Brain Link. Laughter starts in the brain. Brief humor-related laughter also starts in the brain. Mirthful laughter is a miracle medicine—requiring no visits to healthcare professionals or prescriptions, no special outfit or environment, and it is free. A cheerful mind works healing. Much like yawning, laughter is an intensely infectious activity that triggers the Brain Reward System. Madan Kataria MD, of India found that when groups of individuals get together and simply choose to start laughing, it soon becomes genuine mirthful laughter. Think of laughter as a form of play—for both your brain and body—while also being greatly beneficial. An interesting phenomenon, laughter is considered a form of audible speech, arising from Broca’s Area in the brain’s left frontal lobe. Indeed, you can convey much through laughter: anger, fear, sadness, scorn, derision, or joy, happiness, affirmation, and so on. Choosing to laugh disengages you from regular life, which may not be very humorous at the moment. Laughing from your diaphragm helps rid the lungs of residual air and makes room for deep inhalations of fresh air. When sustained laughter comes from the inside, the brain gets it and releases endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin to help you feel better.
Laughter triggers the release of a cocktail of endogenous (internally produced) chemicals and hormones that are extremely beneficial and crucial to good Health. These substances can boost immune system function, improve your outlook on life, diminish symptoms of depression, reduce stress, and help prevent diseases and disorders caused by chronic stress. Laughter is the best medicine! —Madan Kataria, MD
Gelotology is from the Greek gelos or laughter. It is the study of laugher’s impact on the brain, mind, and body from a psychological and physiological perspective. This field of study is said to have been pioneered by William F. Fry, MD, of Stanford University. He reported that it required ten minutes on a rowing machine for his heart rate to reach the level it would after just one minute of hearty laughter.
Laughter dulls the sharpest pain and flattens out the greatest stress. To share it is to give a gift of health. —Barbara Johnson
While it is important to be serious about life, avoid taking every little thing too seriously. Life is relatively short: years against eons. Make your life count and have fun in the process. Schedule regular opportunities for play, relaxation, fun, and variety. Mirthful laughter is being touted by some as a medicine. It requires no visits to healthcare professionals, no prescriptions, no special outfit, and certainly no specific environment.
You don’t need equipment, you don’t need a nice day, you don’t need humor. You just need to laugh. —William F. Fry, MD
Think of laughter as a form of beneficial play—for both your brain and body. Dr. Madan Kataria, a family physician in Mumbai, India, also researched the benefits of laughter. In 1995, he started a Laughter Club. It has grown to more than 6,000 clubs in over 60 countries. In his book “Laugh for No Reason,” Dr. Kataria pointed out that laughter can provide many benefits.
1) Change your mood instantly by releasing endorphins, the body’s natural morphine.
2) Reduce stress and strengthen the immune system.
3) Increase the net supply of oxygen to the body and brain, making you feel more energetic.
4) Help develop a caring network of friendship since laughter bonds people together.
5) Provide a positive mental attitude when life gives you challenges.
Laughter has the potential to improve immune function and change brain wave activity toward the ‘gamma frequency’ understood to improve memory and recall. —Ronald A. Berk, PhD
Typically, a child grows up absorbing rules about laughter. ”Don’t laugh at funerals, at church, or at the misfortunes of other,” and so on. These rules may be spoken or unspoken. Following the rules is expected. Some are appropriate and necessary for effective communication. Others reflect antiquated beliefs or expectations on the part of the adults. Some rules can and do change from generation to generation.
Being told “Don’t laugh” in childhood pretty well guaranteed that you would laugh since those words create a picture of laughter in working memory. Studies have estimated that the average happy child laughs about 400 times a day. That is 388 times more per day than the average adult laughs. They may squeeze out 12 laughs a day—if they are fortunate.
That humor, mirth, and laughter produce beneficial effects on the immune system, and therefore, on health, is no longer in doubt. —Sandra L. Nehlsen-Cannarella, PhD
View the Educational Video #9. If possible, stand and walk in place for at least a portion of the video to increase blood flow to your brain.
People are 30 times more likely to laugh when they are with others. —Robert Provine, PhD University of Maryland
After nearly three decades of evaluating the physiologic effects of mirthful laughter, Dr. Fry has pointed out how humor can antagonize stress in mental, emotional, and physical aspects. Emotional tension that contributes to stress is lowered through the cathartic effects of humor. It actually banishes the rightness and severity that are necessary for anger. In all but the more severe degrees of depression, humor can help relieve its devitalizing grip.
Laughter appears to occur much more often when people are engaged in social interactions with others than when they are alone. This phenomenon has also been observed in children. Consequently, the frequency of laughter at any age depends on how much time an individual spends interacting with others. Thus, laughter is essentially a social behavior, a form of nonverbal communication.
Laugher is the most reliable gauge of human nature. —Dostoevski
Some people rarely laugh, which may relate—at least in part—to socialization attempts by family and friends who believe that one must be sober, serious, and vigilant at all times. It also may involve a failure to hone one’s own sense of humor and/or look for humor in everyday life and use it to trigger laughter. Obtaining clear data on the amount of laughter among children and adults is difficult because definitions of a laugh differ. For example, is it one exhalation of laughter or one episode of sustained laughter?
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. —Edward Estlin Cummings
Gelotology researcher Lee Berk, PhD, has reported conclusions from many studies. In one, a group of test subjects sat quietly in a room while the other group watched a short comedy video. Memory testing immediately afterward found that those who had watched the funny video performed better on all of its measures: memory recall, learning ability, and visual recognition. Saliva samples taken before and after showed a decrease in levels of the flight-fight hormone (cortisol) in the humor group but stayed constant in the control group.
Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top. The response to incongruities is one of the highest manifestations of the cerebral process. —Norman Cousins, BA Anatomy of an Illness
Physiologically, laughter is said to be a respiratory act. Laughter increases pulmonary ventilation, meaning over and above normal breathing rates, which is good for your brain! It has a positive impact on breathing, especially when you are gasping from laugher. It also increases the heart rate in proportion to the duration and intensity of the laughter. When the episode of laughter ends, heart rate and blood pressure—both systolic and diastolic—drop below the pre-laughter baseline rate.
Laughter also triggers musculoskeletal activity, with relaxation of muscles in the neck shoulder, ribs, diaphragm, and abdomen. Digestive functions are stimulated through episodes of laughter. In very hearty laughter, even more muscles become involved, which can result in total body relaxation. The benefits of laughter have been compared to those of exercise. Both promote an enhanced sense of well-being, stress reduction, and relaxation.
Both adults and children laugh primarily during social interactions. —Sebastian Gendry “Laughter Wellness Method”
Wilson and Gervais applied the concept of group selection to two distinct types of human laughter. Spontaneous, emotional, impulsive and involuntary laughter is a genuine expression of amusement and joy and is a reaction to playing and joking around; it shows up in the smiles of a child or during roughhousing or tickling. This display of amusement is called Duchenne laughter, after scholar Guillaume-Benjamin- Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who first described it in the mid-19th century.
Conversely, non-Duchenne laughter is a studied and not very emotional imitation of spontaneous laughter. People employ it as a voluntary social strategy—for example, when their smiles and laughter punctuate ordinary conversations, even when those chats are not particularly funny.
You grow up the day you have the first real laugh—at yourself. —Ethel Barrymore
Facial expressions and the neural pathways that control them differ between the two kinds of laughter. Duchenne laughter arises in the brain stem and the limbic system (responsible for emotions), whereas non-Duchenne laughter is controlled by the prefrontal cortex. The neural mechanisms are so distinct that just one pathway or the other is affected in some types of facial paralysis.
You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing. —Michael Pritchard
Laughter is a sound that arises from Broca’s area, the home of audible speech. Broca’s area is located in the left frontal lobe or the Prioritizing division. Depending on how you laugh, you can express happiness, joy, affirmation, mirth, anger, fear, sadness, scorn, derision, shame, and more. Laughter, an interesting phenomenon, appears to be modeled by the mother figure during the 1 st year of a child’s life and stabilizes in the child’s 2nd year.
If the mother is happy and laughs a lot, the likelihood is that so will the infant. Babies as young as 17 weeks have been observed laughing, while other babies might not laugh until 4-5 months of age or more. Ziv Avner has pointed out that around the age of one a child begins to laugh at the unusual behavior of adults, e.g., making funny faces or walking on all fours. By age two, children laugh at incongruities and try creating their own juxtapositions. Children learn incredibly early when laughter is acceptable and when it is not; what it is appropriate to laugh at and under what circumstances. Not that they always conform, you understand.
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine. —Lord Byron
Laughter can be reflexive, meaning that it is almost impossible to control laughter when being tickled playfully—something you cannot accomplish alone. (You are in control when tickling yourself, and there’s no surprise!) Laughter can also be instinctual, as in hearing the unexpected punchline on a joke. Instinctual laughter appears to be linked with your brain’s overseer, the hypothalamus. You may or may not be able to control instinctual laughter, especially if you are being told to “Stop laughing!” Good luck! Mirror neurons behind your forehead fire when watching another person’s actions, as if it’s happening to you. When watching or hearing laughter, these neurons may be partly responsible for a person following through on those mirror neurons with hearty laughter.
One day, as the story goes, Abraham Lincoln read aloud an anecdote to his cabinet. No one so much as cracked a smile. “Why don’t you laugh?” he is reported as having asked those present. “With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die—and you need this medicine as much as I do.”
Laughter dulls the sharpest pain and flattens out the greatest stress. To share it is to give a gift of health. —Barbara Johnson
Much like yawning, laughter is an intensely infectious activity that triggers the Brain Reward System. Dr. Kataria found that when groups of individuals get together and choose to begin laughing, it soon turns into genuine laughter. Brief humor- related laughter comes from the brain. Choosing to laugh disengages you from regular life at the moment. Laughing from your diaphragm helps rid the lungs of residual air and makes room for deep inhalations of fresh air. When you are laughing mirthfully, the brain gets it and releases substances to help you feel better. A vigorous laugh is said to burn as many calories per hour as brisk walking or cycling and shake up major body organs, providing a form of internal jogging.
We usually encounter positive emotions, such as laughter or cheering, in group situations, whether watching a comedy program with family or a football game with friends. This response in the brain, automatically priming us to smile or laugh, provides a way of mirroring the behavior of others, something which helps us interact socially. It could play a significant role in building strong bonds between individuals in a group. —Sophie Scott, PhD
Multiple studies have revealed the many benefits of mirthful laughter to the brain and the body—including both the immune systems. Mirthful laughter can do many positive things for the brain and body.:
1) Trigger the Brain Reward System to release serotonin and dopamine that help one to feel better.
2) Lengthen your life regardless of your age, weight, or even smoking habits.
3) Relieve psychological stress and keep the brain alert, improving creativity and problem-solving.
4) Increase IgA antibodies in the saliva to help combat upper respiratory infections.
5) Increase rate and depth of breathing that helps oxygenate cells and clear mucus from the lungs and may improve chronic respiratory conditions. It can increase circulation of the blood, temporarily lower blood pressure, and decrease a risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke.
6) Mimic the effectiveness of repetitive exercise, strengthening the response to repetitive or sustained laughter.
7) Relieve muscle tension, relax muscles throughout the body and condition the abdominal muscles.
8) Enhance digestion, releasing enzymes that protect against stomach ulcers and act as natural laxatives to help prevent constipation.
9) Enhance learning, promote retention of information, and increase the ability to recall information.
10) Increase the likelihood of transferring information from short-term to long-term memory during sleep.
11) Trigger the release of endorphins, the brain and body’s natural morphine, to help reduce aches and pain.
12) Give you a unique perspective and help you see life’s bigger picture.
13) Stimulate and reconnect the two cerebral hemispheres that have been disconnected by stressors.
14) Boost the production of human growth hormone, which is anti-aging.
15) Help the body with type 2 diabetes to process sugar better.
16) Trigger the release of interleukin-2 and other immune substances that help the immune system fight infection
17) Heal on an emotional level and help create a sense of closeness.
18) Help to moderate anger.
19) Promote more comfortable sleep.
20) Decrease cortisol and epinephrine, the result of which can help reduce the negative effects of stress on brain and body.
21) Help manage stressors.
22) Stimulate the body to repair damage from the effects of mismanaged emotions.
Don’t feel like laughing right now? Choose to laugh anyway and keep at it. A cheerful mind works healing. Laughter can enhance work success. Employees who laugh together are more likely to stay together. They also tend to be more creative, more productive, and better at collaboration. As has been pointed out many times, it is difficult to stay angry and irritated when you are laughing together.
Even in the most difficult of times, a laugh—or even simply a smile—can go a long way toward making you feel better. And laughter really is contagious. Just hearing laughter primes your brain and readies you to smile and join in the fun. —Melinda Smith, MA & Jeanne Segal, PhD
Listen to Chapter #11 of Just the Facts audiobook. If possible, walk around the room while you listen. At least walk in place.
When used effectively, classroom comedy can improve student performance by reducing anxiety, boosting participation, and increasing students’ motivation to focus on the material. —Laura King, PhD
Laughter and humor are different. They are even believed to arise in different cerebral hemispheres. Laughter is a sound, a form of speech that is created in Broca’s area in the left hemisphere. It can be triggered by humor or simply exhibited by choice.
Humor is a set of survival skills that relieves tension, keeping us fluid and flexible instead of allowing us to become rigid and breakable, in the face of relentless change. —C. W. Metcalf
The left hemisphere is quite literal in its interpretations of humor (e.g., a joke) and rarely gets it. However, it is especially drawn to wordplay like, “The bigger the summer vacation, the harder the fall.” It creates the sense of amusement and so is quite happy to laugh at anything when prompted to do so.
The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is more alert to subtleties and nuances. It quickly grasps the meaning by pulling together threads of a joke—including context, assumptions, knowledge of personal bias, and/or prejudice. It gets the joke by registering the dislocation in logic that is a hallmark of most formal humor. What strikes you as humorous is usually learned and is triggered by a mismatch between what your brain expected and what actually occurred—like the punch line on a joke.
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. —Elwyn Brooks (Andy) White
Humor is a mental faculty that is built into the right frontal lobe—the envisioning division of the brain’s right hemisphere. Like any other faculty, however, it must be developed and honed. Humor activates when something you did not expect to see, hear, or think occurs—if you have honed your sense of humor. Humor may be triggered by seeing a person skid unexpectedly on a banana peel or from hearing a child make unusual sounds or from watching the antics of a clown. Humor recognition alone may or may not be accompanied by laughter.
During students’ most anxious times—such as prior to or during an exam—humorous directions or test items may relieve tension and help students perform better. —Ronald A. Berk, PhD
Typically, humor is learned in your family-of-origin and is very subjective. It may be appreciated with or without laughter and can be used to trigger laughter. Most individuals can name people who have a profound sense of humor, as well as some who fear humor, who never honed that mental faculty, or grew up believing that it should not be exhibited.
What if you don’t feel humorous? Pretend to be happy. You have to start somewhere even if it means going through the motions at first. If you decide to be healthy, hopeful, and fun-loving, that is what you will be. —Harry A. Olson, PhD
You may have a predisposition toward music, but unless you develop and hone that faculty it can sit in the brain quite dormant. You possess a mental faculty in the brain for humor. However, if it is not developed and honed, it might never see the light of day.
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road. —Henry Ward Beecher
There are those who are absolutely humorless. These individuals seem either to not understand a sense of humor or have not developed theirs. Sometimes they will comment, “Oh, that was funny.” If you find something funny and others do not, avoid taking it personally. Each person’s perception of humor and expectations about laughter differ.
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. —Robert Benchley
Outstanding leaders use humor often use humor and laughter to reduce stress, enhance brain function, and positively impact their communication. Correctly used humor can be an effective intervention to improve retention of information in students from kindergarten through college. Studies find retention to be strongest in lectures with content-related humor. Plus, students generally reported higher levels of enjoyment in the experience.
A number of brain structures including the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in language processing and memory, are involved in humor appreciation. The brain’s mesolimbic reward center, which is responsible for the rewarding feelings that follow such events as monetary gain or cocaine use, is also activated by humor. —Allan L. Reiss, MD
Develop your sense of humor: it is a skill! Expand what your brain finds funny. Need help? Join a Laugh Club. Hang out with people who have a well-honed sense of humor. Read humorous books and choose to laugh. Studies have suggested that an adult’s health could benefit by a minimum of 30 mirthful laughs a day.
A good sense of humor is a natural way to keep your stress levels in check. —WebMD
Humor can be appreciated without laughter. No doubt you have heard someone say with a straight face, “That was really funny,” without even a chuckle much less laughter. A recognition of humor without any accompanying laughter, however, doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of benefits.
Humor is an attitude toward life, an ability to be objective, unattached, and see the absurdity of one’s plight. Humor is a willingness to accept life and oneself. —Harvey Mindess
Male-Female Differences. Perception differences of what is funny typically exist between males and females. The good news is that you can learn each other’s humor- laughter language if you have a mind to.
1) Female humor tends toward word play in the left hemisphere and stories about something that strikes a woman’s funny bone. Females connect through language, but not necessarily through jokes. Females are less amused by poor jokes and less likely even to “get” them. However, if they find a joke very funny, they are likely to rate it even higher than male counterparts do. They usually accept teasing more playfully while not always understanding that males tease when they like a person.
2) Male humor is more right brained. They use jokes to connect with males or use slapstick humor requiring no language. They typically give most jokes a higher rating. Males try harder to be funny and are rewarded for this growing up. They may be five times funnier according to some estimates. They like to tease others but do not necessarily like to be teased themselves and may even respond with aggression. Males are more likely to tease females they like—but do not waste the time and energy on those they dislike.
Business women who can interact easily with male humor are a step ahead of women who can’t or don’t. Some universities now offer courses in understanding male-female humor. Studies show that humor and laughter promote healthier relationships: couples who laugh together tend to stay together! After all, who can hold onto anger or hurt while doubled over in mirthful laughter?
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. —Albert Einstein
If others are laughing at a joke and you don’t get it, you might just want to laugh along with the others and ask questions later, if at all. It’s the laughter that will make you feel better. As one woman put it, “I don’t mind if I don’t get every joke. It is the opportunity to laugh, which always makes me feel better.” It’s a bit like standing in front of your bathroom mirror on a morning when it was difficult to crawl out of bed. If you choose to start laughing and watch yourself in the mirror as you laugh, your brain will likely trigger genuine laughter, which will change your brain’s chemistry for the better.
The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than twenty asses laden with drugs. —Thomas Sydenham, 17th century physician
View the short Birds ‘n Brains video #9. If possible, Stand and walk in place for at
least part of the video.
He who laughs, lasts. —Mary Pettibone Poole
Relaxing is key to learning. Learning is key to leadership. Laughter unlocks both. When people share laughter, they trust each other. And laughter begets more trust. Laughter need not be cut out of anything since it improves everything. —James Thurber
Recall a time when you doubled over with laughter. Laugh aloud at the memory. When you do so, similar brain chemicals that were released at the time of the original incident will again be released. It requires 15 facial muscles contracting in a specific pattern to laugh, while it takes 26 muscles to frown. Studies of individuals who are judged to be incredibly happy reportedly laugh between 100 and 400 times a day. That is not hard to do if you are healthy enough to laugh at yourself. You carry an unending supply of laughter triggers with you. Some studies have estimated that many adults laugh less than 12 times a day.
As you hone your humor skills, you can help others raise their numbers of laughter each day. Think of laughter as a ping-pong game: You say something humorous. That reminds someone else of something humorous, and so on. Pretty soon everyone is triggering the brain’s pharmacy to release endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine.
Choose to laugh at another’s attempt at humor. They may be learning, and you can genuinely laugh at that. Be encouraging, even if you’ve heard the joke before and they blew the punch line.
Radiate happiness. Abraham Lincoln has been quoted as saying that people are about as happy as they choose to be.
The minute a crisis arises, or an adverse event occurs, rather than choosing anger or panic right off the bat, choose humor. Laugh at least part of it off, if not all of it. That will help keep your brain ‘upshifted’ cognitively, which can enhance problem solving and decrease the likelihood you will say or do something that will add to the problem instead of lightening the situation. Remember, laughter is catching, like yawning.
Identify what you find funny and make sure you get some of it each day.
Be serious about life but avoid taking every little thing too seriously. Approach life as an important and fun experience where you look for and purposely choose humor and laughter.
Laughter may wrinkle your face, but the absence of laughter can wrinkle your heart. The sound of shared laughter may not be as loud as the thunder of firecrackers, but the echo can be heard a great deal further and can last a great deal longer. —Arlene R. Taylor, PhD
Concentrate on Module #9 during this entire week. Reread the sections, review the videos, and relisten to the audiobook excerpts. It takes the average adult four times through the material to really it and turn it into a new behavior. Practice, practice, and practice the new strategies you are learning.
Are you a happy person who laughs a lot? Now is the time for smiles and laughter, for you and for everyone with whom you come in contact. Your health depends upon it. Sustained mirthful laughter matters. Remember the words of Mary Pettibone Poole, those who laugh—last.
Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top. The response to incongruities is one of the highest manifestations of the cerebral process. —Norman Cousins, BA
