Why Laughter Is a Human Superpower | Stress, Love, Loneliness & Your Brain | Prof Sophie Scott

41:33So we often take kind of social interactions, water cooling moments, whatever you call them. They sound like the trivial, silly part of the day, but actually they're probably one of the more important parts of the day. So when we, I still talk about lockdown a lot, sorry, but it was. I do think it's actually so important. We have just totally looked over this massive part in our life. It was, it was crazy. And when we first went into it, my son was homeschooling and was really stressed out, very anxious. It was frightening, the sort of lockdown was frightening. That's why I started this podcast.

42:07Yeah. Because I couldn't watch the news. No, I need something else. Exactly. And I'm working from home. My partner's working from home. We've got this tiny flat. And it was really stressful. And I was just like, you know, I'd only just become the director at work and I was just like fighting fires in all directions. And at the end of the first day, I said, right, everyone put away their computers. It's 5.30. We're going to sit down together. and we're going to watch something funny. And it didn't matter what it was. I think we started with Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then we did that every single day for an hour every evening.

42:39And it was just, it was absolutely deliberate, just a reason for us to do something together where we would laugh together. And then, and actually we still do it. When my son's home from university, he'll say, oh, should we watch something funny? It's how, the evening's starting, we'll watch something funny. And that was absolutely deliberately to attempt to improve our mood together for the three of us. guys it's taken me eight years but I finally wrote a book and it's called healthy shouldn't be this hard and actually became bestseller this May very exciting now if you want more self compassion in your life and you want to know the reasons on why that is so important I tell you all in this book and I give you a lot of tools to help you get there it's definitely been a lifesaver for me and I know many people that have read it it has for them too so if you want to check it out head to my bio or the show notes below you'll find the link to the book have you ever found because I'm just thinking about those moments have you ever found times where it's just really hard to make people laugh is there times where it's just like physically impossible if you're like maybe somebody's got depression or anxiety or I don't know because I was looking into like different types of therapy and there is laughter therapy out there which I found I mean amazing I didn't even know this was a thing but you can actually go and pay and have laughter therapy there's yoga retreats in Bali yeah um like yoga laughing yeah I'm like how have I never come across these so it's like force laughter yeah so can certain brains really struggle to to laugh and then I guess like with that type of laughter work to help support more laughter in or can you not force laughter so I'm going to break that down definitely there are times and places where anybody it's going to be hard to make them laugh okay rats they laugh when you tickle them but they have to be in the right sort of space you can't if the rat's feeling really exposed nervous and the environment doesn't feel safe it doesn't matter how good you are at tickling they won't laugh wow and the same is true for us you've got to be in the right place at the right time you've got to be with the right people you've got to feel safe there's a vulnerability to laughter you won't let your guard down and if your mood is you know taking you somewhere else then again it's going to be you know if you're very anxious about something it's unlikely somebody no matter how funny it is it's going to make you laugh um I can remember trying to read the Bridget Jones book when my father was extremely ill in hospital and I thought this is the single most stupid thing I've ever read someone said perhaps it's not the time for you Sophie it is a very funny book you are not in the right mood um so that's definitely the case um there's all the the issues around love love to therapy love to yoga basically builds on the idea that love is contagious so you can they use the phrase fake it till you make it and i've done a few love to yoga sessions there's literally someone with a script that goes ho ho ho ha ha ha he or she reads that out and then the audience go ho ho ho ha ha and it just builds and builds and builds until people are, I mean, I've seen people just like rolling around on the floor, absolutely helpless, but it doesn't work on everybody.

45:47So when I've done yoga, laughter yoga, it gives me a migraine. It absolutely stresses me out. I can't bear it. Wow. But actually that's true for all kind of, if you think about like the kind of natural space for laughter being humans, having conversations with friends, soon as you look at something more culturally constructed, like laughter yoga or clowning or stand-up comedy or farce, you'll find some people who just love it, absolutely love it, and some people who go, this is not for me. I've got friends who cannot abide going to stand-up comedy. They think it's the worst thing. And I was like, it's brilliant.

46:19Why wouldn't you love it? I can see some comedians might not make you laugh, but the concept of it seems strange. It's not for me. Some people don't like clowns. I found the first time I saw farce, I was really thrown because the laughter was working completely differently than I was used to. it wasn't like punchline joke laugh punchline laugh it was like this rolling around the room as people notice things happening on the stage so there's a lot of individual variation as soon as you get away from the wild type but within that if it works for you like I find stand-up comedy can be really amazingly funny and as I say the people who really like laughter yoga they get massive benefits from it so it's definitely if you find something that works for you go for it um and i mean it's very clear with laughter yoga it really is just building on this contagion and that can be amazingly powerful if that's what works for you i feel like i need to go and try laughter yoga i mean i still want to try puppy yoga oh man that sounds great it's like you're just in a room of puppies i think that would just make me laugh just the whole day of puppies trying to like fall over someone doing a down with dogs i think that would be my laughter but when I was like researching this I was like wow actually people that are going through grief can actually go to laughter therapy it's just all of these kind of new concepts that I hadn't thought but then I was trying to think if I'm when I'm in grief can I even laugh I'm not even sure if that's something that I can because sometimes when someone tries to make me laugh and I'm sad it just annoys me yeah oh sorry and that was something else that you mentioned I hope we've looked a little bit at this in depression and certainly anecdotally people who are depressed they can find laughter actively annoying irritating it's not that it's neutral it's all they can hear is like a fakeness to it and that they don't really mean that what they're doing it's really you're quite extraordinary and this is interesting because we normally think of we think of depression as being an excess of negative emotions but what if it was a complete lack of positive emotions like that you are without joy and it thought then think about Well, that does the conversations you have with people because, you know, if you aren't, if they laugh and you don't join in and you find their laughter irritating and you let that show.

48:31That kind of positive spiral of the interaction is not going to get going and both of you are going to feel less good for the interaction and it's going to push you apart. So it's definitely something that I'd like to know a lot more about in terms of depression, because I suspect there's some really quite interesting things we can dig out there. Yeah, well, I think I can connect to that when I've gone through quite bad grief. And, you know, my dad is naturally just a very funny person. He is just probably one of the wittiest men that I know. He can just, it's joke after joke. But when I was in a very bad stage of grief, nothing, I just felt very isolated.

49:08And it felt like more drawn apart. And actually, when I came back to myself and I'd got through, you know, because grief is just a stage of process. it's just time and you have to allow that time then I felt life in me again you know and I could actually find these things naturally funny and it's funny when you get to that moment when you feel it again you're like wow I really did feel like like I was in a glass box yeah that kind of like nothing was happening yeah and then all of a sudden one day you have that feeling again and you're like oh my gosh I'm back yeah to my my natural self because I find grief or if it's depression or whatever is quite fascinating to explore it's grief is so um it's so cognitive it affects how you think yeah um I it was my mother's funeral last week and um she died a few weeks ago um and it was really I I and it was similar when my father died I couldn't remember anybody's name yeah I was just calling everybody the wrong name continuously and it's um it is I think this is going to sound really crazy I promise you there's a point to this um the Nobel Prize a few years ago went to these scientists some of whom are at UCL who found that when rats are navigating space there are cells in their hippocampus that know where they are in a room so it likes a corner or it likes a long wall and it's sort of mapping you out in space and they kind of panned this out to this kind of network of brain areas that were sort of telling you where you are and how you navigate but I went to a really interesting talk which applied, was looking at these same sort of families of cells but not for space, in physical space but looking at social networks and they were finding something similar there's like a map in very much as you're mapping out spatial navigation your social network is like a map in your brain and when you lose someone from that social network when they're gone that's really disrupts the whole thing I would imagine so you probably when I I think a lot of our kind of psychological day-to-day experience doesn't feel like but really is based on a like this is what I know to be true about the world like where I am in space that matters and who I am in my social network that really matters a lot of my kind of memory and everything's hanging off that and if that gets disrupted which it is completely by grief all this other stuff starts to fall apart and it's my mom when my father died my mother says she couldn't read books you just couldn't read and that's you know that seems ridiculous but I think it's just the all these different directions that you're describing that grief is not just sadness no it's really affecting how your brain is working and I think it may well relate to this massive disruption in the certainty of your social network and then I mean that makes a lot of sense and actually as you're describing that I and this might be completely wrong but I remember when I lived in my old house I had a mice problem and I remember it always used to be the same circuit that they'd go in yeah right and when the mouse man came out he said look they they spray their odor yes and so and i was like oh gosh you're really freaking me out now but he was like they spray their odors they know the way and basically what happened was when one came back he'd buried up the holes but left one so the mouse kept running straight into the wall it just kept hitting the same space in the same wall constantly because it just knew that that was the way they were always going yeah and it was so fascinating because he would run back and then hit the wall again yeah and i just watched this mouse like he wasn't going in any other route no it was just this one way yeah and because it was blocked you couldn't figure out what's in he was getting so disorientated in there yeah and that makes a lot of sense with as you're saying like the mapping in the brain of certainty yeah what space means yeah exactly and i'm thinking about that with them with grief yeah right you're these patterns of all of sudden this well that it's just been it's just gone it's been ripped from you yeah so your brain is automatically going to make that call or think about listening to a voice note or your natural synergy of what you would normally do is all of a sudden just being like derailed so does that then mean that your brain starts trying to push new neural networks like how would that then start to I think um I mean your brain is always remodeling anything when you you're born with pretty much all the brain cells you're ever going to have so when you learn something new you don't build on a new bit of brain the learning's happening by new connections forming between brain cells or existing connections strengthening and you change that network so anything you and I remember from our conversation today will be because our brain network has changed again and that I suspect one of the cataclysmic effects of grief is trying to remodel around this, but the sort of certainty, particularly for grief, perhaps for someone who's been in your life for a huge amount of time, so much stuff will be built around that.

54:31This is just a silly example. After my mother died in hospital, I was staying in her house, and she had this really particular way of handling hand towels. And because of sort of, you know, she'd gone to a care home and temporary, but so she was possibly coming home and anyway various people have been staying in the house and her hand towels were all not they were just piled up so I washed them all and I folded them all up and I put them back into the container that she liked them to be in and I realised I was doing all this because I thought she was coming home. Wow. And so a whole set of things were going you know so a whole lot of things were still working around the fact as if this this hasn't happened and I think that's also a huge part of grief like at one level your brain is trying to do things normally and it can't, but you find yourself caught in these patterns that you don't even realise you're doing.

55:21And so you're like, why am I, okay, right, that's why I'm doing this. So yeah, it's quite extraordinary. It is really, really. I find grief one of the most fascinating things to kind of understand. We've done quite a few podcasts on grief here, but I feel like the only resolution I found, which is one of the most monotonous answers, is time. Yeah. like it is and it's like you hate to hear it when you're in it you're like thank you how am i supposed to do with this that's such unhelpful information i'll just keep feeling this way but it is you get to this like and i guess it never goes it stays in you but your brain starts operating again in the way that it used to you kind of start feeling back to yourself yeah and then that's i think when the humor i feel that somebody will say something and i'll i would have you know gone back to that place and gone oh wow that actually really made me laugh yeah and then that's such a nice feeling when you come back um neurodivergent brains do they react differently to humor i saw you did a paper on this with autistic brains yes yes um i had a phd student called sessie kai and she was very interested in in autism and laughter and autism because people again anecdotally people with autism will often find neurotypical laughter absolutely inexplicable.

56:45Why are you laughing at that? That's not funny. And in fact, the study we did where we gave people a joke and they had to rate how funny the joke was. And then we put laughter on the end. And we found that putting laughter on the end makes the joke seem funnier. And the more spontaneous the laughter, the funnier it makes the joke that actually um we were doing that because Ceci had done several studies with people with autism where she'd played them laughter and asked them to say how much does that make you want to laugh or how authentic does that laugh to sound and she says I don't think this is meaningful I think it's an odd task we don't normally ask these sorts of questions you neurotypical people get on with it but people with autism like what does this mean I don't know what you mean um so she did this one with the jokes and then just writing how funny the joke is as a way of kind of looking at the influence of laughter but asking a much more ecologically valid question like how funny is that joke?

57:39Is something people can say it was or it wasn't funny? And what we find is that everybody finds the joke funnier if it's followed with laughter and the more spontaneous the laughter, the funnier the joke. Both neurotypical and autistic adults. And the interesting thing, in fact, if anything, because these were terrible jokes, we deliberately told terrible jokes because we were trying to make them funnier. The autistic people rated all the jokes as funnier. they were more generous towards the jokes and then we um we extended that out to in the brain study where we had people listening we couldn't fit jokes in the scanner because they take too long to tell so we had funny words being said by a comedian like flank and then we add on laughter or not and what we find is that actually this kind of we see a lot of brain areas you would expect to see associated with laughter so contagion effects you see happening this kind of reflectiveness on the joke that the funny word we see happening for everybody the difference between the autistic adults and the neurotypical adults was in medial prefrontal areas running down here which are associated with what's called mentalizing thinking about what somebody else is thinking and you see those very strongly activated in neurotypical groups when they hear laughter because it's not just contagious you want to know why is that person laughing and that's actually something that autistic people can struggle with thinking about what somebody else is thinking and indeed they show less of this activation so they weren't showing this kind of mentalizing response um so there's something interesting going on there they are they autistic people laugh and they do find things funny and there is some other evidence that they find slightly different things funny so i think a study with cartoons found that like slapstick was funnier for people certainly for autistic children than for non-autistic children or neurotypical children so there's I mean we need to know a lot more about this but it looks like there's some commonalities and some distinct differences which you would expect in a you know autistic people have got a different cognitive profile we also did a study with boys at risk of psychopathy and these are teenage boys and this is part of a study with my colleagues Essie Vidding and Eamon McCrory who study resilience in teenagers but also look at psychopathy and they're at risk of psychopathy because they have two distinct character personality traits.

1:00:00First of all they have conduct disorders so they're badly behaved. They might be violent or indulging criminal behaviours. They also score highly in what's called callous and unemotional traits and that means they might hurt somebody and they don't care and that's what puts you at risk of psychopathy that's the combination of personality features that is dangerous for your development and we had neurotypical teenage boys and we also had teenage boys who had conduct disorder but they also scored low in callous and unemotional traits so if they hurt somebody they would feel bad and they are not at risk of psychopathy they're not necessarily well behaved but it's a different psychological profile.

1:00:45And what we found was the teenage boys at risk of psychopathy don't find laughter as contagious as the neurotypic was, as the other teenage boys. And when we scan their brains, we don't see this kind of priming response to join in when they hear the laughter. Now, they're at risk of psychopathy. We don't know it that way. That's studied which boys might develop it, but they're at risk. But if you think about what that means, I mean it means we can't we can't pull out the direction of the effect so is there something given this contagious laughter is something you learn to do have they never had the chance to learn it were they in an environment where there was no laughter or is there something different about their sort of their psychological profile that means they don't but either way if you become an adult who's not laughing when other adults laugh you don't join in with laughter you're both a bit more distanced from people and you're less bonded to people empathy well presumably reduced empathy and certainly it's going to be easier for you to deal with people in a more sort of functional way and get what you want from them without really caring what they think so I think one of the things that's interesting about laughter and sort of individual differences is that it takes you directly from people's emotional world into their social world because laughter is this expression of social joy that lives in social interactions and it's you know other emotions like fear and anger and disgust they're very interesting but we don't actually do too many of those in interactions normally whereas actually laughter is very common yeah so it does let you kind of start picking apart some of these sorts of features of social interactions that might have their roots in these emotional differences wow so I'm actually interviewing a sociopath on this show in the next two weeks brilliant so I feel like I now need to ask them directly about humor they've written a memoir on their life they're a psychologist oh wow as well um patricia i can never say her last name ganache but she has yeah it's called um a member of a sociopath right and i have found her obviously very interesting the fact that she's very much out there saying you know i will get what i want i'm very charming i'm great to be around yeah but underneath it i will strip you bare well it'd be interesting i bet she makes you laugh but she probably doesn't laugh when you laugh So that's how I need to psychoanalyse her.

1:03:09Yeah. So she'll probably stay quite composed. She'll definitely try and make you laugh if she's trying to charm you. That's a very efficient way of doing so. She won't laugh. But she may not laugh when you laugh. Quite an interesting way to look at sociopaths and psychopaths. Yeah. Would narcissists be similar or are they very different? Because this is such a big thing online right now that everyone's talking about. I have not looked at narcissists. I suspect And I suspect that the conditions were right. So, you know, because narcissists have such an intense focus on their own importance. Their ego.

1:03:44Yeah, its status. That if they felt things were reflecting well on them, they might well laugh. You know, so I think context might really matter for them. That's just a guess, though. That's so interesting. I'd love to see it. Have you seen brain scans of sociopaths and psychopaths? to see if their brain is aligned with the parts of humour that kind of light up as well? Well, the only one that's close is the one that we did with the boys at risk. So people have done... I have to emphasise, there is so much less study of laughter compared to other emotions. Yeah, why? People just think it's a silly thing to study.

1:04:19It's like a trivial, stupid thing. I've got colleagues who genuinely think I'm, you know, some sort of children's entertainer, kind of engaging in this. There's a guy called James Blair who used to be at UCL and he got very interested in sort of psychopaths' brain responses to sort of other people being in distress and how they're just not bothered if people are crying. And he was finding differences when they were exposed to sadness. So there's definitely more going on. But I think it would be very interesting to look at with adults, psychopaths, what that actually looked like in terms of laughter.

1:04:54I know it's not a documentary. I know it's just a film. But there's that fantastic bit in Goodfellas when Joe Pesky's character's telling a story and everyone's laughing really hard and he suddenly just goes, am I a joke to you? Am I a joke to you? Why are you laughing? Are you laughing at me? And the panic that sets in. They go, no, no, no, we're not laughing at you. We're not laughing at you. You're being funny. Was I being funny? Am I your monkey? And it's horrific. It's absolutely horrific. But that kind of switch, being able to do that, is terrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, I know that's a film, but just imagine that kind of thing playing out in real life.

1:05:25Well, it's actually quite interesting because we're talking about humour, but there's actually nothing worse when someone's like laughing at you and you're like not in the joke. It's awful. It's horrible. Like it's one of, it's actually quite, I mean it reminds like part of going back to school when maybe you were being made fun of or you would watch a bully be awful to someone else and laughing at someone else and that horrible feeling of watching that go down. It's awful. So that's like quite a dark side of humour in my mind. It's really, it is really interesting and it's something that you, at some point I'm going to get to do a study of this but everything I've done with laughter has been sort of playing people laugh to ask them questions about laughter looking at when they laugh and I'm always sort of you know kind of there's no question that sort of there's anything else more complicated going on but as soon as you suspect you're being laughed at it's dreadful it's enraging it's appalling and it's because if you think of laughter as being this way of making and maintaining social bonds if somebody if you're in fact if you're already if you've ever been on a train and there's a group of people down one end of the train all laughing and just so irritating there's nothing to do with you it's just good but they're really loud now they're having a whale of a time but you're you know you're not part of it so you just hear it's a bit irritating if they're laughing at you it's even worse so you've got this if these if these social bonds exist by definition someone has to be excluded and we so care about this and if you're being laughed at you are totally being excluded from the laughter you are not just not part of this group we so little care for you to be part of this group we would make a point of laughing at you we'll feel be better we'll all feel better at your expense and I can remember going to a you're saying about school going to a birthday party when my son was about five and he knew the birthday boy but he didn't know any of the other boys there because they were they went to the same school as the birthday boy different party different school and at tea they all started laughing at my son look at him doing this and my son was laughing along because he didn't pick up they were laughing at him and my partner got so cross I thought he was going to hit somebody we had to leave it was awful it was just enraging and then within six months my son was obsessed with the concern that someone might be laughing at him or that you were laughing at someone inappropriately and he did something he picked up on that his theory of mind had kicked in and he'd realized sometimes people are laughing at you and he was like this radar for kind of am I being laughed at am I being laughed at and actually that's we'll all gone through that and I'd love to know more about that trajectory actually the development of that kind of experience but it's obviously a massive thing to go through you've you suddenly learn that laughter can be at your expense and that what that means is you're being excluded well I think that's just why my brain automatically goes back to school because I think that's what we first start learning these like social norms right and I was even at an event this was a couple of years ago I remember and you know I used to be a model in the industry like before I changed into being a nutritionist and doing all this many many years ago and I kind of went to this event and I got chatting to one girl and she asked me to sit on their table and it was a group of girls that I'd known from the past who I kind of thought that we were all quite friendly turned out they didn't really want me sitting there it was a very like mean girl situation and it was this like it was this really odd moment I haven't really ever had maybe until like if you go back to school and everyone has that time at school where you feel a little bit excluded from like your inner circle and I remember and they were like whispering and laughing and I honestly wanted a black hole to totally like just sink me and I always think why did I never say something because I remember I remember them saying to this girl I'm actually gonna go move back over there because I really, and she was like, no, no, no, you must sit with us.

1:09:12You've got to sit with us. So she was all for me sitting there. And these other, the other part of the group were really not for me sitting there. And I remember being caught in this like horrible moment. And it was just so interesting because it literally took me back. And I can't remember, I don't remember this happening to me at school, but there must have been something, but it was like this weird social isolation. And I was like, I'm way too old to be feeling this. Like what is going on? And I should have just got confidence in being like, do you want me to leave? and said something straight to face.

1:09:40But I just, I don't know why, I just didn't. I felt like fear. It is. The fear of social exclusion. It was horrible. Absolutely primal. And it's horrendous. And you're sort of, you know, by you saying something, you'd have been acknowledging to them that you knew it was happening. You know what I mean? So that's why you don't do it. You're making it real. And it's awful. It's just awful. It's just weird. Even in our adult years, we can get this feeling. Because I think as you grow up and you develop, you start finding your social circles where you're like okay this is my tribe this is who I'm with and even if it's like fakeness if people are fake fine then like that doesn't matter I'll just I'll play along for the night and then I'll leave but when it's so in your faith I think as you get older you just think this is probably never going to happen again and when it does you're like wow no it's it's still happening and it's still triggering me massively I when my son was coming it was like small, I was coming back from Felixstowe with my partner, we'd been seeing his step mum, and we got a little train from Felixstowe to Ipswich, then we were going across the London train to come back to London, and there'd been some teenagers messing around on the train, and I've been a teenager from a small town, you know, you do you guys, I'm not, but we were walking across the platform, and I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I looked up, and there wasn't anybody there, and then I heard laughter from this side, this guy had leant around me, and tapped me on the shoulder and then I'd looked you know I'd looked the wrong way because I thought there was and they were on this side all laughing and I just overwhelmed with horror it was so embarrassing and I thought why are you so upset because you hadn't seen them on the train and thought oh we'll all be friends one day I didn't want to be friends with these teenage boys and I hadn't gone to it switched to meet men I mean I had no expectation of an interaction with them but the fact that they would laugh at me it was awful it was just it was absolutely crazy and and i thought it's also interesting so at the same time the laughter was warm and bonding and doing everything for them it was just hellish for me yeah and it's so you know that was in you know in my late 40s it's just ridiculous it's like social exclusion right and it's like a drop in status and that drops your self-esteem.

1:11:53Everyone saw it. Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. It's so powerful and so horrible. I know. Well, I mean, I'm trying to think what I would do differently in that situation. Maybe I would call out, maybe that would maybe make me feel higher status. I'm trying to think, like, how can you balance your self-esteem? Because obviously self-esteem drops, right, when you feel lower than other people. And how can you get to a more equilibrium state? I guess maybe it's just standing up for yourself. I wondered afterwards if I should have said, hey, lads, let's go and hang out, you know, seeing as we're all friends now.

1:12:20Because of course, I reacted the way I was supposed to I was I got upset rather than going brilliant I've made new friends like a complete weirdo which would but that would still have been funny to them so I thought there's no there's no way out of this I've lost status I've lost massive amount of face it's not my fault there's nothing I can do about it let's go back to London where I that never happens so what is the most I mean how long have you been studying laughter I know you didn't start off studying laughter you actually started off studying speech which is really interesting which is quite fascinating for me as a dyslexic to like I mean I didn't speak to a very low I went to a speech therapist because my speech, and then I didn't stop.

1:12:53And now I do it for a job. It was a living. But you started, because you're dyslexic as well, aren't you? Or you're not? Did I read that wrong? Maybe I thought I read that online. I'm aphantasic. What does that mean? I don't have visual imagery. But I think there's probably, I don't have pictures in my head. So you can't, so if I said visualize a bacon sandwich? Yeah, I can't do it. You can't do it? No. Wow. It's not that uncommon. There's quite a lot of us. yeah it's really that's fascinating I can sort of see colours and space that's it because that's the only way I learn well it's it's one of those things where you kind of people have actually been describing it for about 100 years and it's recently got a name and people have started studying it more in earnest but it's definitely so what about imagination how does that work then verbal spatial colour based sound based I've got very good auditory imagery so is that how you probably learn the best is audio yeah I've got a good verbal, yeah, mixing with good verbal memory, yeah.

1:13:52Gosh, that's, okay, so I'm dyslexic. What was the word? Afantasic. That's quite, why are they so hard to pronounce? They're going out of their way to make it hard. It's like, it's so difficult. Afantasic, brilliant word. But you're absolutely right. It does seem that the thing that's happening with dyslexia, I know there's still debate about it, but one really big source of evidence is that in dyslexia, dyslexia it's not a it's a problem of a sort of mapping between sound speech in and speech out which when you learn to read it parasitizes on that so there's some kind of connectivity between speech perception speech production that is different in people with dyslexia wow yeah i think mine was also maybe it's different now but it's a lot like my my processing and that's only so much at one point and then i kind of get over overloaded and then i've got to like take a break it's true so there's something there's a task called the rapid automatic naming where people just see like pictures of things and you have to name them and people with dyslexia are slower at that that's why you get given extra time yeah lots of superpowers though that are alongside it but so you started off in speech how did it go from speech to laughter because you obviously just said it's such an underfunded understudied area of research and trying to research for this podcast was one of the hardest I've ever had to research for.

1:15:16Because it's so limited. So I was like, okay, I'm this is as this is as much as I'm getting. This is all there is. So how did you jump from speech to laughter? It went through emotion, actually. So I was working. I was working in Cambridge, and I had colleagues who were working with patients who had brain damage, and they could no longer recognize certain facial expressions of emotion. So particularly the amygdala which sits sort of at the front of your hippocampus inside your medial temporal lobes. If you think about the brain, it's looking a little bit like a boxing glove. You've got these temporal lobes coming down here and in the middle of that you've got the hippocampus and right at the front you've got the amygdala and it's a very tiny but very complex bit of brain and one of the things the amygdala does is it's involved in threat perception.

1:16:02So if you have damage to your amygdala you can have difficulty recognising a frightened face or an angry face and both of those are signs a threat if you look frightened I should be frightened because what's a threat to you might be a threat to me if you look angry I should be frightened because you might be angry at me and indeed patients with damage to the amygdala struggle with recognizing frightened and angry faces but um they didn't have everything been done with faces and the journals were saying well you don't know if that's faces or if it's the emotion you need to test a different modality so I said they asked me because I was doing stuff with speech they said well how about trying non-verbal emotional expressions.

1:16:36So a scream. Can you recognize a scream or can you recognize an angry growl or a happy sigh or a sad sobbing sound? So I start working on these non-verbal emotional vocalizations. And actually, they're really interesting. They're more like animal calls than they are like speech. And they are better analogs to the facial expressions of emotion because there's no speech involved. And when you're in more extreme emotional states, you tend to make these noises rather than if you're really frightened, you are more likely to scream than to say I am very frightened in a frightened voice. So I was working on those.

1:17:08No one else is really looking at them, found them interesting. And then I just thought it's really interesting. It's all really negative. It's all fear and anger and disgust and sadness. And there was happiness, but that was as positive as things got. And psychology has been very much criticized for massively overestimating the importance of negative emotions and never looking at positive things. So I started looking. There's a guy called Paul Ekman who'd written a lot about emotion recognition. and he turned out to have said he thought there would be more positive emotions out there that might be kind of really well recognized amongst all human communities and like things like fear anger and disgust have analogues in other animals so I started looking at the positive emotions as well as negative and I was looking at the ones he'd suggested so he'd suggested triumph you know you know you get you win a prize or you know wonderful feeling lots of dopamine that's that kind of there's a fantastic photograph of Kelly Holmes winning a race and she realizes she has only won a race she's also broken a world record and she's just her arms are in the air her face that that triumph emotion like a cheering sound and then you've got um he'd suggested relief oh that kind of feeling you know something bad has been averted uh contentment pleasure and what he called amusement which is laughter so we start looking at those as well and as soon as you start looking at laughter it just runs away from you because it's recognized much better than all the other emotions it's very very common in social interactions in a way that the other those other emotions tend to be more associated with extreme states and um and also this is going to sound silly but all the emotions we work with they're always the stimuli are always posed because i can't put somebody in the anechoic chamber and then make them so frightened they start screaming genuinely that no one's going to give me ethical clearance to do this but we can make each other laugh really hard yeah so we just we spent a really delightful afternoon making each other laugh till we were helpless and so we got all these examples of really spontaneous laughter and then we recorded more kind of conversational laughter and started looking at these basically differences in laughter and then you start looking around and realize a there's hardly any research in it b we were calling it amusement but Robert Provine pointed out that we do laugh when things are funny most of the time when people laugh we laugh purely lots of other reasons you're laughing through contagion.

1:19:21We laugh to show understanding or agreement or recognition to communication. Basically, we laugh to reduce stress. We laugh to mask other emotions. All these. So it's like this kind of hall of mirrors. Yeah. And also we're not the only animals that laugh. It's got this kind of complicated life in other animals as well. So it's just taken up more and more of my time because it laughter sort of insisted on it. Really, it was the laugh. This is all laughter's fault you know it was just too interesting um and now there is more there are more labs studying it which I'm delighted to say and then it has kind of increased in popularity and people are starting to see its importance but um it wasn't it wasn't it was never something I set out to do it was just serendipity and I'm delighted about it really because I love it I find it endlessly interesting and I still study speech I mean one of the things that's really interesting about laughter is you know we mostly use speech to have conversations all around the world speech for hearing people is the dominant way for managing a social interaction and that's where most laughter lives so we're dropping between this amazing kind of vocal skill that only humans can do of speech and language we drop into this ancient mammal play vocalization to do a lot of the sort of heavy emotional lifting of an interaction which I find amazing and looking at the timing of that and the functions of that is just fascinating.

1:20:38I mean it is interesting because I also think about the different types of language so obviously Americans speak English a different American English but there is such a different type of humor and laughter between the two countries yeah right yeah even they were both English native speaking languages the American English is actually very different to the traditional English yeah yeah do you find any differences there like because I guess that's also involving a lot of speech like even the way that they like describe words and how they interact um and like their connotations with words have different meanings than ours yeah you know like how we might say something is like fine an American might feel like that's maybe not great yeah whereas if they say something's like awesome they might mean that's more fine actually we interpret it in a different way yeah like do you see that differently in how like humor is interjected You definitely find that.

1:21:37There are no rules to humour. There's no kind of guarantee that just because something's meant to be funny, it will be funny. But there are some general principles. So the more barriers there are to you understanding a joke, the less likely it is that you'll find it funny. And that's why nonverbal humour like, you know, Laurel and Hardy or Mr. Bean is the most popular around the world. It's because there aren't words in there. And there, because you can't use words, the themes that are being picked up on are more universal. And you're working it all out by people's actions. So that's, in Charlie Chaplin, it's still massively popular in China.

1:22:18You know, this nonverbal humor really has a global reach. And then the barriers can be linguistic. So there's a French television program called Deporçon 10%, which is I think called My Agent. It's on Netflix in the UK. And my French is good enough that I can understand it without always having to read the subtitles. and I can often tell that something is supposed to be funny but I've got no idea why because my French isn't good enough. Wow. And it can also just be straight down the line cultural. Yeah. So I love this study. Some researchers took Australian jokes in English and translated them into French and they took French jokes and translated them into English and gave them.

1:23:07And when you translate the Australian jokes into French, French people don't find them funny and vice versa because there's all this other kind of cultural stuff in there that's built in and that can be all the way from word play through to cultural illusions that just are meaningless once it's been translated and you say exactly how you phrase something and there's also, and I just love this because humans have been, as soon as modern humans appear on earth and they start making marks that survive you find the examples of them trying to be funny so there's an example of like a mesopotamian joke that's been stamped into a clay tablet and you can tell it's supposed to be a joke but time and culture had made it so distant you can't work out what the joke is the joke goes a dog walks into a tavern and says i can't see anything I'll try opening this one now a man walks into a bar you know it's an absolutely recognisable start of a joke but is the dog a man is the tavern maybe somewhere of ill repute is it maybe also a brothel or something when the dog says I can't see anything I'll open this one does he mean a door or does he mean his eyes this is a joke at the dog's expense if I had a time machine that's what I'd want to know I would take a Mesopotamian expert with me and we would go back and find out why that's funny.

1:24:34Because it's really... What year are we talking here? When's Mesopotamians? It's like 2000 BC, something like that. It's mentally, it's ridiculously old. It's extraordinarily old. Wow. I'm terrible with dates, but it is really, it is ancient. And then there's a whole book of jokes called The Laughter Lover, which has been preserved from Roman times. And Romans really like jokes. and that's closer to us and you can start to see things again they're still not particularly funny to us but you start to see stuff that looks a lot more recognisable like even if you don't find it funny you can see what's intended there's lots of jokes about different foreigners who the Romans thought were funny because they were stupid or newlyweds are funny or they thought crucifixion was very funny because crucifixion was a big part of Roman life and you're like okay that's not really working for me there's a lot of crucifixion jokes so you know but it's it's getting closer so there's um so to go back to your point about america sometimes it's the exact use of the language sometimes it's the precise cultural illusions but it has to it can definitely be something that you can struggle to make work so i i did some stand-up in america earlier this year and i was really struggling to think of things i thought first of all my english accent is going to be hard for people to understand, so I need to speak slowly.

1:25:57But also, there's a lot of the stuff I'd be normally talking about won't be funny because the cultural illusions will just be meaningless. So I ended up doing stuff about how difficult it is to deal with sex education and children. But these are in universal themes. Sex sells. Exactly. Sex sells. And I can make a lot of jokes about how bad the British were. Well, because we're so self-deprecating here. This is the thing. That is our humour. I mean, I personally think we have the best. Well, naturally. The best. Not bias or anything. But I do think English humour is hilarious. And we're going to because that's the world we grew up in.

1:26:38And that's what shaped us. That's what we've seen, what's made people around us laugh. Our families were growing up. I'm sure many people are going to disagree and write under the comments. I'd love everyone to tell me where they think their favourite humour is. apparently the closest you find to British humour is Finland the Finns find a lot of the same stuff funny that the British find funny oh really um Monty Python was popular in the rest of the world but it's really popular in Finland so that would be I need to know more about that but I think it's um there's did you have family jokes when you were growing up with oh yeah yeah yeah I always remember my dad coming in I mean he is I was very very lucky to have a dad who has an insane sense of humour and I always he would always be the typical dad joke and he would walk in and I remember him coming in one day and going I've got a really funny tummy and like holding his tummy and my really funny tummy and I was like why what dad what's happened and then he lifted his top up and he had a smiley face written around with his belly button with his nose saying I was like that was the household that I grew up in it was amazing and I was like he was just so quick and witty yeah you know and he would kind of always start with a bit the drama and it would always kind of then mask into something that's quite hilarious yeah um and he'd always put my mum kind of in that center of jokes kind of always like making fun of her but she would always find it absolutely hilarious but you know I think it's that like very quick witty like also quite dad type jokes which I find amazing the quick wit yeah it's a beautiful thing it's delightful, it's playful and it's for you they're doing this for you to laugh yeah which is lovely when my my parents lived in France at the end of the 90s my father was like mortally ill, he was desperately ill he kept having these kind of it took ages for the doctors to work out what was wrong with him but we were just sat around in hospital one afternoon he was just visibly we were losing him he was having difficulty breathing no one seemed to know what to do it was very very it was it was terrifying and we were just waiting for somebody to do something and he did survive he lived for another 14 years but um he suddenly said oh we've laughed a lot haven't we and I was like yeah dad yeah we have we have and yeah and then anyway things improved he would he would been put on a drug to try and manage his problem and he was having an ab reaction to the drugs he was okay when they took him off and then I started working on laughter and the more I thought about what he had never that stayed with me um the more I thought about what he said the more I realized he's right if you've lived a life where you've been able to share a lot of laughter with the people that you want to laugh with that really matters that's that's the that's the important you know that's valuing the really important parts of your time together and it's kind of beautiful actually it's you know we've had a lot of kind of philosophical endings on this podcast where someone like Shane Parrish for instance who was someone who inspired me to start the podcast years ago because I used to listen to his which was Farnham Street and he's all about mental models and how to make good decisions he would always ask guests you know when you're sat on a bench when you're 90 what is it that you want to be remembered for yeah and I think it's such an important question to kind of think about because actually it's not the amount of money that you make yeah it's not your career achievements it's actually at the time and the love and the energy that you spend with people that you love right no one ever says i wish i worked harder when i'm 90 years of age no one says i wish i slept more you know what you say is like i maybe wish i laughed more or maybe i wish i had more experiences with the ones that i really loved or actually spent more time with my parents when they were alive or was more interactive with my children and worked less you know like all of these things that we actually do know that gives us such an important quality of life and like humor is so central to that absolutely like so central to that because going on a trip where there's no laughter is like misery we all know the energy vampire so we can be around when you're when you're there and you're like god i feel exhausted leaving yeah and you You leave this dinner and you're like, that was not fun at all.

1:30:59Whereas, you know, you've always got these, like, if you're going away with someone or you're having an evening with someone and someone's making you laugh, you just feel so much more bonded and you want to see that person again because you feel good. Yeah, you've got that positive spiral. Right, the positive spiral. And I think, like, you know, I always think about that question. It's come up quite a lot on this show. Like, what is it that I would want to be remembered for at 19? I kind of think, like, being able to make people laugh is such an amazing answer to that. Yeah, exactly. I'm just thinking about this because you can create so much joy to other people in their lives.

1:31:31And it's beautiful in the moment and it makes you more closely bonded. You know, it makes you feel better. It gets you to a better place emotionally. Honestly, I'm coming to think of sharing laughter truly as a human superpower. Yeah, well, I agree. I said that laughing reduces stress in those married couples if they both laugh. And there's also data showing that shared laughter in speed dating predicts people wanting to see each other again. And the amount of shared laughter in job interviews predicts people being offered the job. There's something really happening there. It's a culture fit, right?

1:32:10You want people in your company as well, that culture. And it can be what biologists call a truthful signal. because you're very aware of somebody's really forcing it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, you know when it's not heartfelt. So there's a truth to it, I think, that we're very good at picking up on. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's a very common... Well, now I know that if someone's very straight, they might be a psychopath when I'm talking to them. Some people also just don't laugh much, but it's the thing to look for is the contagious laughter. Sophie Scott said that you might be a psychopath because you don't laugh.

1:32:50but it's like quite eerily when you I mean I've been in situations where I'm trying to make light of something and someone's just deadpan I mean it honestly makes things so much so uncomfortable that's funny yeah you're like great I really feel that I feel that shed that shed experience so of all the stuff that you've worked on now what is the thing that surprised you the most I always find that such an interesting question um something that surprised me the most is that we're trying to write this up at the moment but because I work a lot with laughter and I've got a lot of recordings of different people laughing and one of the people laughing is me and I noticed that when I hear myself laughing I always laugh and I thought that's weird you must be a narcissist you know and then I've also got recordings of my brother laughing and I I've given a load of laughter to recordings for a Canadian radio programme and some of the laughter was hid and I sent it to him saying oh you're gonna hear yourself laughing on this program and he said is it weird that when I hear myself laugh it makes me laugh and I thought what two of us so we actually looked at this we have laughter I've got all these recordings of laughter and actually I realized within these recordings of laughter there's a quite an interesting social network with some people very close like me and my brother and then lots of people who don't know each other and then bits in between so we did a study where we just asked got all those people back and asked them to listen to the laughter and rate how contagious it was and how familiar it was and then we told people who the laughers were and they did it all again so now they know for sure do they know this person or not and what we find is there's a really lovely relationship between how familiar laughter is and how contagious it is which we were expecting to find the thing we didn't expect to find was that everybody rated their own laughter as the most contagious even if they did not realize it was themselves laughing wow and most people aren't weird like me and listen to lots of recordings of themselves laughing.

1:34:46So, you know, there's something going on there. And I wonder if one of... There's familiarity? Well, at some level, there must be something that's familiar that you're picking up on. But also, you referred at the start to when you start laughing and then you can't stop laughing. Maybe that's because your own laughter is being contagious to you. Wow. And that's what's pushing you off in this direction of not being able to control it. So, So, I mean, we need to do more studies on this. But I was absolutely blown away by that. That's really, really, really extraordinary. And I think it's saying something quite interesting about yourself.

1:35:22Yeah. How you are experiencing being you. Yeah, it's also kind of, it's not familiarity, but it's also kind of like an internal safety mechanism maybe that's kind of going off. And I'm also just thinking about all the oxytocin that's kind of maybe coming out when you're, you know, feeling high on life. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of what laughter is, right? high on life you get massive endorphin kick from laughter you get measurable changes in people's ability to tolerate pain when they've been laughing you get such big big up endorphin uptake even if you fake the laughter it has a really big effect so it's really um it's quite extraordinary and then you get all this you know get an immediate reduction in adrenaline you're on a slower time scale you get a reduction in cortisol you get an increase in human growth hormone there's a lot that's going on yeah so they're maybe having a mechanism to kind of trigger that it's actually very beneficial.

1:36:13Gosh, it's so interesting because I think one of the things that I think about, especially with this podcast and I kind of think of all the other podcasts that are out there is there's a massive thing happening right now with obviously huge clickbait, right? So I say in my book, fear is the currency, right? So if you can inject fear in people, it normally is like a great marketing tool. Yeah. But I've always kind of felt very disingenuous ever using something like that because it's just like, I don't want to fear people. So this is a health podcast. so it went to be like making people feel good about themselves not like fearing them and actually just thinking about i don't even know if this works in marketing but thinking about this as a tool like if you can make people laugh surely people are gonna also naturally want to go on it but i think we're so deep in this fear of clickbait like it's the end of the world so you've got to watch this if you don't watch this you might die yeah you know we're constantly like oh my gosh i've got anti-aging i don't want to don't want to age so i've got to like get this product but actually can't we flip reverse it and put more laughter in yeah and actually like that must be so much more positivity to wanting to watch something although i think about horror films people still want to watch horrors it's not me but people love watching horrors it's uh there's something very you said earlier what why why why is there so little research into laughter and i think like I said I think people think it's a silly thing to study but actually as a culture we don't really value it and that's got a long history like they're kind of in the in the you know coming out of the dark ages there was a lot of theological debate about whether or not Christ had ever laughed with a strong view that he would not have done it's the plot of the name of the rose actually kind of features in this you know it's uncivilized it's wild get out of control it's childish it's not civilized and adult sensible and serious not stoic exactly and we still undervalue laughter in that way so comedies never get Oscars I think Melissa McCarthy was nominated for a best supporting actor for Bridesmaids and I think that's the only one that's happened for years whereas it's really hard to make a comedy really really hard to make something funny The Invite's good if you watch The Invite amazing superb isn't that brilliant with a living wild I loved it I just loved it I wanted to go and see it again I loved it yeah it was incredible I mean, Esther Perel, see how I love, consulted it for two weeks.

1:38:38Superb, superb. But that had the comedy element in it. It had the comedy element. Penelope Cruz was good in that. She was phenomenal. I mean, I'm really interested to see what happens with the Oscars with that. So am I. Because really, it's the standout film of the year for me so far. Yeah, same. Yeah. It's brilliant. I think anyone who's in a relationship or not in a relationship should watch this film. It is amazing. It's amazing. And if it doesn't get nominated for an Oscar, it's because people are down on comedy. and laughter. We just don't value it. So apart from people watching the invite as a tool to inject more comedy into their life, do you have any tips that people can do to kind of insert more laughter or humour into their lives?

1:39:18I would say make time for it. So a bit like me saying, right, end of the day, we're going to watch something funny together. We're doing it together. Put your phone down, we're watching this together. Just as a reason to get us to laugh together. um you know we make time for exercise um and the other thing is often that means being with other people because you will laugh more if you're with other people do that fight think about who makes you laugh make time to be with them make opportunity build create opportunities to spend that time with them because you're going to feel better they'll feel better and you'll feel more bonded and that's um again it feels like a sort of silly thing or shouldn't i be doing something morally improving like going to the museum.

1:40:02Also fine, also do that. But it's definitely just having a laugh with friends. It might feel like the silliest part of the day, but it's probably the most important part of your day. Can I say one thing that I would find really interesting to study? Please do. I'm going very left field here. Magic mushrooms and laughter. Is there a connection? it's definitely the case that if you give people things that make them feel good and can make you a bit more disinhibited you will start to get a lot of laughter I mean a good example is alcohol oh yeah um and it's mildly disinhibiting you and people start laughing more in fact I sometimes worry that all my brain imaging studies are people desperately trying not to laugh in the scanner because we're quite good at inhibiting laughter normally um I think you're probably trying to stay on top of it um so but you know um you know laughing gas is called out you know for a reason so it's you know there's so i wouldn't be at all surprised if there wasn't a strong element of you know maybe the kind of the reframing the experience of a psychedelic experience would take you in that direction certainly a bit more disinhibited yeah because i find that like quite fascinating the sort of suburban effect on the brain sophie thank you so much for bringing laughter to live well be well it's amazing thank you I really enjoyed the conversation thank you it's been amazing and I always leave with one last question which I always feel is maybe people's interpretation of the word success because I find that not the best reference in the Oxford dictionary of how it's described so what does live well be well mean to you Sophie Scott

1:41:49I came across a quote recently and I'm going to spoil it by not remembering it's an American author an American female author and she was asked why she always used her best china for everyday use and she said everyday is all there is and it's true it really is this is it life isn't a randomised control trial You don't get to 75 and then say, well, I'm going to try again as a dentist this time. You know, this is it. So I was old when I had my son and I was determined to enjoy being a parent. And I've loved being a parent. I've loved being a mom. It's just great. And one of the things I value most of it is because we were both older, both my partner and I were like, OK, we're not going to waste a minute of this.

1:42:38One of us has got to travel for work. We'll all go. Let's go on a trip. Let's do things together as a family. and because every day is all there is, you know, do it now. These are the good days. We're all alive. We're all running around. We're all still healthy. So, you know, every day is all there is. Make the most of it. That is such a brilliant quote. I think we should wake up and remember that every day because, you know, I always used to remember buying my mum for Christmas like the Jo Malone candles. Yeah. And getting her one the next Christmas, but the one before still hadn't been burnt.

1:43:05And I was like, mum, why do you not burn this? And she was like, no, because, you know, it's so nice. I don't want to burn it. And I'm like, what are you saving it for? Yeah. Like, this is a gift to be enjoyed. And then we went and she bought a really nice coat from Maximara. She's never worn it. It's just in the closet and she won't get it out. And every year I'm like, you don't know how many times you can wear that coat. You don't know how many winters you have left. You've got to enjoy it. It's such an important part of life, right? Absolutely. And as I was coming here, I cycle here in the summer, not in the winter.

1:43:35It's a really nice cycle. And somebody had just gone underneath a lorry coming here, a cyclist. And it just kind of hit me in my mind where I'm, you know, I'm very aware when I'm cycling, but you just kind of go, when you're on a bike and you've just kind of seen another cyclist, you just kind of go, you just never know what's going to happen. Yeah. You know, and actually like every single day is so important. I think sometimes we forget that, that you just actually never know what's around the corner. Yeah. So I think that's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed that conversation.

1:44:08Thank you. That was amazing, Sophie. Thank you so much. Thank you.