Gelotology (LAUGHTER) with Lee Berk

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Hi, iologize, Hi Ali Ward here it's me so first off, I want to apologize to the many thousands of you who think that this episode is about gelato, because it's just straight up not. It's not about gelato at all. Jelottos in Greek means laughter, jelare in Latin means to freeze or congeal, two different things in origins. But that doesn't mean that you can't eat gelato while you're listening. I can't see you, you can not on a ham. You can lick your tile grout listening to this. It

You on two, three, four five.

How long have you been at this university?

I started in nineteen seventy one. Here, yes, nineteen seventy one.

Forty seven years, you guys, forty seven years. He started in laboratory medicine and immunology. He was working on transplants for infants. And he holds degrees in psychology, sociology, clinical laboratory science, Masters, and a PhD in clinical preventative care. So the things you can do to stop I'm getting stick in the first place, other than just washing your hands obsessively.

But to be involved in psychoneuroimmunology, you have to be very eclectic.

So how many degrees do you have? I'll give you a minute. Five five degrees?

Five degrees. So I started in psychology. I was going to go into clinical psych and I decided, nah, it doesn't have all the answers because there's more to wellness or staying well, which was my passion, than just the psychological theoretical component. So that's why I decided to step into the heavier sciences, if you please.

And now, in nineteen seventy one, I imagine that science didn't necessarily look at the mind and the body as super connected or did they.

No, there was no real appreciation for mind body connection in late sixties or early seventies, and when it came to light, the medical community didn't know what to do with this bizarre thing of a connection between mind and body. You have to remember the historical context of the separation had to do with four hundred and fifty years or so ago with de car and that there was a split when there was interest of integrating mind and spirit

So who was de Karte? I'm sorry, I'm glad you asked me to ask Google because I could not remember. I had no idea. So French born and Dutch lived mathematician and philosopher. He wrote about something called dualism, which is the mind and body being separate, made of separate types of matter. You know, the mental can exist outside

So the separation of dualism took place. Back then we had medicine dealings with the somatic or the body, and at that time they all powerful entity was the Church, which dealt with the mind and the spirit. So medicine was told to keep its hands off and stay with the body and the mind and the spirit would stay with whatever they meant by mind at that time would

How did you get interested in studying humor and its effects on the brain, because there's not many people out there doing that.

I feel like, yeah, a great question. How did I get started with looking at humor? I was always intrigued with the ancient wisdom, of the ancient biblical wisdom actually of mary heart does good like a medicine in the Old Testament of the Bible.

So when doctor Burke said mary heart, I thought he was talking about either very heart from entertainment tonight or like biblical Mary. I was all confused. So I looked it up and it's Mary as in cheerful, which makes way more sense. The whole quote is a mary heart

Statement of a merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit will drise the bone. Nothing could be more modern in interpretation of the field of psycho neeuroimmunology than that that statement that I was intrigued with the positive aspect, knowing that there was this communication between brain, neuroandercin hormones and the immune system. What was going on relative to positive behaviors of keeping one well, of staying

What is a laugh? What is happening in the brain and the body?

A laugh is the physical expression of something that triggers the brain to say that this is really funny enough to provide some sort of overt expulsion of air.

I laughed. Why did I just laugh? Maybe because I didn't expect such a technical answer. But what happened physically to my face and my lungs? So a researcher named Robert Provine found that fifteen muscles in your face contract, and your respiratory system gets jacked up by your epiglottis, which is that throat flappy thing half closing your air passage. So your air intake occurs irregularly and it makes you gasp. But not everyone who enjoys humor l'sl or.

In some cases, with some individuals, not an expulsion of air or a laugh or a sound that one hears from the other person. We found the latter out to be true when we were doing some early pilot studies and one of our subjects was he happened to be pathologist, not targeting pathologist, but I'm just saying this was a pathologist that was somewhat passive and not overt and we hooked him up with the needle in the arm and we said, now here and watch this humor video that

What was he watching?

He was watching a Abbot and Costello video. We asked him how he enjoyed was this funny or did you enjoy oh? He thought it was a scream, although there was no overt evidence that. So one doesn't have to be falling on the floor laughing if you please, as we typically will think in fits of laughter. Yet the hormone response, that is, the decrease in the detrimental stress hormones, was just as significant as one who was laughing overtly or out loud. So well, we learned a lot by what.

Laughter is or isn't and what triggers a laugh. Is it something that is surprising? Is it something that is ironic? Why typically do we laugh?

Uh?

There, gosh, it's a question I can't answer. There are a number of different theories about laughter or what is humorous that causes one to laugh.

They say most laughter isn't about humor necessarily, it's about relationships between people, which I think is really interesting. One theory is called the relief theory, and Freud said that laughter releases tension and something called psychic energy, which maybe one reason why it's seen as healing, or why laughter can be used as a coping mechanism when someone is upset or angry or sad. And this happens to my sister. I have never seen anyone else have this happen to

One The best definition that I think we that I have to date, would be that there we stumble on an incongruity of what is and what we stumble into. So it's that incongruity of what you are anticipating is going to be that does not occur. It causes you to trip on yourself, so to speak, mentally, and as a consequence, you laugh. Beyond that, I still don't know how we can describe it any better.

Do you laugh a lot in your daily life?

That's a good question. I probably or don't overtly laugh a lot, because I'm one of the indicators of who doctor Lee Burke is is that he's the guy that's serious about laughter. And essentially that's true. But I enjoy humor just incessantly. I grab it as much as I can, and I will sit and watch humor on places like

I got to ask what YouTube videos.

I watch a lot of Carol Burnett Show.

So there's a pair of comedic actors from the Carol Burnett Show that he really loves, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman. I looked it up.

They do a dental scene going to do an extraction on his colleague on the show, and it's probably one of the funniest videos I've ever seen.

Conway and Corman performed this legendary sketch involves a very bad dentist and one of them. Corman could not control his laughter during shooting the scene, and apparently at one point he had a little bit of an accident and he went himself. But it's that legendary a comedy scene.

Well, doctor, please please get this get this tooth out of my mom out. Let's see if we're gonna pull her out, we'll have to have those pulley things, please, and let's see pinchy things and the little picky things there, didn't you picky pully.

Doctor Burke says he'll put on videos like this in the middle of the day if he needs like a little boost, you know, for you, it might mean falling down a rabbit hole of Twitter memes or researching you know, a pig getting a massage from a cat, which, if you have a chance to, you should look that one up. So stressful day you fired up?

Oh I I watch several times in the day. I'll just stop and just turn something on.

Was there a moment in your career where you realized you wanted to take a turn and study the effects of laughter on the immune system. Was there a moment where you thought, Aha, I'm going to be the guy that does this.

The way that came about deciding to take a look at laughter was more by accident than by design. I think Albert Einstein said, if we had all the answers, we wouldn't call it research, or if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research.

So in nineteen eighty eight, doctor Burke was researching exercise, and I hope it was like gnarly leotard clad, jazzer sized stuff and the effects of that on the brain, and they were finding a correlation with laughter.

And indeed that is the case. We were playing around with laughter because we found prime to that that moderate exercise could literally enhance the production of something called beta endorphin, and we would put individuals on treadmills and put it what we call ivy angio catheters in there at a cubital vein, that's the vein that you have your blood drawn. We saw that, indeed, andendorphins would increase differently in individuals that work physically fit condition versus those that were not.

So that's a type of arthritis that can cause wicked back pain and normal. Cousins was he was a writer, a journalist, he was a world peace activist, and he'd get these massive bouts of pain and he'd watch Laurel and Hardy via projector. This is like in the seventies before BCRs, which were these things that were like you too, but they weighed fifty pounds. Side note Laurel and Hardy

He was able to sleep after laughing for about twenty minutes or thirty minutes at a time and sleep for about three to four hours without any pain. So that was a trigger that I wonder what was happening with the stress hormones, and that's when we started pursuing the studies of looking at what stress hormones were affected or the term that we use this modulated as a result of watching and enjoying mirthful laughter humor videos. And when

So sixty minutes comes and the interview goes well, and in short people are like what hey.

So as a result of that scenario, we decided that this was serious business and we started to pursue it.

So then Norman cousins Laurel and Hardy Watcher with the back vean, hits up doctor Burke for a hangout and doctor Burke is like, Yo, come to my lap, let's chat. Norman's like, how can we get more serious about this research on laughter? Doctor Burke was like, well, research costs money, unfortunately, so you know, bummer dude, and.

He said how much? Well, I've never been asked the question of how much money I wanted to do research, so that that caught me off guard, and I thought, well, if I ask too much, I'll sound foolish, and if I ask too little, I'll sound foolish. So I basically gave him a sum of money, and without question, the next words in his mouth were out of his mouth were whould I write the check to? And that was that was our beginning.

Well, so why does laughing help? Okay, Well, laughter can help lower what are called detrimental stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. That does a few things.

So if we release cortisol on a chronic basis, we will suppress our immune systems, so we are immune compromised, that's the word. So that's the detrimental effect of chronic stress or one of the mechanisms. So through nineteen eighty nine we indeed stumbled on the study, not stumbled, but we produced the study of medical students showing that we could lower detrimental stress hormones while watching a video, a

Is that a choice? Do you think? Do you in your research? How much have you discovered yourself that happiness is a choice or behaviors that increase happiness rather are an important choice to make.

I cannot happiness. To be happy, one has to pursue happiness. Sounds strange, it sounds maybe selfish, but it's not. Can I become physically fit by sitting in this chair wishing to become physically fit?

Probably not?

Probably not.

I'm no doctor.

Okay, no, you really can't. So there is a criteria of certain behavior that you have to do. I have to get up off the chair, and I have to move, and I have to exercise to become physically fit. I have so much aerobic exercise, so much anaerobic exercise to become physically fit or cardiovascually fit. Well, the same thing is I think very true relative to being happy. One has to pursue those things in life with an obviously

Good and yes, I covered them in another episode. For more on this, you can listen to the episode titled grateful Ology is Not a Real Word, in which a very grumpy Alley Ward tries to science herself into a better mood. What is that? What do you need in your brain to be happy? Do you need certain kind of data waves? Gamma waves?

It's a change or modulation in the type of brain frequency. It would be somewhat similar to what one wishes to attain when one reaches a true state of meditation. Mindfulness. Meditation and long term meditation are now well recognized to be associated with a frequency that hereto four was not recognized as even existing, and that's called the gamma frequency. And the gamma frequency is a frequency that ranges in the range of twenty five to thirty to forty hertz. It's like a radio dial.

Let's talk brain waves real quick. This is crazy and cool. If you're into brains, which I think we all are, we have them. Isn't it weird that right now your brain is thinking about your brain, and my brain is thinking about your brain, thinking about your brain, and now your brain is thinking about my brain, thinking about your brain, thinking about your brain. Okay, so brain waves are essentially these synchronized electrical pulses. They're from these masses of neurons.

Well, the benefit of the gamma frequency is that, indeed it is a freak. And see that in neuroscience we now associate with what we call neural synchronization, neural meaning nerves synchronizing or talking to each other. Well, that's that's that's a real effective brain if the brain is talking to itself, and indeed that is the case with gamma frequency. The other intriguing aspects of gamma frequency as a result of the synchronization is that it's a frequency associated with

And another substance, super high intoxidants seventy percent cacao or greater chocolate, This can elicit the induction of gamma frequency in the brain. So eat it whatever you're good, doctor's orders.

We also have seen it with a high antioxygen concentration of various nuts, walnuts, pecans, vistachues. So this is missus essentially brand new research.

This bodes well for the turtle industry. Chocolate nut turtles, So mirthful, laughter, nuts, chocolate, exercise, all good things for your brain and your immune system. So hop on a treadmill, eat a turtle, not a real turtle, a chocolate turtle, and watch comedians wet themselves.

So we are now starting to call all of these kinds of lifestyle behave years a term called you stress metaphors U stress eu for the two letters eu come from the Greek, which mean good stress, good stress, you stress. It's not a word that I coined, A word coined by doctor Hans Celier, who is the father of the stress adaptation syndrome and discovered the detrimental folks of stress.

Doctor Hans Celier, by the way, was a badass. He was a Hungarian who spoke eight languages. He would wake up at five am every morning to swim and then he'd ride his bike six miles to work, and he kind of discovered stress. He would see patients who just looked like garbage, and a lot of them were under a lot of strain. So in fact, when he coined

Then a lot of them lived very long lives.

Doctor Burke pointed out that George Burns lived to be pretty old. He died at the age of one hundred. And I looked up George Burns plus depression, but all the articles capitalized the D and depression, and then I realized they meant oh, as in the Great Depression, because George Burns was born in the eighteen hundreds, y'all before comedians free based crack cocaine and set themselves on fire with high proof rum. And I'm looking at you, Richard Pryor.

Like most of us who work for a living, get stressed from our work and have consequence as a result of the work. And by the way, that's the reason you'd get off the merry. Go round periodically and reset your set point with the use of laughter or music that moves your soul, or some form of appropriate meditation. Just watch the crystals, don't hit your head.

What about laughing yoga? Does that count as mirthful laughter? Because mirthful laughter is organic laughter, right, not psychotic laughter.

There's a controversy of whether laughter yoga is the same as intrinsic oriented good laughter yoga is I don't believe it's the same thing as an intrinsic experience.

Are you ready for some questions from listeners? Sure, yeah, there's so many, but I'm going to go through the best ones quickly. We won't ask all of them. There's no way I can ask you.

All of them.

But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to aliwar dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more every single week.

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Okay, your questions Okay, So these first questions come from my Patreon subscribers. So Priscilla wants to know does a smile have the same effect on the body as a laugh.

There is some evidence that a smile elicits a similar response, because for some individuals a smile is equivalent to a laugh because they're not as overt as others are. There is a benefit, just a little adjective here, there is a benefit of seeing somebody smile because we have in brain what we call mere neurons I'm sorry, maror neurons

Rachel wants to know why do some people me, she says, cry when we laugh really hard.

I think it's it's just part of the package. Yeah, just you are just overflow, tears will roll down the eyes. I mean, one can get into whether it's a sense of eyes cleansing himself. If it's funny, it's good and enjoy it, cry whatever.

That's a great lot of Katie wants to know. Is laughing something that's developed in us biologically or is the origin social She says, it seems like we can't control it, but she does doesn't know what the evolutionary advantage of laughter would be. Great question, Katie Anderson.

We are programmed to laugh, We are born to laugh. And have you ever seen a three to four month old child giggle and smile and laugh?

Yeah, they're giggle there's meaty giggle boxes.

Where did they learn that?

So it's innate?

Sure, Yet they can't speak one word. So the brain is programmed to have laughter, to utilize laughter. Yet we don't do that in our society. In fact, when we go to school. I grew up in Canada and I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Canadian school British system. If you please and education was serious, and teacher told me so, don't, don't fool around in class, and she would waggle her finger at me. Get serious.

Laughter isn't something that's conditioned. Rather, the lack of laughter is conditioned more.

So, Yeah, we're we're deconditioned if to remove laughter as part of being human. Yet we go home in the evenings and look for the best sitcom that we can, which is a whole nother discussion of the sitcoms that are on television today versus do they really represent appropriate humor? Right?

What is appropriate humor?

Humor? Well, it's it's appropriate humor is when we can laugh at ourselves without mockery. And today's humor is your mother looks like a pig. So we are causing a sense of detriment and derogatory meaning to the sense of humor. So I'm supposed to find humor that is demeaning and derogatory as being now the new definition of humor. The question is not just the overt observation, but what is then the neuroscience or the psychological translation of that demeaning or derogatory pursue? Right?

Does it cause as much you stress as humor that doesn't rely on another's kind of misery or taking down a peg?

Well? Is that degradation now the new norm? So the question is if I'm laughing at somebody telling me a joke about my mother looking like a pig, and they find it absolutely hilarious, that doesn't fit with my biology.

So remember, laughter follows this perceived threat found to be benign. So if an insult comic is to cutting that sense of like, oh, never mind, everything is fine, starts to be kind of threatened. And I couldn't find a lot of research on this. I did a lot of looking. But maybe if the jokes are at another's expense, the threat isn't imminent to you, So the laughter comes from

Well, I'm not sure that the pain is the issue of what's being funny. What is funny is the fact that we know that we have periodically slipped on something and we find that identity. They just take it to the extreme that we can identify with.

When it's directed at the human experience or back at ourselves or a surprise factor, it has different benefits neurologically sure. Side note my own question, in a current current climate that seems high stress lately, do you feel that people are doing enough to kind of combat stress of the news cycle? Like, given that our new cycle is now twenty four hours, we're constantly getting alerts on our phone and things like that, do you think people are watching

No?

I think I don't think we were watching enough that which counter counters the detriment. Do we see society improving in its interaction with each other as a result of the enhancement of the technology and the communication with the media and the news as it is today?

Right? Not so much? Perhaps here's a theory. It seems to be a depressing time lately, so let's laugh more.

Then, what then is our our stop gap or how do we counter that? It's at a molecular level?

I imagine yeah, that we don't I think we take stress for granted so much just it's something that we deal with. It's something that happens, and it's something that very much is in the mind, but it's not in the mind when you consider immunology and autoimmunity as well as effective.

Every thought process, every thought process has biotranslation. There's no thought that either we create on ourselves or comes in to us that doesn't have biological translation. The question is, then, what is the consequence of that translation. It's like a fork in the road. You want it to benefit you or do you want is it going to be detrimental? So it depends what you're watching, listening to, and what you're doing.

I have a few more questions. These are from people in your Facebook group. This question came up probably no fewer than six times. Why do we laugh when someone tickles us? And why can't we sickle ourselves?

We haven't studied that yet.

That's a next study.

Yeah, I don't have an I don't have an answer for that.

So this may not be doctor Burke's wheelhouse, but some evolutionary biologists think that we laugh when we're tickled because there's a part of the brain called the hypothalmus, and that tells us to laugh when we experience a light touch. It's the same part of us that says, hey, and painful sensation is coming. Someone goes for like a tickle zone,

Well, they claim, he certainly the chimpanzees have a form of laughter. I even think there is one investigator who studies from the neuroscience standpoint that rats have a form of laughter and they can monitor the frequency and he's calling that laughter.

Okay, go get your eyes on this National Geographic video about rat tickling.

So here's the sound a rat makes if you tickle its back.

The video goes on to note that the rats freaking love it. They seek out this gloved hand of the researcher for more tickling. They chase the hand around. It's kind of like a little tiny sewer dog with a long, snaky tail.

If you've ever seen a dog that's panting somewhat and their tail's wagging. They claim that to be some form of laughter That.

Would make sense be given our social relationship with them as a means of bonding or communicating.

Yeah, But to answer that question more specifically, one would have to look at what is brain doing okay and is it similar in response in their brain? I think most animals most have some sense of capability of laughter, if you please, or I want to call it laughter being associated with happiness or joyfulness.

I have one one last question, but it's a two part of what is the hardest thing about your job or your least favorite thing about your job? It could be anything from like the vending machines in the cafeteria to research funding to having to iron shirts to the mysteries of gamma waves. I always am curious about what the most challenging thing is of the job or of life either. I would say the most challenged to think about about being a psycho neeuroimmunologist slash slash gelatologist.

Not having a twenty fifth hour, not enough time?

What would you do in that one hour?

Albert Einstein said this real well on his deathbed. He said, I've.

Only started so that you can't do it all. Yeah, that's a high thing.

Yeah, well, I get asked by students. I asked the students, doctor Burke, you know so much? You know and it's it's the most humbling statement in the sense. My response is, no, I really don't. I thought I knew a lot yesterday and but I know less today.

What is your favorite thing about what you do?

Everything?

Everything?

Yeah, I'm pretty lucky. I'm lucky to be doing what I'm doing. I'm lucky to be. Don't ever, anybody in your audience, don't ever think because you're so diverse that it doesn't pay off. It certainly does, because you get to you get to see and think of different perspectives that you would never ever have the opportunity to do so. And I started, you know, with this degree, and this degree is I call it, and sociology and on or on.

You are just a new hero of mine. So to learn more about doctor Burke and his work. The work of Burke, go to his website at doctor dash Lee dash Burke dot com and I post links and photos at Aliward dot com slash ologies for all the episodes. You can follow Ologies on Instagram or Twitter it's just at Ologies. You can join all the lovely ologyites at the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Great group of people and they always have really interesting links and insights into the episodes.

Urbye, Pacodermatology, mombiology, crypto zoology, lithology and zeminology, meteorology, bology, nathology. Serious.

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