Eli5-What causes the laughing gas to make us laugh?
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Note that despite the name, nitrous oxide (N2O) does not specifically make people laugh. Instead, it leads to a general feeling of euphoria and disorientation. When you’re feeling euphoric and disoriented, there’s a tendency to laugh at any random stuff; people who are drunk or stoned often laugh easily and excessively as well. It also prevents you from feeling pain, so injuries won’t slow you down – during the period when it was common to fill a theater with nitrous oxide, it was common for people to break limbs by jumping off the stage and then laugh themselves silly trying to flop the limb around.
As for why nitrous oxide causes the feeling of euphoria…we actually don’t fully understand. It’s pretty well studied, but the brain is complicated and it can be surprisingly hard to figure out how very small molecules (which nitrous oxide is) work in the brain.
The ELI5 version is that it sure does a lot of stuff in the brain. It can cause a lot of important ion channels to open or close more or less easily, which has a strong effect on how certain signal are transmitted through your nerves (and thus brain). Some of the things it affects relate to happiness and mood and pain and stuff like that, but the ELI5 version is that we don’t super understand it.
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