Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

Laughter has been considered one of the primitive universal emotions recognized in every culture. Of all the different emotional expressions, laughter is one of the few that adults who have been deaf and blind from birth can generate, indicating that it predates other emotions in our evolution. If it is so old and shared with other species, this suggests that it may have a really important function. Although we all have moments of solitary mirth, private jokes that make us smile, laughter is predominantly a social phenomenon that has its roots both early in human development and also early in the development of our species.

We like to laugh and make others laugh. Not only does laughter have a multitude of benefits in terms of coping with stress and illness, but it works to bind individuals together in social coalitions. It is a deep emotional response activated by the emotional regions of the amygdala and associated brain networks, but it operates in conjunction with higher order processes related to social cognition – thinking about others. We use laughter to signal our willingness to be members of the group and we also laugh at others to ostracize them. In this way, laughter is a powerful weapon of group coalition and identity. However, sometimes this weapon can go off on its own. We know this because various disorders that disrupt the connectivity of the different brain regions associated with laughter can lead to impulsive and socially inappropriate outbursts. 29Multiple sclerosis, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of brain lesions can damage the communications between different parts of the brain that control social behaviour. Even in healthy adults, the stress of highly emotional situations such as funerals can cause us momentarily to lose the capacity to suppress our giggling. It’s also one of the reasons that alcohol and comedy go hand in hand. When you drink you are partially disinhibited because alcohol impairs cortical suppression. We are more at ease and less concerned about our behaviour in public. We become louder, sillier and find jokes funnier, or at least laughing at them more acceptable. Socially appropriate laughter requires not only interpreting complex social situations but also regulating impulses that may be inadvertently triggered. This is why children must learn to control laughter. We may be born to smile and laugh, but eventually our cultures take over and tell us when it is appropriate to do so. This may explain why comedians are continually pushing the boundaries of socially acceptable humour and yet deep down we are egging them on. We take delight in testing the boundaries of our own self-control.

Securely Attached to Apron Strings

Initially most babies are party animals – staying up all night and willing to be friendly with anyone. They find all adults fascinating. It may be true that in comparison to other women, young babies prefer to look at their own mother’s face, listen to her voice and prefer the taste of her breast milk as well as her smell, 30but when it comes to socializing, young babies initially don’t care who the adult is so long as they interact with them in a meaningful way. Meaningful for a young baby means attentively. So long as our interactions are timed to the babies’ activity they pay attention to us. 31As noted, babies have been shown to copy adult facial expressions but in reality most of the copying goes in the other direction. That’s why they don’t like adults who hold impassive faces. 32On the other hand, adults who engage in an overly animated manner, too much ‘in your face’ as it were, are equally upsetting. 33The perfect combination is one of harmony with infant–adult interactions coordinated in a synchronized ballet of behavioural exchanges. 34For the baby, it is as if the first six months have all been about discovering that they are human and paying attention to other humans. Now the task switches to constructing their unique sense of self.

This is where our early relationships seem to play a critical role in shaping our self. Initially babies like everyone but that changes somewhere around the first half-year of life. Now babies become increasingly discerning. Not only do they restrict their preference to their own mother, they can become terrified of strangers. This fear will increase over the next year until they start daycare school. You can even gauge the age of an infant if they burst into tears when you approach them. This phase of social development marks the beginning of mother–infant attachment and the corresponding appearance of stranger anxiety. 35Of course, most parents, especially mothers, have already formed a strong emotional bond with their infants from birth. For a start, our babies look cute because of ‘babyness’, a term coined by our bird expert, Lorenz, to describe the relative attractiveness of big eyes and big heads that is found throughout the animal kingdom. 36Big-headed, doe-eyed babies are adorable to adults, which explains why we think that puppy dogs, pop star Lady Gaga, who manipulates the size of her eyes, and even cartoon characters such as Betty Boop or Bambi look cute. They all have relatively big heads and big eyes. It’s one reason why women (and some men) from cultures around the world have used makeup to emphasize the eyes for beauty. Babyness also explains why pre-pubescent girls prefer to look at pictures of adults, but when they hit puberty, they prefer to look at babies. 37Nature has wired in baby love for those ready to have them.

Social bonding with babies is a chemically coordinated event that engages the reward centres of both brains – mother and child. 38The potent hormonal cocktails that flood the reward centres generate the feelings that accompany our thoughts. Just as hormones regulate social bonding, they are also released in times of social stress. This is why most mothers and their offspring cannot be easily separated. If you try to take an infant rhesus monkey away from its mother, you get maternal rage, a violent reaction typified by extreme aggression, arousal and the release of cortisol. 39Cortisol is the hormone that floods the body to motivate and prepare for action. It breaks down fats and proteins to generate extra energy while putting other systems on temporary hold. Combined with other hormones, such as adrenaline, our arousal system is activated to prepare us for life’s three big Fs: fighting, fleeing and fornication.

When it comes to fighting, people can rarely be more aggressive than a mother separated from her child. During a routine security check at an airport, my wife Kim was travelling with our first daughter and nanny through immigration. At one point, she handed the baby to the nanny in order to retrieve the necessary documentation. However, the nanny and baby were ushered through security to the next stage of processing and a glass barrier slid across to separate mother and baby. Realizing the situation, Kim attempted to push through the barrier, whereupon the security guard raised an arm and told her to wait. Kim, with her cortisol raging, threatened to overpower the armed guard and smash through the barrier to retrieve her newborn if the gate was not opened immediately. The male guard recognized the maternal rage and crazed look and immediately let the young mother through. This is why most animal experts caution against approaching young offspring when the mother is about.

At about six months, babies start to show the same strong emotional reactions to separation from their mothers. Now they do not want to be held by others and will scream and wail if you try to separate them from their mother. As their cortisol levels spike, 40they unleash that piercing wailing on separation that is almost unbearable until the infant is consoled and returned to the comforting arms of the mother. This is no laughing matter. There are few things more distressing to a mother than the sound of her own infant crying. This ‘biological siren’ 41ensures that even if they are not yet mobile, the Machiavellian baby can still control the movements of their mother from within the confines of the playpen. When they do actually begin to crawl and toddle, towards the end of the first year, babies will literally hold on to their mothers’ apron strings as they go about their routines. A colleague of mine, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, made a television documentary 42where she filmed a young toddler and his mother as the mother went about the house doing her daily chores. When speeded up, it was as if the toddler was attached to his mother by an invisible elastic band, never letting her get too far away.