Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

Smiling is linked to the development of the brain regions that support social behaviour, which are located towards the front of the brain in a cortical area known as the orbital cortex because it sits over the orbits of the eye sockets. Although smiling has been observed using ultrasound in unborn babies, indicating that it is a hard-wired behaviour, at around two months it operates in combination with the higher order centres of the brain that are recruited for social interaction. 19At two months, the baby is already using a smile to control others.

The built-in capacity for smiling is proven by the remarkable observation that babies who are congenitally both deaf and blind, who have never seen a human face, also start to smile around two months. However, smiling in blind babies eventually disappears if nothing is done to reinforce it. Without the right feedback smiling dies out, just like the following instinct does in goslings. But here’s a fascinating fact: blind babies will continue to smile if they are cuddled, bounced, nudged and tickled by the adult 20– anything to let them know that they are not alone and that someone cares about them. This social feedback encourages the baby to continue smiling. In this way, early experience operates with our biology to establish social behaviours. In fact, you don’t need the unfortunate cases of blind babies to make the point. Babies with sight smile more at you when you look at them or, better still, smile back at them. If you hold a neutral or worse, a still, impassive face, they stop smiling and get quite distressed. By the time the baby is six months old, they will cry at angry faces and frown at those that look sad. Babies expect and prefer adults to smile at them. Who doesn’t? It’s a universal expression first recognized by Charles Darwin as one of the core components of human social interaction. 21

Laughing Rats

Laughing and smiling are not just signals for others that we are like them, they are strong emotional drives that bind us together as a social species. They are just some of the mechanisms that begin to integrate the individual into a group. When my infant daughter burst into laughter, she was demonstrating one of the most powerful primitive needs to make contact. Without the ability to laugh and smile, we would be isolated individuals. We use laughter to lubricate awkward social interactions, as a way of signalling that we are easy-going, not aggressive and potentially someone worth investing time and effort in. In short, we use laughter to generate our reflected self because our sense of self depends on what others think of us and being funny is considered by many in our culture as an important measure of who we are. It is one of the reasons that most of us think we have a better than average sense of humour – although statistically, that cannot be true. Very few people would readily admit that they do not have a sense of humour. It’s one of the main attractive features that singles use to describe their attributes in personal ads. People who take themselves too seriously are regarded as cold and distant, whereas those who make us laugh are more likely to be considered warm and approachable.

Without the ability to laugh, it is difficult to imagine how we could ever endure life’s challenges. Even during the worst imaginable atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, there was laughter. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, wrote how laughter was the one thing that helped many survive. 22In his memoir, Terry Anderson, who was held hostage in Lebanon for 2,455 days during the 1980s wrote about how his fellow prisoners coped by using humour. 23One captive told shaggy-dog stories. Another mimicked the guards. The laughter made the unbearable situation bearable. Maybe this is why in the wake of every shocking world event where lives are lost, someone comes up with the inevitable ‘sick’ joke. It’s as if we need laughter as a release mechanism for pent-up anxiety. Freud coined the term ‘gallows humour’ and described how it operated as a defence mechanism when confronted with the prospect of death. In such times, laughter can afflict us like a sneeze that cannot be suppressed. I know this because as a teenager at my own father’s funeral, I was overcome with a fit of giggles that I could not stop – something that I felt guilty about for years until I realized that this was a common reaction to stress.

Psychologist Robert Provine, who has studied the science of laughter, 24reminds us that the mechanisms that generate laughter are largely unconscious and that we do not choose to laugh in the way that we choose to utter a sentence. It is more of a reaction that is triggered by others around us. When others in our group laugh then we laugh, too. Laughter is an emotional state – a feeling that arises from systems that work unconsciously deep in the brain that produce the arousal. But what we find funny depends on how these emotions are triggered, which is the output of the cortical systems that process content. Laughter can be triggered by a joke or it can be caused by something less intellectual and more bodily, such as tickling. Even as an infant, we can share laughter with others and this appears to be one of the primary social mechanisms with which we are equipped. When you tickle your baby and they laugh, they are displaying an ancient evolutionary mechanism – one that is shared by other animals.

Animal laughter has been a controversial claim. Until fairly recently, laughter was considered uniquely human. However, most human behaviours have evolved and so we should not be too surprised to find primitive versions in other species. As many pet owners already know, their animals display behaviour that looks like they are having fun during rough and tumble play. Puppies and kittens seem to engage in behaviour that has no obvious rewards other than the joy of play. Initially it was argued that these behaviours were precursors to adult aggression – a means of developing survival skills for hunting. Even the interpretation of animal behaviour was misguided. For example, chimpanzees who bare their teeth in a smile are generally regarded as displaying a threat or fear response.

However, animal laughter during play had to be rethought when Jaak Panksepp made an amazing discovery with rats. 25First, he noticed that rats that had been deafened for experiments on hearing did not engage in as much rough-and-tumble play as normal rats. There was something missing in these deaf rats. It turns out that it was the squeals of delight. When Panksepp placed a sensitive microphone in the cage that makes high-frequency sound audible to human hearing, they discovered a cacophony of 50 kHz chirping during the play sessions – the rat equivalent of laughing. He soon discovered that rats were also ticklish and would chase the experimenter’s hand until they were tickled. Apparently, rats are most ticklish at the nape of the neck. They would play chase with the hand and all the other familiar baby tickling games like ‘coochie-coo’. Baby pup rats laughed the most, and as the play activity declined with age so did the laughing.

What is it about tickling that is so enjoyable? There is a tactile element to it, but that is not enough to explain the behaviour because it is well known that you cannot tickle your self. 26There is something about being tickled by someone else that is necessary to induce the experience. It turns out that it is the absence of self-control that creates the pleasure of tickling. Whenever we touch ourselves, our brains keep track of our movements. We need this self-monitoring in order to guide our movements but also to know whether changes in sensations are due to our own actions or changes in the external world. We are not aroused when tickling ourselves because the action is totally under our own control and predictable. However, researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London found that you could tickle your self with a tickling machine when there was a delay inserted between the action of operating the lever and the probe that did the tickling. 27When the self no longer seems in control, we surrender to the illusion of an external agent. This also explains why schizophrenic patients can tickle themselves because their self-monitoring is believed to be disrupted and they attribute sensations and experiences generated by their own brains and bodies as coming from somewhere else. 28No doubt losing this sense of self during tactile stimulation extends beyond tickling into other areas of sensual pleasure, which is one reason why getting a massage can be so enjoyable!