Laughter - A Scientific Investigation

Laughter - A Scientific Investigation

Robert Provine, 2000

• "Most laughter is not a response to jokes or other formal attempts at humor" p42
• Bowlers don't smile when they're facing the pins, but they smile as soon as they turn around and face their friends. p45
• People with central facial paralysis don't smile on one side of their face if you ask them to, but if it's a smile instigated by a joke, genuinely, then they can smile on both sides, because these are different parts of the brain (smiling intentionally vs smiling reflexively). In reverse, people with Parkinson's can smile on command, but not at a joke. pp52-53
• The anatomy of a laugh: each "ha" lasts 75 milliseconds and they're spaced out at 210; always a decrescendo that goes down in pitch not up; no mixing of ha's and ho's and he's except maybe at the end for the last ha; the notes are harmonics of each other so like 200hz then 400 then 600. 
• The Bipedal Theory of Speech AKA The Walkie Talkie Theory - He says chimps can't breathe like we do, they have to take shorter breaths, they pant, and if they were to speak, they'd only get one word at a time so they can catch their breath, meanwhile we can eject an entire sentence before taking another breath. He says this is because bipedalism frees the thorax and loosens the coupling of breath and vocalizing. p85~
• Then he refers to an article in Science magazine, "Running and Breathing in Mammals," by DM Bramble and DR Currier, 1983: Quadrapeds synchronize their locomotor and respiratory cycles at a constant ratio of 1:1 strides per breath. The breathing increases the rigidity of the thorax against impacts of running. Runners (human runners) don't do 1:1 but 4:1, 3:1, 2:1, 5:2, 3:2, with 2:1 the most common. (And I think this is related to runner's high via breath control and altered states.) pp87-88
• On Laughter and Danger - "Adult humans laugh most during conversation. Chimps, in contrast, laugh most when tickled during rough-and-tumble play, and during chasing games (the chimp being chased laughs most). Physical contact or threat of such contact is a common denominator of chimp laughter ... the physicality and social context of chimp laughter resemble that of human children before the age of five or six when joking becomes prominent and intentional." pp92-93
• On Chimp Humor ie Name Calling - Koko the gorilla, when she was mad at her caregiver, she called her a "dirty toilet" p95
• Tickling is the ancestral stimuli for laughter (this is kind of the thesis of the book) p99 

• [On the Early Internet] - A moment happens while reading this book. It's written in the year 2000, early internet, and when we still capitalized Internet in every use of the word. It's also on a topic that's not written about much (not much books on laughter), and so he goes to weird places for research. Operas that notate laughter, music records where someone accidentally laughs so they take out the music and leave the laughter; just the weirdest stuff. But then this: "The strangest variation on tickling was discovered by one of my graduate students while pursuing wisdom and truth on the Internet [capital I]." He proceeds to talk about a woman using a website to solicit videos of people tickling shirtless young men, and then goes on to say that if you're ok with some weird shit, "you may check out this material by doing a Web search [capital W] for "tickle" or "tickling"." So at least he gives us two options(!), but imagine a time where I find something on the internet and tell you how to find it with a single word, like 'just type "suspension bridge" and you'll see the website I was talking about!' Just imagine. pp105-106

• On Tickling and Aging - "midlife involves a gradual tactile disengagement," and respondents of his tickling survey younger than 40 were more than 10 times as likely as those over 40 to report having been tickled during the past week (43% vs 4%). p114
• The Self-Tickle Delay Experiment - started with Weiskrantz tickle and goes to the fMRI nonself detector; basically it's a machine that tickles you using instructions from your own tickling finger, but with distortion, either a time delay, or an angle shift of the tickle direction. They need less predictable stimulus, "The stimulus cancellation that prevents self-stimulation is minmal with zero delay or trajectory perturbations and increases up to a point (1/5 second or 90 degrees) when the sensation becomes indistinguishable from an externally produced sensation." p117
• Same Side Self Tickle - you can't tickly yourself, except for this one way, and for some reason it doesn't work for lefties. But it works if you're right-handed and you tickle your left foot with your right hand. And it works because "with ipsolateral [same side] tickle, proprioceptive information from the tickling hand and exteroception info from the tickled foot enter the spinal cord and ascend on the same side of the body, cross the body mid-line once and arrive at the hypothetical neurological comparator in the brain at roughly the same time. ... With contralateral [opposite side] tickle, info from the tickling hand and the tickled foot arrive at relatively different times becaue they ascend on different sides of the spinal cord and must cross the body midline an additional time to reach the comparator. [Remember all signals cross the midline, left to right and right to left.] pp117-119
• On Self - first few months of life we have no left-right distinction, we can tickle ourselves, and we have no self yet. p119

• "Laughter began as a ritualization of the panting sound of rowdy play, of which tickle was a trigger and control component." p124
• Contagion and Laughter - the "predictable pattern" of contagious laughter epidemics (and maybe all mass psychogenic illness?) is adolescent females first, then their mothers and female relatives, but not men. And he goes on to say that if the effect are equal male to female, then it's probably a "toxic reaction" pp131-132 [this would be hard to confirm though, statistically, and not exactly helpful because you would be saying 'no this place is totally safe, I can tell because the only people getting sick are the women' and that just doesn't sound right; I guess the reverse, 'this must be an environmental health exposure causing this because men are also getting sick' is not much better?]

• Here's just a good sentence, like something related to Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector Kit, and it could relate to anything, not just studies of laughter, but the general psyops we all get exposed to now and then, "Pathologizing extreme cases of mentally disturbed behavior creates errors of categorization that artificially partition and distort our thinking." p133