if you cry when you get angry mostly women it's not but and a lot of people put your hand up if you cry when you're laughing it's a great deal of people what it links across that because you don't cry when you're disgusted and you don't cry when you're frightened you don't cry when you're surprised this I wonder if there's something about a sort of helplessness that you're helpless with sadness so you're feeling helpless when you're angry if that's what's happening when I feel angry and I don't feel helpless I don't cry and when I laugh it's almost the first thing that starts happening so there's a sort of incapacity that you're signalling with it that's our best guess we don't really know well very good so there's lots of questions but unfortunately we run out of almost run out of time I'm glad we haven't completely run out of time because there's one last thing I need to do before we thank Sophie again so Sophie if you can come over here with me I have something for you there so this is the micro faraday price and this is a medal that I'm told you must impon or sell but it's worth a lot and so Sophie's a great honour for me on behalf of the Royal Society to give you the present you the 2021 micro faraday price here it is thank you congratulations congratulations thank you so much to for everyone who came up who came to the lecture and in particular to Sophie for a really really memorable lecture I'm going to be laughing all the way home but she who laughs last laughs best thank you Sophie