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While most of the sounds produced by man have been thoroughly studied by scientists, the acoustics of laughter has practically not become the subject of research to this day.

“We tend to think that laughter sounds like 'hee hee' or 'ho ho' or very similar sounds,” Baczorowski says. But research suggests otherwise.

To begin with, when laughing, a person makes many different sounds, including grunts and snores. However, for the most part, laughter consists of neutral, indefinite sounds.

The researchers found that men tend to make snores and grunts more than women.

Women's laughter is more melodic than men's. This is the so-called vocal laughter, which means that the vocal cords and tissues are actively involved in the process of its formation.

Both male and female laughter is surprisingly piercing. To establish this, the researchers measured the "fundamental frequency" of each episode of laughter recorded during the experiment with the help of volunteers. The fundamental frequency of laughter corresponds to the degree of vibration of the vocal cords and is perceived by the listener as a high-pitched sound. Scientists have found that the frequency of female laughter is approximately twice the frequency of normal female speech. And the frequency of male laughter increases on average by 2.5 times compared with the frequency of men's speech in a normal communication situation.

Researchers have found a lot of evidence that laughter in the speech apparatus is accompanied by extraordinary physical processes - "whirlpools" of air or whistling in the larynx. These processes may be the result of an emotional upsurge at the moment of laughter, but researchers are not 100% sure of this.

Laughter research is currently ongoing. In particular, scientists began to study the emotional reaction of listeners to the sounds of laughter. In addition, they hope to reveal the secret of the processes that occur in the human brain when he hears laughter. One of the areas of research is the study of the semantic load of laughter, in particular, the transmission of semantic information and symbolic value to the listener through laughter. At the moment, scientists believe that the main function of laughter is the formation of the interlocutor's emotional reaction, and the semantic load is a secondary phenomenon, varying depending on the situation, which is illustrated by laughter.

Such a simple and characteristic thing for all of us as laughter for scientists is still a mystery. And even more questions are raised by the fact that at the same unfamiliar joke, some people laugh until they drop, while others only shrug their shoulders in bewilderment. Why are people laughing? Let's try to answer this question.

What do we know about laughter

Humans are the only creatures on the planet that can laugh. And all scientists currently know about why we laugh is:

• An adult laughs about 17 times a day;
• During laughter, 80 facial muscles are involved;
• A hearty laugh can burn 550 calories in half an hour, and one minute of laughter is equivalent to 10 minutes of fitness;
• During laughter, blood pressure decreases, blood circulation improves, stress levels decrease;
• Laughter releases endorphins and antidepressants, which brings people into a state of peace;
• Laughter is one of the human responses to humor or tickling;
• Laughter can be a sign of nervous tension or mental disorder;
• Laughter is not an innate emotion, and it is not transmitted by genotype.

A special branch of psychiatry deals with the study of laughter, it is called gelotology. The scientific definition of laughter is as follows: a complex act that consists of modified breathing movements associated with certain facial expressions.

What is laughter

Laughter can be different, it can be natural, bold, pacifying, or it can be ingratiating, mocking, threatening, when we experience very strong emotions, “laughter through tears” may even arise. But if those who laugh, laughter still calms, then those who are laughed at can be upset and offended. We love jokes, but we don't like to be the object of them, and when it does, we sometimes sigh bitterly: Why am I being laughed at? People really laugh when they see clumsiness or weakness in another person. Therefore, when hearing loud laughter next to them, people with low self-esteem first of all believe that they are being laughed at. Why do they laugh in their sleep? Laughter is a natural reaction for us, but sometimes we suppress our emotions so much that they begin to manifest at the moment when we cease to control our mind, namely in a dream.

What causes laughter

In attempts to answer the question of the century, what exactly causes laughter, why small children smile, why girls laugh, where does the sense of funny come from, scientists spend years. And the exact answer has not yet been found. Laughter expert Robert Provine spent hours recording people's conversations, trying to figure out what made them laugh. And he revealed only general patterns - laughter was a reaction to a funny joke, to an unexpected resolution of the situation, and sometimes it simply arose for no reason. But one thing is known for sure, laughter is inherent in all people from birth, not as a mental, but as a physiological feature. Even deaf-mute people from birth who have never heard laughter in their lives laugh. Perhaps laughter is our tool for social interaction. After all, good laughter unites, makes people easier and closer, but it can also quarrel if people laugh at each other, and always, without exception, attracts the attention of people of the opposite sex.

Humor provides food for thought about how the brain works.

They understand the human auditory system so much that they can already restore hearing. Biomedical scientists are successfully implanting chips that partially restore vision. Neurosurgeons know that if you poke in one part of your brain, an image of your third grade teacher will appear in another, and if you poke in another place, you will smell the scent of her perfume. Neuropsychologists have gone so far as to isolate a part of the brain whose cells are activated when a person prays. And yet, the nature of idiotic jokes remains as mysterious as the sphinx.

The difficulty in understanding the nature of humor reflects the difficulty of the task. This topic interests scientists so much because if they understood how humor works, it would immediately become clear how the brain works, and this would give the key to healing after paralysis and illness. Recently, neuroscientists who take jokes seriously have released some interesting results from their research. With the help of the Internet and volunteers around the world, scientists were able to rank the jokes and select the funniest ones. Then, using a brain scanner, they isolated the part of the brain that becomes active when we laugh. Independently of each other, Canadian and British experts came to the same conclusion: different types of jokes activate different brain cells.

The best joke

“Previous research on humor has revealed important features of brain function,” says Richard Weissman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire (near London). Around this time of year, he launched a project called the Laugh Lab. The goal of the project is to find the funniest joke in the world.

Weissman's research began by collecting jokes on the Internet. After his employees threw out all the indecent and racist ones, he dictated the most popular jokes and posted sound files on the Internet.

Site visitors were asked to rate them. At the end of last year, the computer chose the joke that was most liked by visitors of both sexes, all age groups and all countries. Gurpal Gosal gave it,

31-year-old psychiatrist from Manchester (England). You've probably heard it before. Here she is.

“A group of hunters from New Jersey are wandering through the forest, and suddenly one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes roll back. His friend takes out his cell phone and calls the rescue service. Shouts to the operator: “My friend is dead! What should I do?" The operator replies in a very calm voice: “Don't worry. I can help. First, let's make sure he's really dead." There is a pause, a shot is heard. Then the hunter says: “Done. What's next?"

Weissman argues that both the winning joke, the one that came in second, and the winners for each country all line up in a system. “We find the joke funny for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it puts us in an excellent light, reduces the emotional impact of disturbing events, and sometimes it surprises us with some inconsistency with what we expected. The hunter joke has all three properties: we feel superior to the jerk hunter, we understand the discrepancy between what the cameraman means and what our character understood, and we laugh at our own mortality,” continues Weissman. He completed his experiment by putting volunteers in a functional nuclear magnetic resonance (fNMR) device and monitoring the circulation of blood inside their brains while they listened to jokes. “Tests have proven the existence of a well-defined area of ​​the brain responsible for understanding why a particular joke is funny. This area is approximately behind the anterior lobes. Curiously, this correlates with other studies. From them, we know that people who have this place damaged often lose their sense of humor, ”says the scientist.

Inside the brain

Vinod Goel of York University in Toronto and his colleague Raymond Dolan of the Neurological Institute in London have focused their research on what happens inside the brain when it processes a joke. Like Weissman, Goel placed his volunteers in an fNMR device. They listened to taped puns: "Why does a golfer need two pairs of pants?" “He hit the hole the first time.” They were also given what Goel calls semantic jokes, such as "Why don't sharks eat lawyers?" — «Professional

solidarity". Goel limited the choice of jokes to those in which the first line is a question, and the second is the answer and denouement. For control, he added pseudo-jokes, traps. In pharmaceuticals, traps are called placebos. In humor research, traps are soothing responses.

In particular, about the golfer - "It was cold." Analyzing the results, Goel found that both puns and semantic jokes activated the mid-uterine prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for reward and control, so this was not a big surprise. However, the second discovery surprised. Not all jokes are treated the same. Puns and semantic jokes caused different reactions in the subjects. Puns affected the so-called Broca's area, which is responsible for speech. But the semantic joke improved the flow of oxygen to both temporal lobes. This came as a surprise, since language processing has always been considered the prerogative of the left temporal lobe. Lawyers, it seems, are indeed ubiquitous.

Much remains to be learned about the nature of humor. It is unlikely that we will ever understand why women are completely immune to some jokes. Or why, statistically speaking, ducks are the funniest animals. So far, what we've found out is that jokes are not only funny, they also allow us to understand how our brains work.

Without laughter it is difficult to imagine our life. There is no such person who has not laughed at least once in his life. Everyone does it. Has anyone thought about why people laugh?

Laughter is one of the least studied and understood human behaviors. A specific part of our brain is responsible for each function. However, with laughter, everything is not so simple. Until now, scientists have not been able to “tie” it to any part of the brain.

Man is the only species that can laugh. The average adult laughs 17 times a day. Scientists have known about the health benefits of laughter for a long time: laughter reduces stress, helps to cope with serious diseases, lowers blood pressure and improves blood circulation. Laughter also helps to get rid of negative emotions such as fear, anger and sadness.

Most scientists agree that the main reason for laughter is humor. Laughter is a physiological response of the brain to humor. Conventionally, two causes of this phenomenon can be distinguished: gestures and sounds. Very often they complement each other, thereby enhancing the effect.

English psychologist Richard Wiseman, who specializes in the study of humor, identifies two main “pillars” on which humor is built: incongruity and superiority. When we hear something absurd, something that does not fit in our head, this, as a rule, causes us surprise, which is often followed by laughter. Scientists suggest that primitive people used laughter to warn their tribe that the danger that everyone was afraid of did not really exist, and that the alarm was false.

As for superiority, when someone tells us a funny story that happened to him or his acquaintances, we laugh, at the same time feeling superior to the hero of this story. We imagine how we would behave in the described situation, and, naturally, our behavior seems more logical to us, so we laugh at those who acted differently from us.

What do we usually laugh at?

Richard Wiseman identifies four main themes that people commonly laugh at:

1. Someone is trying to look smarter than they really are.

2. Husband and wife have not experienced the same feelings for each other for a long time.

4. Someone made a stupid, ridiculous mistake.

Laughter is one of the least studied and understood human behaviors. A specific part of our brain is responsible for each function. However, with laughter, everything is not so simple. Until now, scientists have not been able to “tie” it to any part of the brain.

Man is the only species that can laugh. The average adult laughs 17 times a day. Scientists have known about the health benefits of laughter for a long time: laughter reduces stress, helps to cope with serious diseases, lowers blood pressure and improves blood circulation. Laughter also helps to get rid of negative emotions such as fear, anger and sadness.

Most scientists agree that the main reason for laughter is humor. Laughter is a physiological response of the brain to humor. Conventionally, two causes of this phenomenon can be distinguished: gestures and sounds. Very often they complement each other, thereby enhancing the effect.

English psychologist Richard Wiseman, who specializes in the study of humor, identifies two main “pillars” on which humor is built: incongruity and superiority. When we hear something absurd, something that does not fit in our head, this, as a rule, causes us surprise, which is often followed by laughter. Scientists suggest that primitive people used laughter to warn their tribe that the danger that everyone was afraid of did not really exist, and that the alarm was false.

As for superiority, when someone tells us a funny story that happened to him or his acquaintances, we laugh, at the same time feeling superior to the hero of this story. We imagine how we would behave in the described situation, and, naturally, our behavior seems more logical to us, so we laugh at those who acted differently from us.

What do we usually laugh at?

Richard Wiseman identifies four main themes that people commonly laugh at:

1. Someone is trying to look smarter than they really are.

2. Husband and wife have not experienced the same feelings for each other for a long time.

4. Someone made a stupid, ridiculous mistake.

Prepared by Alexander Timoshik based on Livearticles.org materials