Laughter is almost universal. It’s an expression that is seen across all human cultures, babies begin to laugh within the first few months of life, and animals such as apes and even rats exhibit forms of laughter. The ubiquity of laughter suggests that it’s a behavior that dates far back in human cultural history and evolution – and that you might be able to trace laughter back to some of the most basic parts of our brains.

The neurobiological roots of laughter will be the focus of a lecture this Saturday by University of Chicago professor of neurology and psychology Steven Small built from the latest discoveries in brain imaging research. But Small’s lecture won’t be happening at the big Neuroscience meeting at McCormick Place, but as a special part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Small, appearing from 10:00 – 11:00 Saturday, Oct. 17 at the Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St., said he will give a talk for non-scientists on the strange but primal act of laughing, including where it appears to be localized in the brain and what can happen to make this simple act go awry.

Small, whose own research focuses on the neurobiology of language, said he has not studied laughter himself, but found the behavior to be an intriguing example of the brain at work. Gathering material for his talk led him to discover popular 1920’s novelty records of people laughing, medical case studies of uncontrollable laughter caused by neurological diseases and tales of a contagious laughing epidemic in Tanzania that lasted as long as one week in some children.

For his lecture, “Humor Humours, Laughter and the Brain,” Small said he will focus on laughter itself and its relation to emotional expression, which is not always related to what people find funny – a distinction that actually makes neurobiological sense.

“Laughter as a response to humor is what we think of, but that’s not what laughter is. It’s a reflex.” Small said. “It’s a motor sequence and a sound sequence, and it can be produced by a mechanism that doesn’t even have to be controlled by the cerebral cortex. You don’t need to have a cognitive stimulus: I could tickle you, and you would laugh. It doesn’t have to have humor involved at all. Of course, its association with emotion, social exchange, and humor is what makes laughter in humans different from laughter in other animals.”
read more

Hockey players conducting hands-on research

If you had to pick a group of researchers who would be interested in hockey, you’d probably first think of dentists, not psychologists. Certainly you wouldn’t consider hockey players an ideal subject pool for mapping the brain’s language pathways, unless you were uniquely interested in the comprehension of French-Canadian slurs.

But hockey players and their brains were perfectly suited for the lab of Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychologist looking to study whether experts in an action-based field - such as one involving pucks, sticks and skates - process language differently than those with little experience in the field. Professional and college hockey players, as well as hockey fans and hockey novices, sat in MRI machines while they heard sentences about hockey (“The hockey player knocked down the net.”) or more mundane topics (“The individual closed the book.”). The resulting images revealed that people who play hockey for a living exhibit a unique pattern of brain activation when they hear sentences about their sport, suggesting that experience can shape the way humans comprehend language at its most basic level.

It may not be surprising that people who spend dozens of hours a week practicing slap-shots and fore-checking have a deeper understanding of their sport’s terminology than someone who thinks a hat trick is a Charlie Chaplin bit. But Beilock, an associate professor of psychology at U. of C., said nobody previously had viewed modulation of language pathways as a function of an individual’s motor expertise. In fact, psychologists long considered language and one’s ability to shoot a puck to be unrelated processes in the brain, never sharing information.

“People used to often talk about language as being a very specific cognitive activity in a very specific part of the brain,” Beilock said. “What we’re showing is that people with experience in acting out things they might read, hear or talk about seem to call upon not just traditional language areas when hearing information, but seem to call upon areas involved with acting out things the language depicts.”

read more