This is Mind Bites, a series for philosophy bites with me David Edmonds.

And me Nigel Woberton.

What did the hippocampus say during its retirement speech?

Thanks for the memories.

It's a neuroscientist joke, but it turns out

that even good jokes are not really what makes most of us laugh.

The neuroscientist Sophie Scott has chosen an unusual but intriguing specialism.

She studies laughter.

Sophie Scott, welcome to Mind Bites.

Hi, thank you very much for inviting me.

The topic we're going to focus on is the meaning of laughter.

Just to begin, is laughter universal amongst human beings?

Yes, as far as we can see every human culture, even cultures that might not use

laughter very much because it seems impolite, recognize laughter even from people and cultures they've never seen before.

Well basically what is it?

It's weird it's more like a different way of breathing than it is anything else

it just involves squeezing air out with these large contractions of the intercostal muscles and the diaphragm.

So it's a very basic, very elemental way of making a sound.

It's part of a set of non-verbal expressions of emotion, things like screams of fear or angry growls or yuck sounds

and they are more like animal calls than they are like speech and they seem to be under an older

evolutionary pathway for controlling vocalizations.

But even within that, Laughter is an extremely basic sound.

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