Sophie Scott: Why we laugh (A.Estephany)

Sophie speaks of when she was little felt a curiosity to hear their parents laugh and wondered Why we laugh?
She did not understand anything of that. She is just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, she have come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. 

She had put some examples of real human beings laughing, and "I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound". 
It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. 

Sophie said: to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is: the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. 

What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing.  
So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing.
You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out -- and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all. 

Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you.
Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. 
It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it -- humans, primates, rats -- you find it associated with things like tickling. 
So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation.
So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie.

(A. Estephany López 2n batxillerat )