What is your body doing when your laughing and what is the purpose of it biologically? Do animals have an equivalent?
In: Biology
laughter is a response to surprise – like to a good punchline of a joke.
In nature, things that surprise you may kill you, so a survival response occurs: fight/flight/etc. This includes a panting response, to increase oxygen in anticipation of serious trouble.
In a human social environment, we seek out surprise that is non-life threatening (think: jump scares in movies), and instead of panting, we’ve developed it into laughter.
Every laugh is basically, “I can’t believe that didn’t just kill me.”
I don’t know if there’s a biological purpose, but it certainly has a social purpose, namely building solidarity and defining communities (in- and out-groups). Laughing with someone brings you closer to them, and laughing at someone can be a powerful way to define community norms and boundaries.
We don’t know.
There will be lots of people making up answers to this question, and giving their best guesses, but we just don’t know. We don’t really understand how our brains work very well at all.
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