A serious matter

You cannot anticipate when it will strike you. It is highly contagious. It spreads uncontrollably in a crowd. It is not easily suppressed. It is little understood. It can happen anywhere. In a memorial service, I had an attack of it and had the most agonizing time suppressing it. On a flight, I burst into fits of it. I was told that covering my mouth subdues it but so far, this has not been proven to be a hundred percent effective. At parties, I was told they are still experienced even behind masks. In the hospital, during minor surgery done on me, I got lots of it when I asked anyone in the operating room to please hold my hand while surgery. In school, children I know get it all day and even bring it home to their parents. Robert Provine, a medical scientist, has been studying it for 10 years based in the University of Maryland and says he has been trying to catch it and define its parameters in order to help us understand it but much of it still remains a mystery. He had apparently left his windowless lab to investigate it as it spreads in the field but relatively very little has been yielded by the research. It has become a laughing matter.

No, really, it IS a laughing matter. This week’s column is about the science of laughter. Dr. Robert Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience, is one of the foremost names in the study of laughter. His probe into this area, in fact, touches on the larger area, which is the development of human speech in evolution. He thinks that studying laughter will provide us with traces that will lead us to answering the bigger questions on why humans seem to be the only species that laugh (although I reserve a future De Rerum on what Mark Twain said that we are also the only species "who blush or need to.")

The insights that have been so far revealed by the studies tell us that eighty percent of laughter is mostly elicited by social situations other than humor, i.e. by jokes and other materials intended to be funny. That means that laughter seems to be more of a social expression, something that could help us cope, react, respond to a whole rainbow of life situations involving other people. Cultural factors that affect people’s sociability thus influence the differences in various kinds of people’s tendency to laugh. I have noticed this when encountering other cultures. Some cultures are indeed given to laughter more easily than others. The study also showed that women seem to laugh more than men but that men elicited more laughter than women. (Now why am I not surprised at the latter?) But in a crowd, when even a fake laugh is started by anyone, it could generate genuine fits from everyone else. Remember that "laughing bag" toy you had that was a fad in the 70s and how strangers would start laughing upon hearing it?

In terms of the physiological process involved, scientists found evidence to believe that laughter stimulates the pituitary gland to release natural painkillers like endorphins and enkephalins, similar to opiates such as morphine and heroin. In terms of the brain, it seems that the amygdala and the hippocampus in the brain’s limbic system, responsible for emotions among other functions, are involved in producing laughter.

Science has barely kissed laughter’s skin but human experience is already soaked in it. Philosophers and modern behavioralists point at the kind of laughter as an expression of gloating, done after a cruel act. We have seen this all too often by members of our own species in history. We also know of the "pained" laughter of the one who bears physical or psychological trauma and are reminded that weeping is the physiological Hyde of laughing.

But anyone whose spirit has been tossed as if in a trampoline by uplifting laughter elicited by a genius comedian or literary wit, rolled like lapping waves in children’s innocence and their laughter, knocked over continuously but tenderly like lined-up dominoes in conjoined laughter among old friends or intimately wrapped in silken laughter with your beloved, knows that laughter is one of the deepest, most courageous acts we do in our lifetimes. It is because we all know that sorrows abound, that our present lives will end but our bodies and our minds take the time to resoundingly cymbal-clap the air with our bodies and our will, as if to blunt the finite nature of our lives. Can you think of something so profoundly courageous coming out of something so seemingly trivial?

And you all thought anything that spreads this way has to be viral.