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It prolongs life and is considered the first sign of intelligence and well-being. It is not for nothing that they say about those who are sick or going through difficult times: if you can joke, then you are on the mend. How else does laughter make our lives easier?
1. Makes us smarter
Laughter improves not only mood, but also attention, motivation and memory. Employees of Stanford University published the results of an experiment in which the participants were shown comics. It turned out that drawings that make the audience laugh activate the limbic system, which is responsible for the ability to assimilate new information.
It helps dopamine, known as the “hormone of joy.” It supports the desire to move mountains on the way to the cherished goal and charges with the energy necessary for new achievements.
2. Helps in love
Intelligence (not height or hair color) is one of the main parameters by which we choose a partner. Smart men, as a rule, earn better money and are less likely to succumb to temptations. But do not wear a magazine with puzzles and IQ tests to every meeting with a new acquaintance for immediate verification.
Laughter weakens the power of stereotypes and patterns of thought and allows you to find unexpected connections.
Evaluating the chosen one, the easiest way to focus on his sense of humor. At the same time, even if the new acquaintance is not inferior in wit to Ivan Urgant, we ourselves do not have to tell anecdote after anecdote. Several psychologists at once – Eric Bressler, Sigal Bolshine and Liana Hawn – found that men like girls who laugh at their jokes, rather than making up their own.
3. Develops creative thinking
Let’s say you need to write a lesson program or an article for a magazine, and the muse has gone away on business. Midnight is approaching, getting up early tomorrow, but there is still no inspiration. To cause a state in which you want to scream “Eureka!”, Youtube videos with funny animals or a selection of jokes on the Internet will help.
Researcher Karuna Subramanyam from Northwestern University (USA) found that participants in the experiment who had just laughed at a comedy or jokes were significantly better at solving creative problems than those who watched a horror movie or listened to a lecture on physics.
MRI diagnostics showed that creative breakthroughs are the result of brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. During fun, she gets excited much faster, which means she works more efficiently.
Laughter also weakens the power of stereotypes and thought patterns and allows you to find unexpected connections between phenomena.
4. Infects those around you with fun
You can catch not only the flu, but also a good mood. It is worth someone to burst out laughing, and this reaction is transmitted to others as if by a chain. Scientists have been struggling for years to unravel this phenomenon and put forward one hypothesis after another.
For example, Ryan Gadzola, Ph.D. in psychology, suggested that it was a special category of neurons in the gray matter. They are called mirror images, and because of them we return a smile with a smile or yawn in chorus at boring meetings. They are responsible for our ability to experience empathy.
Neurons create a kind of “laugh meter”, and it works when we are next to the merry fellows. Perhaps that is why a person laughs alone about thirty times less often than in a company.
5. Helps to make contact
If you want to melt the ice in the heart of the interlocutor, make him smile. You don’t have to be a stand-up comedian to do this. Research by Robert Provine, a professor at the University of Maryland, shows that in 80% of cases, laughter is not related to someone’s witty remarks at all.
Most often, we rejoice in response to banal comments, such as “How great you speak English! It’s like I grew up in Oxford! The incentive for positive emotions is sincere attention.