A disaster. But what did the enemy. Of the little stat we were very well now for the first time i can tell you that your disasters i. Think two president s laughed and the entire world laughed with them didnt write it was bridging the divide of Language Culture and politics laughter brought them closer than anything else. The. Mainstream science long ignored laughter and even today many questions about the origins function and mechanisms of laughter remain unanswered. What is it that triggers laughter in the brains of primates medical science suggests that there is no Single Center in the brain responsible for laughter not activates a number of different regions including the brain stem and some more evolved areas of the brain. Laughter is not simply a reflex its a complex neural activity. Laughter is a mystery that scientists are still working to decode. These scientists on mavericks pioneers they even then. In the new field the science of laughter. And. Dead things that laughter is one of the important keys to understanding humankind and its evolution. Robert provan is a neurologist behavioral specialist and professor of psychology. For many years now laughter has been the focus of this research. And for years the biology of laughter has been something of a stepchild of Scientific Research its author may regard it as a c. E. O. Science something less than serious. Were also not ready for this office yet but over history theres been a lot of concern it would work to avert most great philosophers have dealt with the topic of laughter Plato Aristotle taught open howard kurtz. Right up to the present all felt that this was something that had to be dealt with as. Many people have tried to explain after in seven hundred seventy six the chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nyquist. His discovery helped prove that laughter is a Chemical Reaction in the brain. In the eight hundred sixty s. French position to use the new tool of photography to study the facial muscles and expressions involved in smiling and laughter. In one thousand nine hundred eighty two the naturalist Charles Darwin published the expressions of the emotions in man and animals. In his study you compared the behaviors of laughter in adults and children. And in humans this is animals. Today love to be studied and taught at universities. For example at the university of maryland in baltimore. Robert provine and his students are investigating the mechanisms behind laughter. My main motivation was to learn about brain and behavior you know laughter is an ideal place to learn. First of all laughter is a human universal and if we want to learn about a brain mechanism we dont want this person to have it in this person not we want everyone to have it we want males and females to have it members of every culture and everyone laughs and pretty much the same way so theres a good place to work. Little by little rather proton has established a methodology to understand and explain the phenomenon of laughter. Hard to do that our first approach was to bring people in the laboratory situations such as this laboratory here show them comedy material get them to laugh and then analyze the laughter that was produced. Because analyzing the laughter not only describes what that sound was but describes the behavior that produced it ah. The genuine laughter isnt all that easy to achieve in the laboratory. Present and realize that during his initial experiments so he decided to switch venue. Now hes carrying out research in the University Cafeteria a good place to find genuine enough ted. And there are plenty of subjects here for his Research Private im just has to sit back and observe. Every gesture and every facial expression before during or after laughter could hold a clue. What we found was by recording what a person said before they went off first of all. The material was wasnt all of a joke. Perhaps only ten or fifteen percent of prelaw comments were joke like at all. When we started to attribute the sex to the speaker and audience some striking things started to appear first of all we felt that males were the best to laugh getters both women and men laugh more when men are speaking to them than when women are speaking. This is also interesting because its not because the men decide not to lie off because laughter is not consciously controlled so what we have here is the acting out of this kind of primal dance between individual different sexes. So when were looking at these relationships we are getting insights into what people really thanks for example if a woman is standing near a man and looking him in the eye standing close to him and all laughing a lot is the very positive thing mating that the female is sending an unconsciously control message that she is interested in this person. Not to pursue this in other ways we had looked at personal ads in newspapers and looking at thousands of these we find that a common theme of in search of ads personal ads of women is theyre interested in men with a good sense of humor. And when they write their ads often will describe their good sense of humor so we have the faces here become sexual marketplace. We humans are social animals provan has become convinced that laughter is at the heart of our social interaction. And indeed we humans really love when we are alone well very. But the history of laughter is very hard to investigate and for good reason laughter leaves no trace no physical remnants of its existence so how can researchers go about exploring the origins of laughter. One option is taking a look at our nearest relatives the apes between humans and apes there is but a single step. We have put on him in the netherlands to meet another scientist. Who of is another pioneer in the biology of laughter his favorite place to make observations is at the zoo founded by his grandfather. Fun with has devoted himself to the study of social behavior and emotion in apes and humans. And who doesnt carry out his observations in a laboratory he observes from on high right here in this is. Studying animals he needs a great deal of patience. Well here we are. This is our observation cabin from the tree of the chimpanzee here we have all our equipment. Well i have my video camera too to film particular shots i have my microphone in which i had to speak to record the records of the behavior that well of course occasionally you want to watch a little bit closer will in fact what we do people think. Behavior is just a matter of sitting there. But what is actually the case most of the time they simply groom sleep so its a matter of a couple of hours a couple of days weeks of months to systematically call that behavior is to call ect observations into our computers and analyze the. Fun who have has managed to decode the facial expressions displayed by great apes. Which facial expressions are associated with with fear and with to take this behavior. To one of the expressions that he identified as the play face. Relaxed open mouth expression and expression thats reminiscent of human enough to. Hear the small one hit the big one that this couldnt be serious of course both of them showing a beautiful play face while still doing that he sticks his tongue out while hes doing it here the small one chasing the big one he gets a little kiss actually in response. And while the playing. This is. This laughing sound. Not the slightest thats the equivalent for. There was a lot of expression that puzzled me to mend a slit and that is the sign in bettys face which you find in many primates. In most be shes macaques for instance baring of duties is a signal of submission because it. Im afraid a few its derived from to feel the face in the fiftys and that is the nearest to. Push we have always thought that laughter and smiling are so to speak expressions on the same kind but different intensity laugh to being the high intensity form smiling a low intensity for off the seam i was fascinated to see that this means that what we call trend brault smiling has of quite different origins in evolution from our love to laughter playful initiative rionda playful mood were going to enjoy ourselves this is going to be fun where is the broad smile comes from dont fatah im friendly i like you dont be anxious i like you harry much. To the left you see the equivalent of our cheap smile to decry the cd for him to walk off the fish. He didnt want but studying primate love to means finding ways to make them laugh thats where marina davilla ross a neurobiologist from the universe to portsmouth comes in shes visiting on him to carry out some reset. Her way like the boy this is money another. Reason i actually heard all. The work weve got to do is to see whether we can make our little. Law. Is a baby chimpanzee who is just four months old shes being raised outside the colony because the mother was unable to feed her. Four of us caretakers tend to juma we alternate mujhe one of us takes one week at a time we bring her home in the evening we give her a bottle changing diapers and the next day we bring a back to work and of all the thoughts of me. Testing. January fourth. For. The ape or human the first laughs are always touching moments. Infants begin to live at around four months of age but a fetus already smiles in the womb at seven months that gap in time is further evidence that smiles are distinct from laughter. When you tickle the baby or play. At the moment the surprising twist in the play for sequence occurs the little child will be with her. And that develops into food blown laughter which we as we grow up. Suppress our appreciation that something for the. Smarts and love to help establish emotional bonds and promote social intelligence long before a child learns how to talk. And the way laugh out only individual style of laughter seems to be in the form. Identical twins often have identical learn even when theyre raised. You know more you know youre. Always the primal stimulus for human laughter in fact my candidate for the most joke is saying turkle would be like im going to get you im going to get you its the only joke that you can tell both were chimpanzee and a human baby. But here it is. An older juvenile being tickled by it cared for who has a very close relationship with that girl and that is very important. Of course they can be very strong individuals but its also important when one interacts with a very young individual to have a close relationship to tickle during the to kings because otherwise it does not respond and thats so similar to how it is with humans as you can see. The gorilla response wrongly when speaking to code or even just touched. At his hands. He shows his head. He wants to be tickled probably also there at a later stage she shows his shoulder. Shoes he shows his food and then allows while hes being tickled and eaten shortly before the speeding ticket hes already producing laster. The key issue and tickle is that you cant tickle yourself because part of our nervous system cancels out the input so if we would try to tickle ourselves by stroking our ribs part of the nervous system saying ignore that input inhibit that input because its self produced so to be tickled someone else has to do it ask yourself this when was the last time you were tickled by a stranger to be rather startled what style youre more likely to call the police than look. For love to scientists tickling is an important step so. It might not be very sophisticated but it gets the job done. So. When i read Richard Perle my. Work on. Chimpanzees produce these so stuck out to like. Vocalisations when they were being tickled i found that highly intriguing and how similar are they these vocalisations are to humans. That was about the time when i heard that photographs are able to produce certain vocalizations when theyre being tickled and that intrigued me and. Thought of that i wanted to reconstruct. Off laughter by assessing all the great apes and humans. What we did was we collected its a ticking sound itself apes and humans and the ticking cells are represented here and sonograms. You see an orangutan. Here that its very. And heres the song from a gorilla. And maybe you can already detect its more complex sounds in here now this is the sound of the chimpanzee you. Teach. The hears exactly. And its also quiet hours and complex similar to the chimpanzee and theyre all to some similarities to the gorillas however they are stronger differences to their ring tones which also evolutionary for this away from them and heres an example of the human sound ok. And what we did then when we had the acoustic data we used to just like geneticist. Data to reconstruct an evolutionary tree and what we found was that the tree matched exactly the genetic tree and that revealed that all of the sticking vocalizations came from the same evolutionary origin which indicates that all of these folks lose asians of the great apes are laughable. So therefore we could trace back the evolution of laughter in tribute to at least ten to sixteen movie years. That turns out that studying the transition from primer. The human laughter not only tells you how other primates are different than us but also explains why we can talk and other apes cant heres a case where laughter can be used as a tool to study vocal evolution. The key events. Human vocal evolution turns out to be by peter you know who would have guessed it. Was. The by peter our the thorax is freed of its mechanical support function and this permits the second theory selection for making fancy sounds of speech. A lot of limbs that might have to do with grammatical processes and so on and theyre less interested in lowly matters of breath control but turn step from laughter to speech. When humans stood upright that was a crucial moment human kind stood upright and laughed and so capable of laughter. To find out more we pay a visit to the pullman campus of Washington State university. Its home to a neurologist who has fundamentally transform doubt understanding of animals. Is also a scientist of laughter hes convinced that animals experience emotions thats put him outside the scientific mainstream. Believes that emotions and especially humor are a key element of evolutionary to get emotions and love to hes convinced help drive evolution. You know no one has described laughter and birds. No want to describe laughter and reptiles. So it is something that distinguishes us mammals and you know we cannot be sure that every mammal laughs in might be just some of them. Up. Play is at the center of punk seps research rats are a favorite reset subject theres surprisingly playful animals. And its really a wrestling match. A famous psychologist robert plant shake this it up all ten years ago twenty years ago and said rob was a great evolutionist. He hadnt ever talked about plan a and i said. I want to show you something in a laboratory and i brought him up to lab and just put a couple of animals together under red lights where theyre very comfortable and they started wrestling with each other on and he was just amazed he looked at it and said ya how did to train the animals to fight that way and. I didnt train them evolution did by the way theyre not fighting theyre playing. Said plain. Have to learn about. Play is one of those things that people say is frivolous this just for fun. Well if this is just for fun it would not have been built into the great play is one of mother natures ways for us to learn about other people and to find ways to get along with approved play you can have fun but if you dont know how to engage with others there will be no fun and there will be a lot of sadness and a lot of psychological pain eventually so all we have to cherish plenty. To do in the course of this Research Panel said made a spectacular discovery rat lofton. Thats. Just six pts. Discovery of the laughter was literally i walked up one morning and said what if that sound is locked when i went to the lab and my student jeff bergdorf was waiting for me i said jeff lets go to call some rats and he looked at me ok. And we took the first rat and theres church and church and church and we took all the second rat nature and i went there third rat every rat of course other people were skeptical at that but we collected more and more data and it all pointed in the same direction and our attitude is you go with the data you know we dont go with logic the data tells you the nature of the world and we now know more about rat laughter than we know but human laughter at least in the brain is. When a rat laughs its not audible to the human in the rasam its a series of High Frequency chuckles in the range of fifty kilo heads to hear a rattle off. An ultrasound detector since we can stimulate right there by stimulating specific parts of the brain. And every place you stimuli that you get a rat laughter which is kind of you chew the animal likes it the animal will turn on the stimulation themselves so now we know its a positive emotion. For. Jason have this anymore church to go to its wonder whos actually been surfing when youre older you know that we go. Youve interviewed right now you must love me. If you stop playing just leave your he knew in there after one of these start. Very gently you never hurt you is there a way of saying congress play. Is one of only a handful of scientists who study this controversial subject the emotions of animals so this our Animal Laboratory and we have two hundred animals here we have happy animals to have been bred for. A while after types of sounds and then on the other side there are animals that are not so happy. Do not try very much at all it turns out the animals that chirp a lot and ones that are have a are very resistant to depression in the animals that are sad and do not lie often is not sure terpenes much they tend to become depressed more easily. So what can we learn by ticking rats. So a study of. Can lead to a slender standing of the chemistry. And the chemistry can lead us into new medicines psychiatric medicines that can make people feel better if theyre feeling depressed we are still in a primitive area where we have lots of drugs for depression but none of them really make people feel good fast so if we found one that was not addictive. I think it would be a wonderful medicine for depression. Because we humans have a Natural Remedy against sadness and depression laughter. Love to lift sound mood and gives our immune system a boost and laughter benefits our cardiovascular system and helps lessen the impact of stress. Oh. You know laughter is a song in that your life is going well a life filled with laughter is a good one the question always comes up does laughter make us healthy. Fans of laugh yoga convinced of the benefits of laughter they laugh on purpose to reduce stress and improve the health and wellbeing. Of some not yet practitioners are meeting in plenty new in france where the International School of laughter holds its annual symposium. Thats not enough to to be taken more seriously the average adult spends just six minutes a day nothing in the one nine hundred fifty s. It was eighteen minutes a day. When one of this is up to you to see if you only make it. About. Laughter yoga is a fascinating topic that taps into the contagious nature of laughter whether we call it yoga or not basically we laugh when other people well. Enough to house release us from our individual and collective lauris and it seems to be contagious but why. This is a mechanism not a. Only involved linking people and groups together but may also provide insights and to the roots of empathy you know what are the mechanisms that allow us to share the feelings of other individuals contagious laughter is one of those places to work another one for example would be contagious yawning we can also ask the questions are individuals that are deficient in the bill you produce contagious behavior might they show schizo lloyd behavior might they be prone to autism in fact there is even simpler memory evidence indicates that autistic individuals are deficient and their ability to produce these contagious acts so here using the unlikely tools of contagious behavior be it contagious laughter a contagious yawning we have something thats powerful socially powerful philosophically and also powerful clinically. The issue of contagious behavior also contributes to you know the concern with for example be socalled mirror neurons. Many in the unit ons are a discovery that may be directly linked to why not contain tests to find out more we have to explore the mysteries of the brain itself. Ninety nine thousand nine hundred eighteen research is studying apes made an important discovery. And experiment with macaques jackalope its a lot he was investigating the most in iraq instead enable a very simple action grasping the peanuts. On the macaque sees the peanuts and reaches five that face the neurons and its a repro call it takes. This new inal activity is indicated by sound. Seen to one day its a lets he picked up the peanut. The macaque is watching but then comes the surprise. Surprise he has the sound that indicates new and all activity even though the macaque isnt moving so the apes neurons are being activated simply by observing someone elses movement. The discovery of mirren irans. Jackal moderates alas he is a professor of physiology and director of the department of neros sciences at the university of palma in italy. Christina. Maslach says there was no way we could have known these neurons existed. But our discovery was not random but it was a result of our approach. Others who studied the motor neuron system we took an ecological approach. The monkey in front of us and we played with it the Traditional Research used to conditioning approach the monkey would sit in a chair in front of a screen when it moved its arm they would study the movement and how it worked. Our major contribution was to use a very different approach we played with the monkey and that made it possible for us to discover something that no one suspected might exist it should have been. Just after the discovery of mirror neurons and monkey is the next step was to demonstrate their existence in the human brain. So. Weve known for a number of years now when a person. See someone laughing was going consciously the same muscles are activated as if they were laughing themselves on the same thing happens when you observe another person crying because it will make that activates your facial muscles as if you yourself were crying oh ok maybe you get a most epic ended of course you must. Say your interview with us that say so if i walk into a room where everyones laughing ill start to laugh to see without knowing why. I asked. The queen of but the. Dream of in this case we dont talk about empathy but emotional contagion band here too we believe the mirror neurons may be playing an Important Role important that. The path was. Nervous when we first discovered mirror neurons we asked ourselves two questions what are they used for to understand what to imitate something the results show that with monkeys they used for understanding with humans they used for both to understand and to imitate but it could be a ticket believing that the. Right. To eat no memory neurons helped make it possible for mammals to communicate emotion and to understand the emotions of others. Over the course of evolution mirror neurons helped primates develop imitation skills which promotes social cohesion. So its no surprise that humans the most social of animals possess and usually complex mirror mechanism and that the mechanism has a link to laughter. Its apparent that laughter is not unique to humans that discovery has helped us survive as a better understanding of the science of evolution. The researchers working in this field must be interdisciplinary in their approach and theyre still pioneers sometimes regarded with skepticism. Some people say to me can i. I proved that the animals have emotions. And i my answer to them is that is not an appropriate question because science never deals in proof. Science deals in evidence and at this moment in time. Whether animals have the motions is supported by an everest of evidence. By looking at Something Like laughter at its biological basis were looking cumin universals things that bind us together that dont drive us apart so i think certainly its not dangerous and it helps us to appreciate things that bridge bridge and a visual some different cultures and individuals throughout history and i think its its really important for that reason. Were learning now that animals. Are complex ways to communicate with one another positively and that shows us that were not only unique to make use of certain important social skills. If i were to come from the planet of must and i look at humans i would say thats a remarkable species not only do they build houses and and they have four reels b. P. H. They move but theyre constantly doing these barking sounds hard. One another good to talk about how. Its remarkable species everything is emphatically supported by our expressive behavior in that respect of course we are developed almost much farther than any other primate. After has shown itself to be a fascinating tool to study the evolution of our species just as darwin predicted more than a century ago we now understand that humans share certain basic emotions with other animals. The study of laughter is also the study of what makes humans social animals what binds us together. And its helped spur a new area of biological research the social sciences love to it would seem. There is a serious business. In good shape. Germs all thank god for disinfectant its good hygiene can prevent serious disease. But excessive hygiene can cause problems. Margin is important in everyday life but dont overdo it. Jim for down my street. Good. Thirty minutes on. The top stories followed across social media share your comments and content welcome to the. Scholars on. The plane still touchable. The search for gold. For city edge but. They have survived do they also have a future. I really understand people who say they dont want to stay here. But i also admire people who want to stay here and who decided to create something new in peace time. What needs to be for tolerance and reconciliation or too soon to chance to storekeepers cities or to more starting march tenth g w. Posturing and provocation out of the Winter Olympics americas Vice President arrives in south korea for the games with promises of tougher sanctions on the north meanwhile pyongyang showcases its military might for some though its all about the spectacle excitement builds in host city contract as the olympic torch glides ever closer. And germanys probable new goal when its the european stamp of approval on a