When You Bust Out Laughing

From time to time, most of us experience bouts of laughter that just seem to explode from within. We sometimes describe these episodes as having "busted out laughing."

We know from personal experience that people won’t all respond in the same way to potentially amusing situations. For example, we recognize that generally speaking, people raised in different cultures can often vary significantly in what they find funny. Those in certain professions will appreciate humor not appreciated by those unfamiliar with their work.

The funny bone

All human behaviors can be thought of as falling somewhere along a gradient from the instinctive, genetically “preprogrammed” responses on one end to those exclusively learned through cultural exchanges on the other. The same could be said of other nonverbal communication like, for example, screaming or crying. The expression and underlying emotions (e.g., fear and distress) that trigger them are basically the same for people everywhere, but different individuals may respond to different stimuli, with each individual needing to reach a different fear or distress threshold before a scream or crying feels compulsory.

So, is laughter a reflex?

Laughter may sometimes be uncontrolled, but that’s not the same as being a reflex. It’s not analogous to coughing when something’s irritating our throat, shivering when cold, or retracting our hand upon sensing sharp pain. Such reactions represent, to a large degree, a bypassing of conscious input from the brain. We don’t have to be thinking of the stimulus or appropriate reaction; we just experience the first and do the second. Laughter isn’t automatic in this sense.

For many, simply the idea of being tickled can bring about a preemptive laugh response. So there is clearly some cognition involved. And while it’s true that we may laugh while dreaming, so too might we talk, or even walk, while dreaming; all are, in my opinion, correctly regarded as fundamentally conscious behaviors.

Things to remember

• It’s not uncommon to think of genuine, spontaneous laughter as being a type of reflex. It can come on quickly with seemingly little forethought.

• Yet there are plenty of examples where different individuals might experience the same stimulus but have polar opposite reactions.

• A relatively new theory of laughter helps to explain why a seemingly instantaneous act is the end result of a longer, quite conscious process.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/laughter-and-humor-101/202210/when-you-bust-out-laughing

How important do you think laughter is for our well-being and why?

#Laughter #Cognition #ManagingEmotions #Neuropsychology