Is laughter a kind of exercise? That offbeat question is at the heart of
a new study of laughing and pain that emphasizes how unexpectedly entwined our
bodies and emotions can be.
For the study, which was published this year in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers at Oxford University recruited a large group of undergraduate men
and women. They then set out to make their volunteers laugh. Most of us
probably think of laughter, if we think of it at all, as a response to
something funny — as, in effect, an emotion. But laughter is fundamentally a
physical action. “Laughter involves the repeated, forceful exhalation of breath
from the lungs,” says Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at
Oxford, who led the study. “The muscles of the diaphragm have to work very
hard.” We’ve all heard the phrase “laugh until it hurts,” he points out. That
pain isn’t metaphoric; prolonged laughing can be painful and exhausting. Rather
like a difficult workout.
But does laughter elicit a physiological response similar to that of
exercise and, if so, what might that reveal about the nature of exertion? To
find out, Dr. Dunbar and his colleagues had their volunteers watch, both alone
and as part of a group, a series of short videos that were either comic or
dryly factual documentaries. But first, the volunteers submitted to a test of
their pain threshold, as determined by how long they could tolerate a
tightening blood pressure cuff or a frozen cooling sleeve.
The decision to introduce pain into this otherwise fun-loving study
stems from one of the more well-established effects of strenuous exercise: that
it causes the body to release endorphins, or natural opiates. Endorphins are
known “to play a crucial role in the management of pain,” the study authors
write, and, like other opiates, to induce a feeling of euphoric calm and
well-being (they are believed to play a role in “runner’s high”). It’s
difficult to study endorphin production directly, however, since much of the
action takes place within the working brain and requires a lumbar puncture to
monitor, Dr. Dunbar says. That is not a procedure volunteers willingly undergo,
particularly in a study about laughing. Instead, he and his colleagues turned
to pain thresholds, an indirect but generally accepted marker of endorphin
production. If someone’s pain threshold rises, he or she is presumed to be
awash in the natural analgesics. And in Dr. Dunbar’s experiments, pain
thresholds did go up after people watched the funny videos, but not after they
viewed the factual documentaries.
The only difference between the two experiences was that in one, people
laughed, a physical reaction that the scientists quantified with audio
monitors. They could hear their volunteers belly-laughing. Their abdominal
muscles were contracting. Their endorphin levels were increasing in response,
and both their pain thresholds and their general sense of amiable enjoyment
were on the rise.
In other words, it was the physical act of laughing, the contracting of
muscles and resulting biochemical reactions, that prompted, at least in part,
the pleasure of watching the comedy. Or, as Dr. Dunbar and his colleagues
write, “the sense of heightened affect in this context probably derives from
the way laughter triggers endorphin uptake.” The physical act of laughing
contributed to the emotional response of finding something to be funny.
Why the interplay of endorphins and laughing should be of interest to
those of us who exercise may not be immediately obvious. But as Dr. Dunbar
points out, what happens during one type of physical exertion probably happens
in others. Laughter is an intensely infectious activity. In this study, people
laughed more readily and lustily when they watched the comic videos as a group
than when they watched them individually, and their pain thresholds,
concomitantly, rose higher after group viewing.
Something similar may happen when people exercise together, Dr. Dunbar
says. In an experiment from 2009, he and his colleagues studied a group of elite Oxford
rowers, asking them to work out either on isolated rowing machines, separated
from one another in a gym, or on a machine that simulated full, synchronized
crew rowing. In that case, the rowers were exerting themselves in synchrony, as
a united group.
After they exercised together, the rowers’ pain thresholds — and
presumably their endorphin levels — were significantly higher than they had
been at the start, but also higher than when they rowed alone. “We don’t know
why synchrony has this effect, but it seems very strong,” Dr. Dunbar says.
So if you typically run or bike alone, perhaps consider finding a
partner. Your endorphin response might rise and, at least theoretically, render
that unpleasant final hill a bit less daunting. Or if you prefer exercising
alone, perhaps occasionally entertain yourself with a good joke. But don’t
expect forced laughter to lend you an edge, Dr. Dunbar says. “Polite titters do
not involve the repeated, uninhibited series of exhalations” that are needed to
“drive the endorphin effect,” he says. With laughter, as with exercise, it
seems, there really is no gain without some element of pain.
NY Times
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