The jargon “laughter is the best medicine” can make sense not only in titles of humorous publications. In everyday life, this natural manifestation, so little studied by behavioral scientists, has essential therapeutic properties for both physical and mental health and social well-being, believes psychobiologist Silvia Helena Cardoso, from the Biomedical Informatics Center (NIB) of Unicamp. If not, how would one explain the voluntary work of NGOs such as Doutores da Alegria, committed to bringing laughter to hospital wards in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of patients? Silvia classifies laughter as one of the main expressions for social communication. Through laughter, human beings reveal their willingness to get closer. “Nothing that exists in our behavior ceases to have a function. Laughter is communication,” she argues.
After publishing an article in Cerebrum magazine, Silvia was invited to give a talk at Brain Awareness Week, held two months ago in London. The considerations made during the lecture piqued the curiosity of the New Scientist magazine reporting team, who dedicated four pages to an interview about the importance and origin of laughter.
Silvia researches the act of laughing from several aspects. The first is the origin itself. Through a study with visually impaired children from an entity in Campinas, she intends to prove that laughter is innate and instinctive. The discovery breaks the myth that babies learn to laugh from their mother. “One piece of evidence is that our primate ancestors laugh,” she asks. In one of her first investigations, Silvia managed to capture the image of a blind child laughing. The research aims to verify laughter in congenitally blind people, observe how they laugh, identifying vocalization patterns, facial and motor expressions. “If they also laugh, that’s evidence that it’s genetic,” she says. The objective is to investigate whether there is any change in relation to normal children. One of the concerns is to discover whether the characteristics of laughter are entirely genetic, or whether blind people stop exhibiting certain characteristics of laughter because it has not been possible for them to learn from other people.
Silvia's dedication to research has an address in Campinas: the Edumed Institute, (a teaching and research center in the health area), where she is a founding partner and director. At this institute she began the development of a special educational methodology that incorporates elements that provoke laughter, based on the psychological, biological and cognitive concepts of laughter, and will investigate the effect on learning and motivation of blind students by applying this methodology. “We are going to compare a traditional class transmitted to these students with a normal class using a modern and special technology, which we believe will facilitate and motivate these students' learning even more: voice synthesis”, reveals the researcher. According to Silvia, this technology allows any text to be converted into voice so that blind people can have easier and improved teaching. From there, she and her team will incorporate elements of humor and laughter into teaching.
Innate laughter – Silvia mentions research carried out by other scientists that proves that some species of animals also emit vocalizations similar to human laughter, for example, in some species of monkeys such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. There are scholars who believe that laughter may be present in even less evolved mammals. Neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp observed that rats exhibit typical ultrasonic vocalizations when playing with their companions. The researcher explains that beings need motor, emotional and cognitive components to laugh. Man shares motor components – movement of the face and chest – and emotional components with animals. “Animals exhibit different breathing when they are happy or playing.” But the cognitive, according to Silvia, is exclusively human.
The researcher explains that man has a part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, which is more developed than that of animals. And more specifically in the frontal lobe, people can understand what a joke means. But if there are lesions in specific parts of the brain, such as the right side, scientists guarantee that the person is unable to understand the joke.
Good for health – In the physiological aspect, laughter affects the vast majority of the body’s systems, guarantees Silvia. Cardiovascularly, it initially increases heart rate and blood pressure. Subsequently, vasodilation of the arteries promotes a drop in pressure, which is beneficial, especially for hypertensive patients.
Regarding the respiratory system, Silvia recorded a normal sound and another with laughter. Comparing, she found that the frequency and intensity of sound during laughter is much higher. This increases the amount of oxygen captured by the lungs and facilitates the exit of carbon dioxide. “Also, when we laugh a lot, the organs in the abdomen contract and move. And this increases blood flow to the organs, which is also very positive for the body”, she guarantees.
Studies show that laughter even affects the immune system, increasing the release of cells that prevent infection. The increase in the production of endorphins (also called endogenous morphines) by the body of those who laugh has also been proven. This, according to Silvia, promotes well-being, as it relieves and even reduces pain. “That’s why today in many hospitals, including in Brazil, groups like Doutores da Alegria use laughter as true therapy.” According to Silvia, studies by Dr. Margaret Stuber in North American pediatric hospitals prove that this therapy reduces the recovery period
Crying with laughter – In the lecture held in London, during Brain Awareness Week, Silvia Cardoso used as an illustration an image of Bill Clinton crying after losing control of his laughter. She explains that the human body has a tear gland on the side of each eye. When a person laughs a lot, the repeated contraction of the muscles around the eyes compresses these glands, causing the flow of tears.
Other examples of physiological reactions were shown in his talk, for example, the well-known “belly pain” when a person laughs, which is caused by contractions of the muscles of the chest wall, abdomen and diaphragm, promoting an increase in blood flow. blood.
Laughter is contagious – Some scientists hypothesize that laughter is contagious, informs Silvia Cardoso. In cinema, or comedy programs, the production usually invests in laughter recordings to stimulate the viewer's laughter. This happens because a good laugh is contagious. Contagion happens naturally. The same Clinton scene was used by Silvia to illustrate information about contagious laughter. Upon seeing the former president of the United States laugh compulsively, everyone present also lost control of their laughter.
“We have a complex neural network, more specifically in the auditory cortex. This network would send the sound to a laughter generator, which would be another neural network in the cerebral cortex,” he explains.
