As promised in my last blog, I’m going to tell someone one joke a day for each of the days left remaining in August because laughter is so good for what ails you.
Why don’t aliens eat clowns?
Because they taste funny!
While we’re on the topic of laughter, I thought it would be fun to discuss what makes laughter so interesting. For this, I went to the great scientific reference, The Reader’s Digest. I’m not mocking The Reader’s Digest. In fact, when I was a young child growing up, I often read The Reader’s Digest because it was filled with all kinds of facts, adventure and fun. It even calls itself “A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World”. Any friend who can make my world less complicated is a true friend, indeed. I also liked The Reader’s Digest for the jokes it contained. They made me laugh and when I laughed, I always felt better. Maybe that’s why I like jokes so much!
In any event, I came across an article in The Reader’s Digest called “9 Weird Facts You Never Knew About Laughter” and I thought I might share it with you. In the article, Beth Dreyer discusses some trivia about laughter, which she calls “one of the ancient forms of expression and communication”. I’ll summarize her article for the sake of brevity and try to hit on what I thought were the most important points.
Humans laughed before they spoke – According to the author, the mechanism of laughter is so ingrained in our brains that babies as young as 17 days old have been observed laughing.
Laughter is actually rarely tied to humor – A study conducted by Robert R. Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland – Baltimore, and a team of grad students placed a group of people in a social setting and watched their behavior. They discovered that of the 1200 laughing episodes he and his graduate students logged, only about 10% were generated by humor or a joke. From this data, they concluded that laughter has a bonding function between individuals in a group and doesn’t necessarily require humor or a joke to initiate.
Rats and monkeys laugh – Were you aware you can tickle a rat or a monkey to make them laugh? It’s true. It may sound more like high-frequency chirps or grunts, but it’s laughter.
Couples who laugh together, stay together – Robert Levinson, psychology professor at University of California Berkeley, performed an experiment where he invited couples into his lab and asked each partner to discuss something that irritated him or her about their partner. The couples who tackled the stressful situation with laughter not only felt better at the moment, but they had higher levels of relationship satisfaction and stayed together longer than couples who couldn’t laugh about it.
Laughter controls our brains – Have you ever noticed that when you see people laughing, you can’t help but smile? That’s because your brain makes it nearly impossible not to. Dr. Sophie Scott, a neurologist at University College London, found that when she monitored peoples’ brains while she played laughing sounds, the premotor cortical region of the brain was motivated. The premotor cortical region prepares the muscles in the face to move and laughing sounds generally produced smiles.
Laughing burns more calories than you might think – Just 10 to 15 minutes of laughing a day can burn up to 40 calories, according to a study at Vanderbilt University. They determined that the increase in heart rate and oxygen consumption during funny moments boosted the burn of calories. I, for one, need to start laughing more!!!
Nashville is a really funny place – On April 15, 2015, a bunch of comedians put Nashville in the Guinness Book of World Records. Funny people like Hannibal Buress, Rory Shovel and Ahmed Ahmed performed on stage to help set a new record of the longest continuous stand-up comedy show by multiple comedians. They kept people in stitches for 208 hours and 16 minutes. My face would hurt from laughing that long!
Laughter really is the best medicine – Study after study has pointed to the health benefits of laughter. Some of the findings include that laughing improved the memory of adults in their 60s and 70s, hilarious movies improved the function of blood vessels and increased blood flow in 30-somethings, and laughter can improve immunity, regulate blood sugar levels, and improve sleep.
Your sense of humor may be genetic – Northwestern University found in one of their studies that people who have the short version, or allele, of gene 5-HTTLPR are quicker to laugh at cartoons or funny movie clips than those with the long version of the gene. That particular gene has been associated with depression. Their study concluded that people with short alleles may flourish in a positive environment and suffer in a negative environment, while people with long alleles are less sensitive to environmental conditions.
So, there you have it: 9 Weird Facts You Never Knew About Laughter.
Let me share what I’ve learned about laughter. It makes me feel good. That’s all I need to know. When I’m down, nothing snaps me out of it better than a good bout of laughter. When I’m up, nothing keeps me going like sharing jokes and having fun with friends. I even like to joke about Myasthenia Gravis. It’s such a funny disease and it just loves playing tricks on us. MG can make me feel weak, it can make me ache, it can even prevent me from smiling, but it can’t keep me from laughing, even if it’s only just a little giggle inside.