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.”
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