Science of Laughter
The Infinite Monkey Cage
00:00
The Importance of Laughter in Mammals
Our laughs don't sound that different from the laugh to produce by chimpanzees and apes and orangutans. But there's a few more steps between us and rats, evolutionarily. And that seems to speak to it being both quite a common mammal vocalization and probably a really important one. The same behavior could just be violence if you didn't frame it as play. So I suspect that one of the really important things about laughter is it's kind of giving you an easy way of signaling this important emotion.
Transcript
Play full episode
