Laugh Your Way to Good Health

How laughter affects every part of your body.

Positive Convulsions

Kevin Lee Smith bounds to the front of the room, grabs a microphone and utters a few words. Then something comes over him: A cascade of chemical messengers in his brain throws Smith into convulsions.

For several seconds, he loses voluntary control over most of his body. His legs, arms, back and chest tense. His facial muscles squeeze upward. His stomach muscles and diaphragm spasm. His heart races. His blood pressure spikes. Someone call 911; give the man a sedative!

But Smith's audience is also experiencing the same phenomena: They are, of course, laughing.

Value of a Giggle
Laughter is so common a human experience, we forget how bizarre it is. When aliens first see us laugh, they'll think we're having some sort of fit (and they probably won't get the punch line either). Smith causes the hilarity by talking about his growing forehead: "My hairline is making a beeline for my behind." Those chemicals cascade, bodies convulse, laughter erupts.

Smith informs the audience that he's a male nurse: "Some people think it's unusual for a man to be a nurse. But there are male nurses throughout the country. Every once in a while the seven of us get together to talk about things." He teaches a course on humor and medicine at the University of Minnesota and came to this medical conference at Loma Linda University in California to argue that laughter has medical benefits. That notion is at least as old as Proverbs 17, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine" (which wasn't saying much back then, unless you liked leeches). It's also an idea that some mind-body fanatics, with more enthusiasm than medical proof, have oversold. But in the past few years, a brave group of scientists, fewer in number than male nurses, has been trying to uncover the physiology of laughter and its provable medical benefits. Foremost among these researchers is Loma Linda professor Lee Berk, PhD, who organized the conference Smith addressed and who also stands convulsing in the room.

"The jury is still out," says Robert Provine, a University of Maryland professor and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, "and more work needs to be done." But the initial results are very encouraging. All the suggestions are that laughter is indeed good for you. So get those convulsions going and chuckle yourself to health.

Tickled Pink
Tickle laughter is a good place to start because it is, in fact, the most primal form of laughter. Or perhaps we should say the most primate form of laughter. Chimpanzees and other primates "play-fight," especially when young, and let out a rhythmic "pant-pant" that is the simian version of ticklish laughter, according to Provine, who has been studying the subject for decades.

Provine and others are convinced that laughter is deeply wired in our evolution, predating language. And its origin in tickling and play-fighting is more complicated than simple humor: We're being touched in our most sensitive (and lethal) areas, under the ribs, under the arms, under the neck. Maybe we laugh because we're pleased as punch that we're not actually getting beaten or killed. If so, we can chalk that up as laughter's first medical benefit!

So just what is this ancient phenomenon of laughter? It's a preset program that involves the entire body. If it's a joke we hear, the phenomenon starts in the auditory nerves in our ears. If it's a comic strip, the program is triggered by our eyes. When a father tickles his son, nerve endings in the boy's skin send electric impulses to the spinal cord and up, triggering a reaction in the part of our brains responsible for sensing what's going on in our muscles, joints and on our skin. Similarly, someone hearing a joke or reading a comic strip sends that information to the brain for processing.

A Natural High
Whatever the cause of a laugh, what happens next is not fully known. Scientists are actually starting to put people into functional MRI machines and make them laugh in order to find out. In a recent study at Stanford, researchers showed Bizarro comics to people while their brains were monitored by an MRI. They were able to prove for the first time that laughter (or at least humor) stimulates the parts of our brain that use the "feel good" chemical messenger dopamine. That puts laughter in the category of activities you want to do over and over again, such as eating chocolate or having sex. Dopamine systems that get out of whack can lead to addiction, says Emory University neurologist Gregory Berns. This finding explains why kids want to keep playing silly games until parents can't stand it anymore. Laughter is pleasurable, perhaps even "addictive," to the brain.

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