Hej. Jeg vil tale i dag med jer om latter, og jeg vil starte med at tænke på den første gang jeg husker at bemærke latter. Det var da jeg var en lille pige, omkring seks år gammel. Og jeg så mine forældre gøre noget usædvanligt, hvor de grinte. De grinte rigtig, rigtig meget. De lå på gulvet og grinte. De skreg af grin. Jeg vidste ikke, hvad de grinte af, men jeg ville også være med. Jeg ville være en del af det, og jeg sad ved siden af dem og ligesom sagde "Huu huu!" (Latter) Tilfældigvis var det, de grinte ad en sang, som folk plejede at synge, som handlede om skilte i toiletter på tog som viste hvad du må og ikke må gøre i toiletter på tog. Og hvad du må huske om os englændere, er selvfølgelig, at vi har en særdeles sofistikeret sans for humor. (Latter)
Hi. I'm going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor laughing. They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, "Hoo hoo!" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. (Laughter)
Dengang forstod jeg dog ikke noget af alt det. Jeg forstod kun latteren, og som neurolog er jeg begyndt at interessere mig for den igen. Og det er en meget sær ting at gøre. Nu vil jeg vise nogle eksempler af rigtige mennesker, der ler, og jeg vil at I skal tænke over lyden og hvor sær den kan være, og hvor primitiv lyden af latter egentlig er. Det er meget mere et dyrekald end den ligner tale. Så her er lidt latter til jer. Den første er ret munter.
At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful.
(Lyd: Latter)
(Audio: Laughing)
Den næste mand, synes jeg, trænger til at trække vejret. Der er et tidspunkt hvor jeg tænker du har brug for noget luft der, min ven, for han lyder som om at han kun ånder ud.
Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out.
(Lyd: Latter)
(Audio: Laughing)
Det er ikke blevet redigeret; det er ham.
This hasn't been edited; this is him.
(Lyd: Latter) (Latter)
(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter)
Og endelig har vi -- det her en kvinde, der ler. Og latter kan tage os til nogen mærkelige steder, når det kommer til at lave lyde. (Lyd: Latter) Hun siger egentlig, "Åh du godeste, hvad er det?" på fransk. Vi tænker det samme som hende. Jeg aner det ikke.
And finally we have -- this is a human female laughing. And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. (Audio: Laughing) She actually says, "Oh my God, what is that?" in French. We're all kind of with her. I have no idea.
For at forstå latter, må vi se på en del af kroppen som psykologer og neurologer normalt ikke bruger så megen tid på, som er brystkassen, og den virker ikke så spændende, men faktisk bruger du brystkassen hele tiden. Det, som I alle gør i øjeblikket med jeres brystkasse, som I altid gør, er at trække vejret. I bruger musklerne i interkostalrummet, musklerne mellem ribbenene, at trække luft ind og ud af lungerne kun ved at udvide og sammentrække brystkassen, og hvis jeg satte et bånd omkring jeres bryst, kaldet et åndedrætsbælte, og ser på den bevægelse, kan man se en lille bevægelse i sinus, som er åndedrættet. I gør det alle. Ikke stoppe. Når I starter at tale, bruger I åndedrættet helt anderledes. Hvad jeg gør nu er, som I ser, noget meget mere som dette. Talende gør vi meget små bevægelser med brystkassen for at presse luften ud -- og faktisk er vi de eneste dyr er i stand til det. Derfor kan vi tale.
Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing. You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out -- and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all.
Både at tale og at ånde har en ærkefjende, og den fjende er latter, for hvad der sker når vi ler er at de samme muskler trækker sig meget jævnligt sammen, og der dannes et meget stærkt zig-zag mønster, som presser luften ud af dig. Det er måden vi laver lyde på. Hvis man stamper på folk får man den samme effekt. Vi presser kun luft ud, og hver sammentrækning -- Ha! -- laver en lyd. Som sammentrækningerne sker oftere, får man disse spasmer, og der sker disse -- (Hvæser) -- ting. Jeg er rigtig god til det her. (Latter)
Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. You're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions -- Ha! -- gives you a sound. And as the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these -- (Wheezing) -- things happening. I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter)
Videnskabeligt set er der ikke meget om latter, men det viser sig at stort set alt, som vi tror vi ved om latter er ukorrekt. Det er slet ikke usædvanligt, f.eks., at høre folk sige mennesker er de eneste dyr, der ler. Nietzsche troede at mennesker er de eneste dyr, der ler. Faktisk kan du finde latter hos alle pattedyr. Den er blevet observeret og dokumenteret hos primater, men rotter ler også, og allevegne -- mennesker, primater, rotter -- er den forbundet med at kilde, f.eks. Det er det samme hos mennesker. Den er forbundet med leg, og alle pattedyr leger. Allevegne man finder latter, er den forbundet med interaktioner. Robert Provine, som har arbejdet meget med dette, har påpeget at du er 30 gange mere tilbøjelig til at le hvis du er sammen med nogen, end hvis du er alene, og man finder mest latter i sociale interaktioner såsom samtale. Hvis du spørger mennesker, "Hvornår ler du?" vil de tale om komik, humor og vittigheder. Hvis du ser på hvornår de ler, ler de sammen med deres venner. Når vi ler sammen med mennesker, ler vi næsten aldrig ad vittigheder. Vi ler for at vise andre, at vi forstår dem, at vi er enige, at vi er del af den samme gruppe som dem. Vi ler for at vise at vi kan lide dem. Vi elsker dem måske. Vi gør alt dette samtidig med at vi taler med dem, og latteren gør meget af det følelses- mæssige arbejde for os. Det er noget, som Robert Provine har påvist, som det ses her, og grunden til at vi lo når vi hørte de sjove lyde i starten, og hvorfor jeg lo når jeg så mine forældre le, er at det har en enormt smitsom effekt på vores opførsel. Du kan smittes med latter fra andre, og du har lettere ved at smittes med latter hvis du kender den anden. Den er stadig moduleret af sociale kontekster. Vi lægger humor til side og tænker på den sociale mening med latter for det er hvordan den er opstået.
Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. Nietzsche thought that humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout the mammals. It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it -- humans, primates, rats -- you find it associated with things like tickling. That's the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. So if you ask human beings, "When do you laugh?" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them. You're laughing to show that you like them. You might even love them. You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie.
Jeg er blevet meget interesseret i forskellige slags latter, og vi har neurobiologiske beviser for hvordan mennesker vokaliserer der indikerer at vi har to forskellige slags latter. Det er muligt at neurobiologien for hjælpeløs ufrivillig latter, som mine forældre der lå og skreg af latter over en fjollet sang, nok har en anderledes baggrund end den mere høflige sociale latter som vi møder, der ikke er en forfærdelig latter, men det er en opførsel en person gør, som en del af kommunikativ relation, en del af deres interaktion med dig; de vælger at gøre det. I vores evolution har vi udviklet to forskellige måder at vokalisere. Ufrivillige vokaliseringer er del af et ældre system end de mere frivillige vokaliseringer som talen jeg frembringer nu. Vi kan forestille os at latter egentlig har to forskellige baggrunde.
Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two different roots.
Jeg har undersøgt dette mere nøje. For at muliggøre det, har vi måttet lave optagelser af folk der ler, og vi måtte gøre hvad som helst for at få dem til at le, og de samme mennesker lo en mere opstillet, social latter. Din ven fortæller en vittighed, og du ler fordi du kan lide din ven, ikke så meget pga. vittigheden. Jeg vil spille nogle af disse eksempler. Fortæl mig om I tror dette er ægte latter, eller om den er opstillet. Er dette ufrivillig eller frivillig latter?
So I've been looking at this in more detail. To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. So I'm going to play you a couple of those. I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it's posed. So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter?
(Lyd: Latter)
(Audio: Laughing)
Hvordan lyder det på jer? Publikum: Falsk. Sophie Scott: Falsk? Falsk. Hvad med denne?
What does that sound like to you? Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one?
(Lyd: Latter)
(Audio: Laughing)
(Latter)
(Laughter)
Jeg er den bedste.
I'm the best.
(Latter) (Bifald)
(Laughter) (Applause)
Nej, vrøvl. Nej, det var ufrivillig latter, og for at få den lyd optog de mig mens jeg kiggede på en optagelse af en af mine venner der lyttede til noget jeg vidste hun ville le ad, og jeg lo på den måde.
Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this.
Folk er gode til at se forskel mellem ægte og opstillet latter. De er to forskellige ting for os. Nogen gange kan man se det samme hos chimpanser. Chimpanser ler anderledes hvis de bliver kildet end hvis de leger med hinanden, og vi ser noget lignende her, ufrivillig latter, kildende latter, som anderledes end social latter. De er ret forskellige akustisk set. De ægte er længere. De er højere i tonefald. Når du ler rigtig meget, presser du luft ud af lungerne under højere pres end du nogensinde kunne rent viljemæssigt. F.eks. kunne jeg aldrig presse min stemme derop for at synge. Også vil der komme sammentrækninger og mærkelige fløjtelyde, som betyder at ægte latter er meget nem at frembringe, eller føles nem at aflæse.
What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here, involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They're acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer. They're higher in pitch. When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. For example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing. Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy,
Som kontrast vil opstillet latter lyde falsk i vore ører. Det er den ikke, den har en meget vigtig social funktion. Vi bruger den meget, vi vælger at le i mange situationer, og den synes at være sin egen. F.eks. hører vi nasalitet i opstillet latter den der "ha ha ha ha ha" lyd som du aldrig ville kunne frembringe hvis du lo ufrivilligt. De virker reelt set til at være helt forskellige ting.
or feels extremely easy to spot. In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. Actually, it's not, it's actually an important social cue. We use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of "ha ha ha ha ha" sound that you never get, you could not do, if you were laughing involuntarily.
Vi lavede scanninger for at se hvordan hjernen reagerer når vi hører latter. I arbejdsprocessen er det et ret kedeligt eksperiment. Vi viste folk ægte og opstillede lattere. De vidste ikke at vi undersøgte latter. Vi lagde andre lyde ind for at distrahere dem, og alt de gør er at ligge og lytte til lyde. Vi beder dem ikke at gøre noget. Alligevel, når du hører ægte latter og når du hører opstillet latter, reagerer hjernen helt forskelligt, signifikant forskelligt. Hvad I ser at områderne i blåt, som ligger i auditive cortex, er hjerneområderne der reagerer mere på ægte latter, og det synes at være tilfældet når vi hører nogen le ufrivilligt, hører vi lyde, vi aldrig ville høre i andre sammenhænge. Den er meget entydig, og synes at være forbundet med større auditiv processering af disse nye lyde. Til kontrast, når vi hører nogen le på en opstillet måde, hvad vi ser er disse områder i pink, som optager hjerneområder forbundet med mentalisering, at tænke over hvad andre tænker. Og jeg tror at det betyder at selv om du får din hjerne scannet, hvilket er ret kedeligt og slet ikke interessant, når du dér hører nogen sige: "A ha ha ha ha ha," forsøger du at regne ud, hvorfor de ler. Latter er altid meningsfuld. Du forsøger altid at forstå den i kontekst selv om, på det tidspunkt for dig, den ikke har noget med dig at gøre, du vil stadig vide hvorfor disse folk ler.
So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things. We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. We just played people real and posed laughs. We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter. We put other sounds in there to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. We don't tell them to do anything. Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds. In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, "A ha ha ha ha ha," you're trying to work out why they're laughing. Laughter is always meaningful. You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you are concerned, at that point in time, it has not necessarily anything to do with you,
Vi har haft muligheden for at se på, hvordan folk skelner mellem latter i alle aldersgrupper. Dette er et online eksperiment vi foretog med Royal Society, og vi spurgte folk to spørgsmål. De hørte folk le, og de skulle svare på, hvor ægte eller opstillet det lød. De ægte lattere vises i rødt, og de opstillede i blåt. Hvad I ser er hurtig indtræden. Jo ældre vi bliver, jo bedre bliver vi til at kende ægte latter. Børn i seksårsalderen kan ikke kende forskel. Når vi bliver ældre, bliver vi bedre til det, men vi bliver ikke eksperter i området, før vi er sidst i 30´erne og først i 40´erne. Vi forstår ikke latter fuldt ud før vi kommer i puberteten. Vi forstår ikke latter fuldt ud, før vor hjerne er udviklet sidst i teenageårene. Vi lærer om latter gennem hele vort tidlige voksenliv.
you still want to know why those people are laughing. Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. So this is an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people two questions. First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound? The real laughs are shown in red and the posed laughs are shown in blue. What you see is there is a rapid onset. As you get older, you get better and better at spotting real laughter. So six-year-olds are at chance, they can't really hear the difference. By the time you are older, you get better, but interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this dataset until you are in your late 30s and early 40s. You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens.
Hvis vi vender spørgsmålet og spørger, ikke hvad latter lyder som, ægte eller opstillet, men om hvor meget denne latter giver dig lyst til at le, hvor smittende denne latter er for dig, ser vi noget andet. Og her, jo yngre du er, jo mere har du lyst til at le, når du hører latter. Husk på mig, leende med mine forældre, når jeg ikke forstod det der skete. Dette kan vi se. Alle, ung som gammel, synes at ægte latter er mere smittende end opstillet latter, men som vi ældes bliver det mindre smittende for os. Enten bliver vi mere gnavne som ældre, eller forstår vi latter bedre, og vi bliver bedre til at forstå den, og vi har brug for mere end kun at høre latter for at le med. Vi har brug for den sociale vinkel.
You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life. If we turn the question around and now say not, what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but we say, how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. Remember me laughing with my parents when I had no idea what was going on. You really can see this. Now everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you. Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older, or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh.
Så vi har en meget interessant opførsel omkring hvor mange af vore antagelser er ukorrekte, men faktisk er der mere end så om latter end at det er en vigtig social følelse vi skal bemærke, for det viser sig at folk er fænomenalt nuancerede i hvordan vi bruger latter. Nogle dejlige undersøgelser kommer snart ud fra Robert Levenson´s laboratorie i USA, hvor han laver langsgående undersøgelser med par. Gifte par, mænd og kvinder, kommer ind, og får stressende samtaler at have fra ham, mens de er forbundet til en polygraf- maskine, så han kan se dem stresse. De er begge derinde, og han siger til manden "Fortæl mig noget som din kone gør, der irriterer dig." Og man kan med det samme se -- tænk lige på den situation, dig og din partner -- I kan forestille jer at alle bliver lidt mere stressede med det samme. Fysisk kan man se folk stresse mere. Han ser også, at parrene der tackler stressfølelsen med latter, positive følelser som latter, ikke kun straks bliver mindre stressede, men også at de får det bedre rent fysisk, og de tackler den ubehagelige situation bedre sammen, de er også parrene der udmelder høje niveauer af tilfredshed i deres forhold og de bliver sammen længere. Så når man kigger på tætte forhold, er latter et utrolig brugbart indeks af hvordan folk regulerer deres følelser sammen. Vi viser den ikke kun til andre for at vise at vi kan lide dem, vi får os selv til at have det bedre sammen.
You need the social stuff there. So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect, but I'm coming to see that actually there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed. So you've got the two of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, "Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you." And what you see is immediately -- just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner -- you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically, people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together. We're not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each other,
Jeg tror ikke, at dette kun gælder romantiske forhold. Jeg tror det kommer til at kendetegne tætte, følelsesmæssige forhold som du også kan have med venner, der forklarer mit næste klip, som er en YouTube video af nogle unge mænd fra fhv. Øst-Tyskland der laver en promo-video for deres heavy metal-gruppe, og den er ekstremt macho og tonen er meget seriøs, og læg mærke til, hvad der sker i forhold til latter når tingene går galt, hvor hurtigt det sker, og hvordan tonen forandres.
we're making ourselves feel better together. Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood.
Han fryser. Han kommer til at blive våd. Han er i svømmeshorts, har et håndklæde. Is. Hvad kommer til at ske? Videoen starter. Seriøs tone. Og hans venner ler allerede. De griner allerede meget. Han ler ikke endnu. (Latter) Han begynder at le nu. Og nu griner de allesammen. (Latter) De ligger på gulvet. (Latter)
He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. Ice. What might possibly happen? Video starts. Serious mood. And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. He's not laughing yet. (Laughter) He's starting to go now. And now they're all off. (Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter)
Jeg kan rigtig godt lide at videoen er så seriøs til han hopper ud på isen, og så snart han ikke falder gennem isen, og der ikke er blod og knogler allevegne, begynder hans venner at grine. Forestil jer, at hvis det der skete var at han stod der og sagde "Nej seriøst Heinrich, den er i stykker," ville vi ikke synes om at se det. Det ville stresse os. Eller hvis han løb rundt med et synligt brækket ben og lo, og hans venner sagde "Heinrich, nu skal du på hospitalet," ville det ikke være sjovt. Faktum er, at latter virker, den får ham fra en smertefuld, flov og svær situation, til en sjov situation, til hvad vi alle kan le med i, og jeg synes at det er en interessant funktion, og det sker hele tiden.
The thing I really like about that is it's all very serious until he jumps onto the ice, and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. And imagine if that had played him out with him standing there going, "No seriously, Heinrich, I think this is broken," we wouldn't enjoy watching that. That would be stressful. Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing, and his friends are going, "Heinrich, I think we need to go to the hospital now," that also wouldn't be funny. The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation, into a funny situation, into what we're actually enjoying there, and I think that's a really interesting use,
F.eks. kan jeg huske noget lignende ske ved min fars begravelse. Vi hoppede ikke rundt på isen i vore underbukser. Vi er ikke fra Canada. (Latter) (Bifald) Disse begivenheder er altid svære, og et familiemedlem var besværligt, min mor havde det ikke godt, og jeg kan huske at jeg fandt mig selv, lige før det hele begyndte, fortælle en historie om noget der skete i en komedie fra 1970´erne, og jeg tænkte, jeg ved ikke hvorfor jeg gør dette, og jeg indså at grunden var at jeg forsøgte at bruge noget et eller andet sted fra som ville få hende til at le sammen med mig. Det var en grundlæggende reaktion for at finde en grund til at le. Vi kan le sammen. Vi kommer igennem dette. Vi kommer til at være ok.
and it's actually happening all the time. For example, I can remember something like this happening at my father's funeral. We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants. We're not Canadian. (Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. We're going to be okay.
Faktisk gør vi det alle hele tiden. Du gør det så tit, at du ikke ænser det. Alle undervurderer hvor tit de griner, og du gør noget når du ler sammen med folk der gør at du får adgang til et ældgammelt evolutionært system som pattedyr har udviklet for at danne og vedligeholde sociale bånd og at regulere følelser, at få os selv til at få det bedre. Det er ikke specielt for mennesker -- det er en ældgammel opførsel der hjælper os at regulere hvad vi føler og får os til at have det bedre.
And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. You do it so often, you don't even notice it. Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It's not something specific to humans -- it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better.
Med andre ord, når det gælder latter, du og jeg, baby, er ikke andet end pattedyr. (Latter)
In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. (Laughter)
Tak skal I have.
Thank you.
Tak. (Bifald)
Thank you. (Applause)