演讲嘉宾：Sophie Scott
语言：英文
演讲简介：你知道吗，当你与别人在一起时，发笑的几率是自己独处时的30倍？在这个快节奏、动感十足，并且爆笑的科学话题里，认知神经科学家苏菲·斯科特分享了这一研究，以及其他关于「笑」的惊人事实。

Did you know that you're 30 times more likely to laugh if you're with somebody else than if you're alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of cracking up.

00:12

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)

01:04

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.

01:31

(Audio: Laughing)

01:47

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.

01:56

(Audio: Laughing)

02:05

This hasn't been edited; this is him.

02:08

(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter)

02:14

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.

02:47

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.

03:37

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)

04:13

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 sayhumans 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.

06:05

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.

06:52

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?

07:19

(Audio: Laughing)

07:24

What does that sound like to you? Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one?

07:29

(Audio: Laughing)

07:34

(Laughter)

07:35

I'm the best.

07:37

(Laughter) (Applause)

07:39

Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record mewatching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this.

07:52

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, or feels extremely easy to spot.

08:34

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. So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things.

08:58

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 boringand 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, you still want to know why those people are laughing.

10:13

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. You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life.

11:01

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. You need the social stuff there.

11:43

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, we're making ourselves feel better together.

13:09

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.

13:41

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)

14:55

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, and it's actually happening all the time.

15:35

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.

16:18

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.

16:48

In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. (Laughter)

16:53

Thank you.

16:56

Thank you. (Applause)

00:12

大家好，今天我要跟大家讲讲「笑」。 我想从我记忆里第一次 意识到「笑」这个概念开始讲起。 那是在我还是个小女孩的时候。 我应该是6岁左右。 我见到父母在做一些不寻常的事， 那是他们正在笑。 他们笑得特别、特别夸张。 他们笑得躺到了地上。 他们笑得尖叫了起来。 我不知道他们在笑什么，但我想要加入。 我想成为他们中的一个， 然后我就围坐在边上 跟着那样，“唬唬！”（笑声） 顺带一提，他们笑的是 一首人们常唱的歌， 那是根据火车上 厕所里的标语写成的歌 旨在告诉你，在火车上的厕所里 哪些事能做，哪些不能做。 当然，你必须记得英国人 拥有的那种高深莫测的幽默感。 （笑声）

01:04

当时，尽管，我对这种幽默感完全无法理解。 我只是关注于笑声， 然后实际上，作为一名神经学家， 我现在要回去研究它了。 这真是一件奇怪的事。 现在，我会播放一些真人发笑的片段， 大家来听听那些人的声音， 想想它们有多奇怪， 以及笑声实际上是一个种多么原始的声音。 与其说它是一种语言， 还不如说是一种动物式的叫唤。 所以现在我们来听一些笑声。 第一个很好玩。

01:31

（音频：笑声）

01:47

然后是下一位朋友，我想他得呼吸一下了。 他的笑很有特点，就像…… 你得来点氧气，伙计， 因为他听起来就快断气了。

01:56

（音频：笑声）

02:05

这声音是未经编辑的；这就是他。

02:08

（音频：笑声） （笑声）

02:14

最后我们来听一位 女性人类的笑声。 笑可以把我们带入一种非常 奇怪的状态，就像在制造噪音。 （音频：笑声） 她其实是在用法语说： “我的天，那是个啥？” 我们都有点被她感染了。 我也不知道为什么。

02:47

那么，为了理解「笑」， 你必须重新认识 心理学家和神经学家通常 不会花太多时间去关注的部位 那就是胸廓。它看起来不是很厉害， 但实际上，你每时每刻都在使用你的胸廓。 你随时都在用你的胸廓做的事—— 千万别停，就是呼吸。 所以你用肋间肌， 也就是你肋骨之间的肌肉 来把空气吸入和排出肺部。 这是通过胸廓的舒张和收缩来完成的。 而如果我把一条呼吸带缠在你的胸膛 然后观察它的运动， 你会看到一个相当温和的正弦曲线运动， 而那就是呼吸的过程。 你们大家现在都正在做这件事。别停。 在你开始讲话的同时， 你也开始用完全不同的方式进行呼吸。 所以我现在正在做的事 有点像这张图上的曲线。 在讲话时，你可以很好地利用胸廓的运动 来把空气挤出去—— 而实际上，我们是唯一一种 可以做这件事的动物。 这就是我们为什么可以讲话的原因。

03:37

然而，无论是说话还是呼吸 都有一个致命的敌人， 那就是「笑」。 因为当你在笑的时候， 刚才那些肌肉全都开始频繁地收缩， 因此你就会产生这种 非常明显的锯齿状（运动图线）， 而这个过程只会把空气排出你的身体。这确实是一个发出声音的基本方式。 它具有相同的效果。 你只是在把空气排出去。 而每一次那种收缩——哈！ ——都使你发出了声音。 所以当这些收缩都在一起发生时， 你就产生了这类痉挛， 这让你开始做出 （窒息声） 这样的反应。 我超擅长这个。（笑声）

04:13

目前，说到关于「笑」的科学研究， 还不太多， 但从现有的研究看来， 我们之前对「笑」的理解 全部都是错的。 所以没什么好奇怪的… 比如，有的人会说 人类是唯一会笑的动物。 ——尼采认为，人类才是唯一会笑的动物。 但实际上，所有的哺乳类动物都会笑。 （笑这个现象）在灵长类动物身上 得到了很好的观察和描述， 但你也可以在老鼠身上观察到， 而无论你在哪发现了它—— 人类，灵长类，鼠类—— 你都会发现它们是伴随着「挠痒」之类的活动。 这在人类身上也适用。 你会发现笑是在玩耍中发生的， 而所有的哺乳类动物都会玩耍。 而无论它在哪里发生， 发生时也总是与互动有关。 所以Robert Provine， 在这方面进行大量研究之后指出 你和别的人在一起的时候， 比你一个人单独呆着 发笑的概率高出30倍。 而几乎所有的笑 都发生在社交过程中， 比如与人交谈。 所以如果你问人类： “你会在什么时候笑？” 他们会说遇到滑稽的、幽默的事，或是讲笑话的时候。 如果你观察他们发笑的时机， 会发现那都是和朋友在一起的时候。 而当我们一起大笑时，我们 实际上很少是为某个笑话而笑的。 你笑了，可能是为了表达你理解了对方， 你同意他们的观点， 你跟他们站在同一边。 你笑了，可能是为了表达你喜欢他们。 甚至可能是爱着他们。 你在与人交谈的同时 做着所有的这一切， 而你的笑替你完成了 大量的这种情绪表达工作。 Robert Provine 指出的一些事情， 就像你在这儿看到的， 就是我们发笑的原因。 我们刚才听到的那些搞笑的笑声， 以及我在看到父母狂笑的时候，为什么会想笑， 是因为，它其实是一个巨大的 行为上的传染效应。 你可以从别人那里获得笑点， 而且这在熟人之间更容易发生。 所以这依然是被社会环境所调控的现象。 你得把「幽默」放到一边， 而去考虑「笑」的社会意义。 因为这是它的起源所在。

06:05

我非常感兴趣的一点是， 「笑」有多少个不同的种类， 我们有一些关于人类表达的 神经生物学的证据表明 我们可能只有2种类型的笑。 所以看起来，很有可能， 那种难以抑制的、不由自主的笑， 就像我父母为一首愚蠢的歌 笑得躺在地上尖叫的那种笑， 可能与那种非常温和的， 你常遇到的那种社交性质的笑 有着神经神物学上的本质区别。 但它依然是人们进行交际时的一种行为表现， 是与人交互的一部分； 是他们选择的互动方式。 在我们的进化过程中，我们 产生了2种不同的表达方式。 不自主的表达属于比较古老的一套表达系统， 而自愿性地表达，就像我现在正在做的 这个演讲，则属于新的系统。 所以我们可以想象，「笑」实际上 可能来自于2个完全不同的根源。

06:52

我对这方面做了更细致的研究。 为了做这个，我们必须录下人们的笑声， 首先我们得，想尽办法把人们逗笑，然后我们再让同样的人， 去呈现装腔作势的、社交性质的笑。 所以假设你的朋友讲了个笑话， 你被逗笑了，因为你喜欢你的朋友 但完全不是因为笑话很好笑。 现在我来给你们演示一组这样的实验。 我需要你们告诉我这个笑是真的， 还是让你觉得装腔作势。 它们究竟是不由自主的笑 还是故意发出的笑？

07:19

（音频：笑声）

07:24

你觉得这声音怎么样？ 观众：装腔作势。 苏菲·斯科特：装腔作势？是的。 那听听这个呢？

07:29

（音频：笑声）

07:34

（笑声）

07:35

我说过我很擅长这个。

07:37

（笑声）（鼓掌）

07:39

我其实不擅长。 这确实是个难以抑制的笑， 而实际上，为了录下这个， 他们只需要让我看着自己的朋友 听一段（我知道她肯定会笑的）录音， 我立刻就笑成了这样。

07:52

你会发现人们很擅长区分 真笑和假笑。 对我们来说这是不同的两件事。 有趣的是，我们发现黑猩猩 在某些方面与人非常相似。 黑猩猩在被挠痒时的笑 和他们玩耍时的笑也是不同的， 这一点和我们很像， 不自主的笑、被挠痒的笑， 与社交性的笑是不同的。 它们从声音上就有大不同。 真笑声音更长。音调更高。 如果你笑得很夸张，你就会用更大的压力将空气排出体外， 你在主动去做时 制造不出这么大的压力。 举个例子，我唱歌时 绝不能将音调提到那么高。 （笑的同时），你就产生了 这一类（锯齿状）收缩和怪异的呼啸声。 所有的这些都表明， 真笑是极易被识别的， 或者说极易被感受到的。

08:34

相反，装腔作势的笑， 想起来可能会有点假。 其实，它不会。 实际上它是一个重要的社会线索。 我们经常使用它， 我们选择在很多场合里发笑， 而且笑得让人觉得他真的被逗乐。 比如说，你会发现假笑中的鼻音， 那种“哈哈哈哈哈”的声音。 那是你从未发出过的声音， 你在不由自主的笑声里做不到这样。 所以这看起来真的是两件不同的事情。

08:58

我们使用扫描仪来观察了 大脑在你听到笑声时的反应。 进行这种扫描，是一个非常无聊的实验过程。 我们只需要播放别人的真笑和假笑。 我们没有说这是个关于笑的研究。 我们还会播放一些别的声音来转移注意， 而他们只需要躺着，听那些声音。 我们没叫他们做任何事。 然而，他们在听到真笑和假笑时， 大脑里的反应是完全不同的， 显著的不同。 你看到的蓝色区域里，是听觉皮层， 这是大脑内对真笑做出更多反应的区域， 并且看起来似乎… 当你听到有人不由自主地发笑时， 你会听到你在别的环境中从未听过的声音。 这一点是毫不含糊的， 看起来这种新奇的声音是与大量的 听觉过程有关的。 相反，当人们听到假笑时， 你会看到这个粉色的区域， 也就是大脑内与心理有关的部分， 用来思考别人在想什么。 而我觉得这代表了， 你用大脑扫描来做研究， 即使研究过程枯燥无谓 一点都不有趣， 当你听到有人笑得， “啊哈哈哈哈哈” 你仍然会试着去找出他们笑的原因。 笑总是有原因的。 你总是试图去理解它在当前环境下的意义， 哪怕，你已经清楚地知道， 在进行实验的时候， 它们跟你没有任何的关系， 你仍然想要知道 为什么那些人会笑。

10:13

然后，我们又有机会研究不同年龄阶段的人对 真笑和假笑有些什么反应。 这是我们与皇家学会共同进行的一个在线实验， 实验里我们只问人们两个问题。 首先，他们会听一些笑声， 然后他们得回答：这些笑声 听起来有多真实或者多假？ 真笑用红色表示， 假笑用蓝色表示。 你可以看到一个陡峭的开端。 随着年龄的增长， 人们越来越擅长识别真笑。 六岁的孩子只能猜测真笑和假笑， 他们不能真的听出两种笑的不同。 年纪越大，越擅长。但有趣的一点是，从这些数据中， 直到三四十岁，你都找不到一个高峰点。 你不会因为度过了青春期就完全理解笑声。 你也不会因为头脑的成熟而完全理解笑声 即使你的青年时期已经结束。 你对笑声的学习，贯穿了 整个成年人生的前半部分。

11:01

如果我们把问题反过来， 不再关心笑声听起来 像真笑还是假笑，而是去问 听到这些「笑」， 你被多大程度地感染， 多想跟着一起笑， 我们就会发现另一番结果。 就是这样，人越年轻， 越容易跟着笑声笑起来。 别忘了我小时候在不清楚发生了什么 的时候，就已经跟着父母笑起来了。 这确实是符合现实的。 那么现在，所有人，无论老幼， 都觉得真笑比假笑更有感染力， 但随着年龄的增长，它们 都变得不那么有感染力了。 要么是我们的脾气随着自身衰老变坏了， 或者，随着你对笑的理解加深， 你就越来越擅长做这个， 你不再单纯因为听到别人笑 就想跟着笑了。 你去要一些社会性的东西去激发它。

11:43

因此我们获得了一些很有趣的现象 表明之前的很多假设都是不正确的， 但我逐渐发现「笑」还有更多含义， 不止是一种重要的社交情绪。 因为人们在使用「笑」时，有着 不同寻常的细微差别。 加利福尼亚的 Robert Levenson 实验室 做了一系列非常可爱的研究， 是关于情侣的纵向研究。 他把已婚夫妇双方 请到实验室来， 他会和他们谈论一些很有压力的话题， 并用测谎仪监测，看他们受压的程度。 于是你会看到两个人来到实验室里， 他对丈夫说： “告诉我一些你的妻子激怒你的例子。” 你会看到结果是瞬时的—— 只需要让这个念头在你头脑中 简单闪过一下，你和你的伴侣—— 你可以想象到，随着实验的开始 每个人都感受到了压力。 你可以看到，人们 从生理上感到了更大压力。 而他发现了一个现象， 情侣们会通过「笑」来 控制这种受压的感觉， 通过「笑」这样的乐观情绪， 不仅是在笑的瞬间降低了压力， 可以发现他们从生理上感觉到了放松， 他们一起搞定了这个令人不快的状况， 被试者正是那些 在夫妻关系中拥有更高满意度的情侣 而且这样的情侣在一起待的更久。 所以实际上，当你研究亲密关系时， 笑是一条关于人们如何 共同调节他们的情绪 的非常有用的线索。 我们不止是相互发出笑声 来表现对彼此的喜爱， 我们还在用笑来 让双方感觉舒服。

13:09

然而，我并不认为这种现象 是仅限于恋爱关系中的。 我想它很可能是所有亲密情感关系的特性， 就像你和朋友之间的状态， 这解释了我的下一个要播放的内容， 那是一个 YouTube 视频， 关于几个前东德的年轻人 在制作视频，来宣传 他们的重金属乐队， 它非常硬汉， 气氛非常严肃， 我想让大家注意： 当事情出错的时候，「笑」起到了什么作用， 它发生的有多快， 以及它怎样改变了气氛。

13:41

他很冷。他本来会被弄湿。 他穿着游泳裤， 还有一条毛巾。 冰。 可能会发生什么？ 视频开始录了。 严肃的氛围。 他的朋友已经开始笑了。 他们已经在笑了，笑得很夸张。 他还没开始笑。 （笑声） 他也开始这么做了。他们全都倒了。 （笑声） 他们笑到了地上。 （笑声）

14:55

我喜欢这个视频的一点是 它原本全都是非常严肃的， 直到他跳到了冰上， 而冰没有应声而破， 但是当然，他也没有伤得头破血流， 所以他的朋友们开始笑了。 想象一下，如果他是站在那里说， “说真的，Heinrich，我觉得这里摔坏了，” 我们不会觉得这个视频很有趣。 那会让人很压抑。 或者，他一边笑一边拖着流血的腿四处跑，然后他的朋友说： “Heinrich，我想我们得立即去医院了，” 那样也不会让人觉得好笑。 事实就是，「笑」起作用了， 笑把他的一个痛苦、尴尬、难办的处境， 变成了一个有趣的状况， 变成了让我们都很开心的状况， 而我想这真是「笑」的一个很有趣的用处， 它实际上每时每刻都在发生。

15:35

举个例子，我还记得类似的一件发生在 我父亲葬礼上的事情。 当时我们不是 穿着内裤在往冰上跳。 我们不是加拿大人。 （笑声）（掌声） 这类（葬礼）活动总是困难的， 我有个亲戚遇到了点麻烦事、 我母亲又站错了地方， 我还记得我在一切开始之前，正在 讲一个发生在20世纪70年代 情景喜剧里的故事， 那时我想，在这个时候， 我不知道我干嘛要讲这个， 然后我意识到我是在 我是在努力从哪想点什么有用的出来 让她和我一起笑一笑。 这是为了找点理由来笑的 一个非常基本的反应。 我们可以一起笑一笑。 我们能渡过这一段。 我们会好起来的。

16:18

实际上，我们每个人 每天都在做这样的事。 你做得太多以至于都忽略了它的存在。 每个人都低估了自己笑得有多频繁， 并且，当你和别人一起笑时， 你做的那些事情， 真的让你进入到了古老的进化系统中 那是所有哺乳动物演化来 制造和维持社会纽带的系统， 它还能明显地调节情绪， 让我们感到好受一些。 这不是人类特有的—— 这真的是一种古老的行为 「笑」确实帮着我们调节自身的感受， 并让我们感到好受一些。

16:48

换句话说，在「笑」这一点上， 你和我，亲爱的，都只是哺乳动物。

16:53

谢谢。

16:56

谢谢各位。（掌声）