>> Ladies and gentleman, to give her her full title,
Professor Sophie Scott! [Applause]
Hi, I’m a professor of cognitive neuroscience and today I’m going to be talking about something
that makes me and you very, very
powerful. I’m sorry, all I can is
that doesn’t usually happen.
[Laughter]
I'm very interested in human brains and how they deal with human communication
so
how my brain’s controlling the sounds of the speech that I’m making now,
and how your brain’s able to decode that information in all cells,
to all sorts of other stuff from my voice if you couldn’t see me; if you knew I was a woman,
if you tell if it was angry,
that's all there, that’s part of what’s going on.
This is the room that we use a lot for recording stimuli for our studies of this nature.
This is called an anechoic chamber,
and its so called because there are no echoes in here so you get this very clean sound
sound which is very good for
making good recordings that we can then analyse
acoustically and use in our brain imaging studies, but it also means that
it's a slightly unpleasant environment to be in because
you don't get any of the normal room sounds that you get when you’re moving around
buildings - there are no echoes, and it always feels to me like I’ve got something
wrapped around my head.
One of the things that we’ve been doing is looking at,
for example, what happens in your brain when you hear the sound of somebody
laughing
because their helpless with laughter or because they’re laughing in a more
social way
and that required us to get people into the anechoic chamber and then do whatever it
took to make them laugh.
Sometimes that was harder than at other times, but actually we found it worked best
if we got groups of people who were friends, and then they found it a lot easier
to make each other laugh.
I'm very interested in human laughter. It seems to be
very unlike certain other emotions that we express, so unlike things like fear or anger,
we use laughter in a very social way. Laughter is used very widely in conversation
and in play, and we will pay good money to go
and see people who make us laugh.
It’s one of the first emotions to be expressed
in infancy. So babies are born and very early on they can signal displeasure by crying.
The first positive emotion to be expressed, a specific one, is laughter,
so babies smile at about six weeks old and that really makes their parents very
happy, because
there’s been quite a lot of not smiling before then. And then at around two
months they start to laugh,
and laughter always has a very familiar trajectory. It always first emerges
during some sort of tickling behaviour, some kind of interaction between
the adult and the baby, and the baby laughs,
it makes the adult laugh, and you set up this cycle of laughter. It seems to me
be one of the reasons why in adulthood, laughter is very, very contagious, because
we spend quite a lot a time
teaching this to babies, encouraging this in babies.
You can see it having a really important role in play
in children.
We’ll laugh at something we find funny when we're on our own, if we’re with our friends
we will laugh much, much more and we seem to be seeing that happening in
the brain.
I know what you're thinking…
The so-called mirror system, the brain areas which are to do with the control of output
which are sensitive to the input of the emotions
are more strongly engaged by positive emotions like laughter, like triumph and
that does seem to reflect the way that they get used
socially, and you have this contagiousness
of something like laughter, whereas you don't necessarily have contagiousness of
fear. If you started screaming, I might well be frightened and I'll probably run
away but I won't necessarily just start screaming
because you are. >> There we go. Thank you. [Applause]