Why do people laugh? Many people think that we laugh because we see or hear something funny, but most of the time this isn’t true. Babies would not start laughing very soon after they’re born if they had to know what is considered funny first. ( ) Deaf and blind people can laugh even though they’ve never seen or heard anyone laughing. Laughing seems to be a part of human nature and is a powerful way to bond. Imagine – would you be attracted to someone who never laughed or even smiled at you? ( ) Everyone has the ability to laugh. Scientists even claim that laughter is primitive. When we laugh, we express emotions ( ) that come from deep inside our biological being. So, even if laughter is often associated with fun, this is not its only trigger. ( ) In one study, a professor of psychology and his students listened in and made notes on hundreds of conversations in public places. They heard about 1,200 laughs, but only 10–20 percent came after a joke or something genuinely funny. The other 80–90 percent followed normal, everyday expressions like, “I’ll see you later” or, “It was nice to meet you.” This clearly indicates the social function of laughter. No one really knows why we laugh, but one idea is that we laugh if we want to make other people feel good. When you laugh, the people around you often start laughing too. ( ) Soon, the whole group is cheerful and relaxed. Laughter can stop negative feelings and help people to connect. It may be that thousands of years ago, before people could speak, laughter helped them to form groups and work together. This seems logical. If you had a choice, which group would you choose: ( ) the one with smiling people or the one where everyone looked serious? Some studies also suggest that laughing may boost our health. Laughing a hundred times uses the same energy as riding on an exercise bike for fifteen minutes. The writer Norman Cousins, who suffered from back pain, wrote in a well-known article that watching comedy programmes on TV helped him to feel better. According to him, ten minutes of laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Why do people yawn? Everyone yawns – babies, children, teenagers, adults – but the truth is that we don’t completely understand why. Many people think that we yawn when we’re tired or bored because our bodies are trying to get more oxygen to the brain. In 1987, Robert Provine from the University of Maryland decided to test this idea. He asked groups of students to breathe different levels of oxygen for 30 minutes, and counted how many times they yawned. The result? All the students yawned about the same number of times. So the traditional theory probably isn’t true. It also fails to answer a lot of other questions. Why do some illnesses make people yawn more? Olympic athletes sometimes yawn if they are about to start a race. ( ) Why? And, what about the phenomenon of ‘group yawning’? If we see people yawn, we may start yawning as well. Who doesn’t know a situation in which someone says, “Argh, if this meeting goes on much longer, I’ll fall asleep” ( ) and starts yawning. Soon yawning, more or less suppressed, starts all over the room. Studies have shown that yawning does have a social effect, and it has even been suggested that the more readily someone joins ‘group yawning’, the better his or her social competence is. Another study suggests we yawn if our brains are too hot. ( ) Yawning is simply a way of cooling the brain and helping it to work better. In the study, students were asked to watch videos of other people yawning, and the number of times they yawned in response was counted. It was found that the students yawned less often if they had something cold on their heads. People who breathed through their noses – another way of cooling the brain – did not yawn at all. Also, when we yawn, the stretching of the jaw increases blood flow in the neck, face and head. It seems that we yawn not when we’re bored but as a way of cooling our brains. ‘Group yawning’ probably started many thousands of years ago, when it helped small groups of people to concentrate and notice dangers. Language skills Extras Explore 5 How do you feel? 55 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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