Translator: Ivana Krivokuća Reviewer: Tijana Mihajlović
Babies laugh.
(Laughter)
Babies laugh a lot.
They laugh at mommies, They laugh at daddies,
They laugh at siblings, They laugh at grannies,
They laugh at cats, They laugh at dogs,
They laugh even While sleeping in their cots,
They laugh at songs And peek-a-boo,
Babies laugh more Than me or you,
They laugh while Playing on the swings,
Babies laugh At all the things!
(Cheering)
(Applause)
But don't you even wonder why?
It's certainly something that's intrigued me.
I'm a developmental psychologist.
For the past 12 years,
I've been trying to figure out all the things that babies are learning,
how they learn at the very beginning of life.
And more recently, in the last two or three years,
I've been wondering why they seem to have such a wonderful time doing it?
This is a bit surprising
because, actually, being a baby is confusing and unrelenting.
Imagine the scene.
You've just arrived on a completely alien planet.
You know nothing about these people or their language,
its customs or its culture,
its animals or its architecture.
Even the very physics is alien to you.
That's the bewildering start of being a baby.
But for a baby, it's even worse than that.
Let's think back to your zeroth birthday.
You've arrived cold, wet and helpless into a world you know nothing about.
Your memory is blank.
Your limbs are not yours to command.
You can't even lift your own head
and have no control over your bodily functions.
You don't even have a language of your own to think in.
This is the terrifying situation that babies find themselves in.
But there are three cheerful miracles that help them survive.
First, babies come equipped
with the most powerful computer in the known universe.
Babies' brains learn more efficiently than anything else we know.
In two short years of being a baby,
you probably learn more profound truths than in the rest of your life.
Second, babies arrive in an extremely benign environment.
We can't help loving these little invaders into our lives.
Human parents do more for their offspring than any other species there is.
Third, we can communicate from day one.
Amazingly, from the very beginning of life,
we and the baby can make an emotional connection.
As babies start to succeed, we start to hear their laughter.
For Aristotle, the first time the baby laughed
is the moment that its soul entered its body.
For the Navajo people, that first time a baby laughs
marks its transition from the spirit realm into the human world.
In Navajo culture,
it's a great honor to be the person that makes that baby laugh.
Jointly with the baby, you host a laughter party,
where you and the baby provide gifts and give them out to friends and relatives
to teach the baby about generosity and welcome it fully into the community.
Today I want to explain to you
why laughter matters right from the very start of life
and what we as adults can learn from these little giggles.
It comes down to four simple truths
that babies know and we as adults have often forgotten.
The first truth is love.
The laughter is loudest, the happiness greatest
when we are with our friends and loved ones.
In our survey of the things that made babies laugh and made them happy,
of course, mommy and daddy were the funniest.
Before they can talk,
mommy and daddy are babies' most important connections to the world,
and the bonding is the purest form of love that there is.
The reason that babies find mommy and daddy so funny
is because this is the best friendship that there is.
Love and bonding is all about acceptance.
We do not chide a little baby that starts to cry or is having difficulties;
we rush to meet her needs.
And it's very easy because that baby loves us back;
we are her world.
In grown-up world, it's harder to find love that pure,
but accepting people as they are is a good first step,
and everyone could improve their happiness by improving their relationships.
The second truth is that we're all the same.
There's something universal about laughter.
Just as we can share a laugh with someone on the other side of the world,
so we can share a laugh with a baby who does not speak a single word.
In fact, that's the job of laughter:
it's a social signal from one person to another.
In one experiment we did with preschoolers,
we found that while watching a cartoon
on their own or in a group of just two children,
they laughed seven times as much with just one other child present.
That shows that what we're laughing at is not the things in front of us,
but we're laughing with the people next to us.
As the comedian Victor Borge says,
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
It can connect you to anyone, anywhere -
if you let it.
Babies do. Babies give everyone a chance.
As city dwellers, we will all have been there.
You're on a bus with a man who just seems so grumpy and unhappy
that it makes you frown and feel slightly grumpy yourself.
But then a baby gets on board.
It starts peering at him over her mother's shoulder,
and soon, he's smiling and pulling funny faces.
That baby accepted him, and that was all it took.
It can work the other way around too.
Recently, I helped Sarah Argent and the Polka Children's Theatre
to develop a play about baby science for an audience of babies.
(Music begins)
[Polka - Where theatre begins...]
[Shake, rattle and roll]
[A theatre experience for babies and toddlers 6-18 months]
[Inspired by the latest scientific research
from Birkbeck University's Babylab]
(Music ends)
Maisie, the actress in the show,
worked very hard to be down on their level.
Being condescending doesn't work on babies,
so it's not going to work on anybody larger.
As Dr. Seuss said, "A person is a person, no matter how small."
It's no coincidence that the best way to make a baby laugh
is to play peek-a-boo.
(Laughter)
It's all about social connection.
It's all about making a direct, intentional connection with somebody else.
You cannot play peek-a-boo while playing on your iPhone.
Babies need this more than anyone else.
You start off with a connection.
It's lost.
It's found!
It's lost.
It's found!
(Laughter)
It's lost.
Well, you know the game.
(Laughter)
Babies love it,
and the reason they love it
is because this is the very first conversation
where they're an equal partner.
This is the first time where the toing and froing
is on a level that they can understand
and begin to learn the basics of what it means to be involved
in a relationship, a conversation with somebody else.
Incidentally, this is also why the best way to make a baby laugh
is to take them seriously.
Don't start waving little objects in their faces, pulling silly faces.
Start by doing nothing.
Listen to the baby, tune into what it is interested in.
Look to see what it's looking at.
When you do this, the baby realizes that it's got adult's attention.
Adult's attention is gold dust to little babies,
and laughter is their payment in kind.
Incidentally, this works on adults, too.
(Laughter)
No, seriously, it's that simple.
Stop, listen to someone,
really try and pay attention to what they are telling you.
Sometimes we need to learn things from little children
that we might have already forgotten.
The third truth is truth itself.
Knowledge and learning for their own sake.
Babies have so much to learn,
but everyday babies experience the joy of new discoveries,
and this drives them forward.
Like Archimedes in their bath, babies might leap out shouting, "Eureka!"
if they weren't having so much fun splashing around,
playing with their ducks,
and if they yet had the words to say, express their joys.
Discovering new things requires a step into the unknown.
This is why Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the former US president,
says, "You should do one thing every day that scares you."
Babies may seem like little scaredy kittens,
but they're driven by an incredible curiosity.
They're always moving to find new things,
pushing the boundary of what they're comfortable with.
This might be my bias as a baby scientist,
but I like to think that babies are little scientists.
(Laughter)
They're experimenting and trying out things in the world
to discover the laws of the world around them.
In fact,
this was why I started researching baby laughter in the first place.
I was already doing experiments to understand what babies knew
and thought that laughter might be a different way into the same information.
You don't laugh if you don't get the joke.
Neither does a baby.
Mommy is going to come back.
Yes, I was right.
A dog does not go "meow"; that's ridiculous.
Men don't have blue hair.
(Laughter)
As adults, finding new challenges can be more challenging.
But Aristotle said that pleasure comes from achieving mastery over the world,
and he was not wrong.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
investigated the happiest people all over the world
and found this was their secret.
You may know that he described a state of flow,
where you get so absorbed in doing something really well
that you lose a sense of everything else.
And the happiest people are the people who can achieve this state the most often.
What you might not know is that the reason that these people get there
is that they're constantly challenging themselves
to get better and better in whatever they're doing.
So if you want to be happy and succeed, you too will have to push your boundaries,
take whatever you're doing now and do it better and better and better.
The forth and final truth is hiding in plain sight.
Babies don't chase happiness; they are happy.
(Laughter)
They live in the moment. I see this in lots of places.
Babies wake up happy.
I don't know why,
but in the summer of 2015, I went to Brazil to work with Pampers.
We wanted to discover what it means to sleep like a baby.
We surveyed parents all over São Paulo
and discovered that almost all babies wake up in a good mood every morning.
As I say, I don't know why, but I have tried to do it myself.
It's a little harder for me, but it definitely seems to help.
And then, babies take pleasure in the simple things.
There's no more clear and obvious picture of pure pleasure
than a milk drunk newborn,
woozy and snoozy after a wonderful big feed
as a huge smile is spreading across their face.
Or imagine that baby splashing in the bath
or transfixed by a flower.
All are absorbed in the moment, reveling in sensations.
As an adult, you might try meditation.
At its heart, meditation is all about stopping
to pay attention to the sensations around you,
and the scientific evidence is that this will make you happy.
I've been meditating every day for the past four years,
and I can personally recommend it.
Or you could try music.
Last summer, my coleague Lauren Stewart and I
worked with the musician Imogen Heap to scientifically create a song
that's designed to make babies happy.
With nearly five million views on YouTube, we think we've succeeded,
but if you want to go and find a baby
and play them the happy song,
let us know whether they agree.
Because I can tell you this: If you ever become that grumpy old man,
there are two things which will make you smile.
One, of course, is babies.
But the other is the emotional connection you have to the music of your youth.
Laughter makes life worth living.
It is the soundtrack of our triumphs that makes the impossible possible.
It elates us, it consoles us.
It connects us. It's contagious.
It is the chorus of our shared delights and deepens our joys and our loves.
Babies laugh more than us
because they're constantly stopping to look around.
They're little zen masters.
They're present.
They're never in such a rush to get to somewhere else
that they miss the magic of right now.
When you are happy, make the most of it.
Slow down and enjoy life. You'll be glad you did.
If you're not sure quite how, just ask a baby.
(Baby laughing)
(Slovak) Thank you.
(Applause)