laughter
dr. dolittle | June 20, 2017 Photo of a kea by Mark Whatmough - Milford Sound, Key Summit, The Divide, Queenstown, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Most of us have heard the phrase: Laughter is contagious. When we hear other people laughing, we often smile even if we have no idea why they are laughing. Dr. Sophie Scott from the University College of London and her colleagues played both positive sounds (like laughter) and negative sounds (like retching or screaming) to subjects and found the sounds activated the premotor cortical region of the brain. This area of the brain is responsible for preparing facial muscles…
dr. dolittle | June 22, 2012In this video, Dr. Jaak Panksepp describes how he discovered that rats apparently laugh, producing an ultrasonic sound which more resembles chirping than laughter as we typically think of it:
Further research by Dr. Panksepp has shown that young rats tend to be more ticklish that older rats and that "laughter" ceases when the animals smell the odor of a cat or when they are hungry. As you might expect, his findings have been debated by other scientists.
To read a recent interview with Dr. Pankseep about rat "laughter" and his theories, click here.
Sources:
Scientific American
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edyong | June 4, 2009 If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood.
But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…