Neuroscience can be lots of fun, but perhaps even more so when researchers study the brain’s Laughter Perception Network. This is no laughing matter: In a PloS One study out today, Dirk Wildgruber and his colleagues at three different universities in Germany and the UK, found that the brain responds differently to fMRI imaging of ticklish versus socially complex laughter (joyful and taunting laughter) areas of the brain.
You can try the different sounds files below (I recommend listening to the evil taunting cackle in particular).
The authors concluded that different types of human laughter modulate connectivity in different, but partially overlapping brain regions.
I assume that none of the experimental participants suffered from gelotophobia. It’s not an irrational aversion to Italian ice cream, but the fear of being laughed at.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Susana Martinez-Conde is a professor of opthalmology, neurology, and physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is author of the Prisma Prize-winning Sleights of Mind, along with Stephen L. Macknik and Sandra Blakeslee. Their forthcoming book, Champions of Illusion, will be published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Follow Susana Martinez-Conde on Twitter Credit: Sean McCabe
