The Healing Power of Laughter

four Elementary Education Conference and it was awesome. It was It's just infectious energy, a lot of enthusiasm from the teachers present all, you know, just really gung ho about science, about teaching about engineering and mathematics. And we gave our spiel about about how we're all scientists just from the get go, where we crawl out of the wound. Why don't guess we don't crawl out of the wound, but we're fee a lot more convenient for women if that

were the case. We're ripped from the womb, with ripped a little strong your coherce coerced from the wound, I guess, from the womb with math, with engineering and science already born into you. And uh we've discussed this in the podcast and we we shared it with everyone there and it's just a grand time. So we may have some new listeners now who were present at our speech. And so if if any of your teachers are tuning in,

welcome to the podcast. Yeah. And actually I have a little tidbit that relates not just to the education conference, but also to our topic today here about laughter, because I can help but giggle into her later on when I when I remembered us rehearsing our keynote speech in front of a giant uh Lucy character from Peanuts, giant sculpture of her. They were all over the hotel and we got there the night before, so it's like Sunday evening and we we just want to rehearse the material

a few more times. So what we need an audience, right, but not a living audience because they have better things to do on a Sunday night. So we found ourselves this giant Lucy idle, I guess you would call it, and with a giant plate of cake. I think it had something because we also found a candy store down the road that had some Peanuts characters out front with candy, so I guess they were related somehow. And looking back, just the two of us in front of this giant sculpture,

gesturing to Lucy and giving the keynote just made me laugh. Um. But of course, if if I had remembered this, um, this, this memory with other people with you, turns out I would have laughed a lot more. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Yeah, we've we've talked about humor before, and we talked a little bit about laughter. This episode is all about the healing power of laughter, which is it's become something of a cliche over the past few decades.

You have, of course, like Patch Adams, you have you shaking your head. Ye, Pat Adams, you have Have you seen it? I have not, but I have seen Children's Hospital the Adult Swim Show where they have a character and they're played by Rob Cordrey. He plays Dr Blake Downs,

who is a healing clown. That the funny part of this is that he takes the healing power of laughter deadly seriously, like he's he's wearing clown makeup that kind of kind of looks like John Lynne Gacy esque, you know, like that kind of slightly scary clown makeup, and he's not really he never does much in the way that of actual humor for the sick, Like he's he's just very serious about yeah, very intense. Yeah, I could get

behind that, the intense clown. Intense clown. But yeah, like I say, it's becomes something of a cliche for all of us. But you go back to around the nineteen in the d a guy by the name of Norman Cousins, and he was a writer and magazine editor for The Saturday Review, and he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and at the time that the theory was making the rounds that stress could worsen such a condition. So he asked himself, well, what about it? What if I use

the opposite of stress? So he thought about humor. So he goes to his doctor and uh, he gets his doctor's okay, and then prescribes himself a regime of humorous videos, shows like Candid Camera, which was I guess was big in the seventies at the time. But he's gonna take these videos, he's gonna watch them along with his other treatments.

And the disease went into remission, and Cousins wrote a paper for the New England Journal of Medicine as well as a book titled Anatomy of an Illness, A Patient's Perspective, and I was posted in nine became a best seller, and it led to a lot of actual researchers looking into the matter. Most notably, you had this guy Lee Burke, a preventative care specialist from Loma Linda University in Low Melinda, California.

And then also from Lo Melinda, you had Stanley tan who was an m D, pH d and a diabetes specialist. So they were curious does mirthful laughter helped individuals with diabetes? And so short version of this as they took a group of twenty high risk diabetic patients. They had a group C, which was control, and they had group L, which was laughter. So twelve months later they found significant

improvement in group L HDL cholesterol. The good cholesterol had risen by in group E, the laughter group, and only three percent in groups see the control group. Harmful C reactive proteins decrease sixty in the laughter group versus in the control group. So this is a big study that actually pushed the idea even more that laughter is maybe maybe there's something too laughter, the laughter it can actually heal us in some way, shape or form. So that's

what we're talking about in this episode. But we need a backtrack a little and say, all right, what is laughter before we start prescribing it willy nilly? What's going on when we laugh? Well, okay, one of the things I wanted to point out is that you can tell that it's central and very important to us when you look across species and you see that other species do it. You know, we know that chimps do it. We know

that if tickled raps will giggle. There's an actual study on this, and from a new article on how stuff works called ten Surprising Behaviors and Non Human Animals by Kate Kirshner, we know that guerrillas also engage in antiq

um and laughter. In fact, she gives this example of a gorilla that got his kicks by running beside his trainer along the length of his cage at full speed, and then the gorilla would suddenly stop and start laughing uncontrollably as the human kept running past him, And she said it was great because the gorilla figured out a stupid human trick. So chimps, gorilla's rats, they're all laughing at us. They're all laughing at us. But what happens

when we are laughing? What's going on in our own bodies? Because this is great. We can look at the chance when we can look at rats and we can see them giggling, But we can of course turn turn the focus to ourselves and say, you know, just at a mechanical level, what's happening to spur on all of these different chemical changes in our body. Well, the thing about laughter, like true laughter, like hearty laughter, not just a little snicker or or or what have you. But full laughter

is a is it's a full body experience. Like your face is moving a lot, your jaws moving, but also your torso, even your arms and legs, your trunk, muscles, everything's getting in on the joke. Um fifteen facial muscles contract, and you also have stimulation of the zygomatic major muscles. These are the main lifting mechanisms of your upper lift lip. And then you also have the respiratory system is getting in on the action. You have half closing the larnix,

so air intake occurs at regularly, making you gasp. And in extreme circumstances, what happens something is just extremely funny. You start crying. With laughter. Yeah, yeah, and you might you might pee a little. I've heard about this. Yeah, well, I think on Dirty rock Wislam and calls it lizing, where if you you laugh so hard that you start peeing yourself. I have you you ever done this? Have

you ever laughed so hard that you really? And I would admit to it even though I because you know, I have no problem with that, But no, have not. My wife sometimes will be watching something and she'll she'll warn that that she's about to pee herself if if she laughs any harder or more. If I was to say, say, like come over and tickler while she was laughing, then she might pee. That's that's the warning. I don't know, maybe a false threat. I've never pushed, pushed, pushed around

that one. I have made friends do it, though, and they'll be like sap, and I can't help myself. Can they start crossing their legs and just go in for the kill? Um? But yeah, I mean that's extreme circumstances for sure. Um. Also, your mouth is opening and closing and so there's still that struggle for oxygen, and of course your face becomes moist and you know, flushed. Yeah, I mean it's a great feeling. Like I watched a lot of humorous content. I imagine you do as well.

You like funny things. Correct, yes, it's true, but I still find it's rare that I watched something where it just completely overtakes me, where it's like you're you're possessed by a demon for a good minute or two and it's just you just can't control yourself. And it's it's overstatement the obvious here, but it's a wonderful feeling because it's it's like you're no longer in control of your body or your senses in the most delightful way possible.

It is great. And it's kind of funny too, because you're psychologically when you're watching something like that, you start to feel that rise and you're like, yeah, it's like a roller coaster. It's like I'm writing something a wave and I'm not completely in control, but I'm loving it. So, Okay, let's break down the actual sonic structure of what a laugh sounds like. And before we do it, let's listen to a clip of what I think is a great, full bodied laugh. Well, that's that's a full body laugh.

In the actual video of the YouTube, the individual's laughing really hard, and he's kind of an older gentleman to the point where you're got a bunch of beer bottles behind them. Yeah, but you're a little concern You're like, whoa, you're laughing a little hard, Grandpa, you need to slow it down. But it's just I love it because it's such a joyful laugh and it's just um, the structure of it just builds in. You can just tell that this guy is having so much fun, and it really

is infectious. In fact, I think if you watch it, you probably are a little bit more invested in it that rather than just hearing it. But even just hearing it, you can't help but smile to yourself a little bit. So let's talk about the sonic structure laughter. Researcher Robert Provine discovered that all human laughter consists of variations on a basic form that consists of short vowel like notes repeated. What he says is every two and ten milliseconds. So

I didn't time it in that clip. The first part of that, though, was the expert weigh in and said, when we laugh, we tend to go ha ha or ho ho. That's right. He said, there's one of two. It's either ha ha ha or I'm glad we have scientists on these things. I know, I wonder if that was an ig noble and think that clip that we played is definitely representative of the more like ha ha ha.

But vrty or do is that? Is that a myth at I've never really heard, unless like they were intentionally saying, yeah, you know, I guess it's or like a wood sprite kind of a thing. Yeah, I know. I don't think it's something that would come natural to you when you're laughing,

like full on body laughing. Yeah, because full on body laughing it, I mean it reaches the point of borderline disgusting at times like where I feel like he he is maybe a more of a social laughter, which we'll get into it a little bit, but more of a look at me, I am laughing and I am a wood sprite, as opposed to I'm laughing so hard that urine is flooding through my pants my face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Provine also suggests that humans have a detector that responds to laughter by triggering other neural circuits in the brain, which in turn generates even more laughter. And that's just one explanation for why laughter is contagious. We'll talk a little bit more about that, But here's the question, why why do we laugh in the first place? I even

do it? Well, this is a valid question. We've touched on this a little bit when we've discussed humor in the past, because on a very basic level, you can say that laughter is a response to humor or about the then that that's a tricky answer too, because then you then you get into the question what is humor? What makes something humorous? One thing that we've discussed in

the past is the is the benign violation theory? Just a quick run through this, this is the idea that you encounter, oh back on the primordial wilds, or when you go to a haunted house, haunted attraction in the modern day, you're something jumps out at you, scares the living daylights out of you, and for a second you think you're gonna die. Then you realize you're not because it wasn't a saber tooth tiger. It was your cousin

ug uh decided to have some fun with you. Or it was just some dude, Yeah, cousin ug he said, he's quite the trickster. Or it's or it's some some person in a Google mask at the haunted attraction. You realize you're not going to die, and the body's response then is to laugh, which arguably and then, according to this theory, is then a queue, a social queue to those around you just say we are not actually going to die. Please disregard that blood curdling scream that I

issued earlier. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that that the basis of this is really stress, right, because it is a release, and you talked about the social implications of it. Um. Some people say that laughter may even serve as a conciliatory gesture at times when things get very stressful. Yes, um, that there's a way to deflect anger. It's interesting. I found a two thousand and ten North Carolina State University study that looked at the role laughter

plays injury the liberation. And in fact, the case they study was a capital murder case, so it was it wasn't like they just they decided, oh, it's like a grandma was arrested for jaywalking and you know, or something more mundane. It was a life and death scenario. And they made some interesting observations about how humor among the jurors.

It helped her to release the tension, and it also allowed them to acknowledge when they made errors and then they could correct them because you know, if you just sort of laugh off your mistakes, which as we've all I hope we've all encountered that. You know, when when something it gets a little stressful at work, maybe you screwed something up. You can stick to your guns and let your ego command it and refuse to back down, or you can sort of laugh it off and everyone forgets.

Like whenever I pronounced Michael Carton as Michael Creton, just laugh at me, do I? You kind of do? It's a laugh Mark. I appreciate it because then I'm like, God, there goes that tick again. Um. But yeah, I mean, laughter occurs when people are comfortable with one another. We've found this out and cultural anthropologist my head Dave opt says that, um, you know, when you feel open and free and comfortable, the more you laugh, the more you laugh,

the more you bond within a group. And this is really important because there's this other desire to not be outside of the group, and so you want to participate and laugh. And we've talked about this before. Within this social contract that we're always signing. Um that where we are kind of hardwired to cooperate with one another anyway because it's to our benefit. So what happens is you

have a feed, a loop of bonding and laughing going on. Well, it's interesting you mentioned individuals on the outside because you also get into that that idea when you look at the theory of what humor is and how it works, the idea that all laughter then has to do with Well, put it this way, with any given joke, you could argue that you're either on the inside or on the outside of that joke. Which side are you standing on? Are you on the side holding the hose on the

side getting hose down by the humor? Uh? And then you can argue that the humor is about maintaining that barrier between self and otherness, between normal and strange. Um. I mean, you can really run wild with it. I was having a conversation with my friend Matt the other day, and he was he was making the argument that all racial humor is intrinsically racist. I don't know, I leave that to everyone else to think about. But but but, but certainly you get into some some tricky moral areas.

But it's why you see comedian after comedian getting the hot water, because they end up joking about a topic that some else takes too seriously. Because there's a certain amount there is a certain amount of meanness to do a lot, if not most humor. You know, I thought about that with Peter Segel because I was listening to him. I'm wait, wait, don't tell me the other day. Yes, a cruel he's not. He's not cruel, but he's very

funny most of the time. But this guy will just he'll just kind of throw whatever out there sometimes, and I admire that because it doesn't always stick. And I have actually heard the audience boo him before, Yeah, because he didn't play with the audience. The audience was a little bit offended. So anyways, it is interesting to see that kind of dynamic can play. Yeah, take Louisa k for instance. I mean, Louisa k Will does not seem really to have much of a filter, but he approaches

it from a certain point of honesty. So he'll say something that's really offensive or really gross, but he approaches it in such an honesty where he's where he kind of says, this is what humor is, and I'm trying to make sense of it as well as you guys are. So you know, I have to say that in season two of Louis that I nearly stopped watching because one of his bits to stand up bits was so offensive

and it's really really hard to offend me. And I was like, oh no, I can't get back on this, but thankfully I did because it is a great show. But back to to uh, laughter and what's going on with the group dynamic. The researcher Robert Provine, who we mentioned, also found that laughter is thirty times more frequent in

groups compared to private settings. So again there's this idea that that's the feedback loop in place, and that's why there's a huge difference between watching a comedy by yourself in the quiet living room, watching it with a loved one or a small group of friends, versus watching it in amidst an audience that's like super into the movie or the improv show or what happened. And this is

from our article how laughter Works. The studies have also found that dominant individuals, the boss, the tribal chief, or the family family patriarch used humor more than their subordinates. And that's where we get into some interesting social area as well, because zero psychological and behavioral studies revealed that laughter can be more than just a spontaneous response to stimula. Obviously, it's not just a matter of tiger jumped out at

me and I didn't die. But about two million years ago we started developing willful control over our facial motor systems. So you can almost think of this as kind of a birth of deception and a birth of lies. That was kind of a Garden of Eden moment because and certainly is micro expressions reveal and you know not everyone's a great liar, and you can often tell the difference between fake laughter and real laughter. And the example that comes to mind is your boss makes a joke, what

do you do? You laugh at that joke. That's even if your boss is a great guy. And maybe even if even if your boss is actually funny, our boss is actually funny. Is pretty larious, it's pretty hilarious. But I still find myself falling into fake laughter sometimes, and hopefully I'm pretty good at it and no one's noticed it, but we still find ourselves knowing when to laugh sometimes.

When I found myself doing this at the teacher's conference because I'm suddenly interacting with a lot of people that I haven't interacted before, be it teachers or discovery personnel that we're there with us, and I find myself falling into the pattern of using a little fake laughter sprinkled in my conversation, you know, and just you know, smiling and kind of laughing a little bit as part of

the way that I'm communicating with them. That's interesting because some I read that UM in order to try to gain control social control over a situation that the people who are trying to gain social control over it tend to laugh more than the person who is listening. So you know, it's a way to engage people, right and

to get people to pay attention UM using laughter. And as you as you had pointed out, this part of the brain is actually called the pre motor cortical region, and this is the reason that's activated, and it is the part of the brain that is standing at the ready and listening to conversations and lighting up just before it begins to contort your your facial muscles to react to this situation. And of course we always have to bring up mirror neurons. When it comes to this kind

of stuff. Stephen Small, who is a professor in neurology and psychology, argues that the contagious nature of laughter is caused by mirror neurons, or he says, brain cells that become active when an organism is watching an expression or behavior that they themselves can perform. And we've seen this again and again and again. Um, so it's no surprise there that when you're watching another person laughing, you begin to mimic that that you actually have those neurons in

your brains that are saying, hey, laugh now it's funny. Yes, well, which comes right back around to the idea of laughter yoga, which I know you hate. I don't know that I hate. And let me let me say I have never taken, well, I've never meant to take a laughter yoga class, but some yoga instructor yeah yeah, uh, you know. I think for me, I was there for yoga, not for laughing. So perhaps I just wasn't in the right mindset. But

I hate the idea of it. Yea. Just to explain this to anyone who hasn't had any actual experience with laughter yoga, this involves you being in a yoga classroom and the yoga instructor who's leading you in various physical activities will also lead you in about of basically fake laughter, where you the teacher will start going off and everyone else has to join in with lots of fake laughter.

But what you're in opposed by the way. Sometimes I've order to involve sort of hand gestures, Like there's one that we do in my yoga class called the laughter milkshake. We have like a pretend milkshake and you move it from one mug to the other and then you pour it on your head and then you laugh really hard. Um, And it's it always ends with legitimate laughter, at least from me and people I noticed in the room. It starts fake and then it becomes contained aus it, it

becomes authentic. It's true. It's one of the things was the whole fake it till you make it and you become right. So if you laugh, even when you're faking it, we're going to actually start to laugh. Sometimes I'm out throwing a little sardonic laughter, you know. Well that's what I did to try to counter it because it was driving me crazy. So I was like, but that's interesting. The sardonic laughter is another interesting thing to bring up because what I don't know that anyone actually does it.

I have I guess I'm just not around like severely evil individuals. But if it exists legitimately and not just in movies, and I don't know that anyone's ever actually uh looked into this. If we have any evil listeners out there, maybe they can tell us. But if it exists, then it's an example of this social hijacking of the left of the use of laughter to where we're faking it.

I guess too belittle someone or we're just unhinged. I guess is the whole deal that you find humor in things that are not humorous, like taking over the world or or creating a robot guerilla hybrid that will help you take over the world. It was just my way of saying, like, hey, I didn't sign up for the left class. I signed up for the regular, regular yoga class. But what does all all of this laughing due to us? What what are the actual physical effects and the benefits,

so the healing power of laughter. We We've talked about a lot about what what laughter is and some of the things that going in the human body. So to what extent can it actually heal us? Well? Okay, um, let's talk about what is happening at the physical level, right, because let's just lay this groundwork so we can see if there's a possibility that it could have some sort of long term healing effects. When we laugh, our bodies

respond really positively. There is a decrease in stress hormones of cortisol, adrenaline, and dopac, and an increased in beta endorphins which lower feelings of depression, and then human growth hormone UM also which helps protect us against disease and infection. So it's not just the act of laughter that changes our body's chemistry, because you know, even the mirror anticipation of laughing does this too. So if you see, um a funny movie, or rather if you're on your way

to see a funny movie, you're already primed. Your body is ready to go ahead and release those feel good endorphins. Just on a physical level, of course, you're the repeated forceful exhalations of breath, it occur. Uh, They really give your give your lungs of workout, gives your the muscles of your diaphragm, will workout. So there's a lot of a lot of breathing and h and chest movements going on. Um and laughter also prompts our bodies to produce more

T cells and globulins. And this is where it becomes very important to our immune system because what they found is that higher levels of an antibody called salivary immenium globulin A when you laugh, this is released and that is what fights infectious organisms entering into the respiratory tract. So that is what they found in the saliva of people, this increase of this antibody for people who watched humorous videos.

And the idea is that the benefits of this could actually be linked to longevity because people who report a general feeling of happiness and of course laughter would help with that, tend to be healthier overall, live longer rather than unhappy people. And there's a two thousand eleven study that says that three out of a people aged fifty two to seventy five, they found that those who rated their happiness higher were significantly less likely to die in

the following five years. Uh So you know, there you go, is this is another reason to laugh. There's a great study that we ran across in researching. There's a two thousand twelve Oxford University study You're not in your head? Yes, okay, you're not laughing. I laughed when I read this one

because basically this is what it consisted of. They had subjects watch videos, either funny ones or dry documentaries, and then they were also tortured, which is to say they were they put their wrists arms inside blood pressure cuffs

or frozen cooling sleeves. Yeah, we should say why they did this because because you had mentioned the what is happening physically like your you know, with your abdomen and the amount of the air that you're inhaling exhaling, they wanted to know if if laughing could be considered actual exercise. And we know that when we exercise were we release endorphins which helped to manage pain. Right, so you need to inject a little pain into the scenario to see

if the laughter is actually helping with it. And sure enough, in the experiments, pain thresholds did go up after people watch the funny videos, but not after they viewed the factual documentaries. So and belly laughter was also the key here, like full blown not just snickering a little, but ken burns hair. Uh, you're watching a documentary, but actual full bodied laughter, like if you're watching airplane or something. Yeah, that's right. They were looking at the amount of contractions

of their bellies were doing, which reminds me. It brings me back to Burdo Eco's Name of the Rose, because a lot of that book and in the movie, which is also quite good, uh deals with the nature of laughter and what the what the church's view on laughter is. And Brother William in the book brings up an example of a saint uh Well who supposedly used laughter, employed laughter want being tortured and tricked one of his tortures and just dipping his hand into the boiling water that

he was immersed in. It made me think it's like, oh, well, if you had a sit maybe that's the way you could to a certain extent but not really counteract torturous pain by just going into it with a sense of humor, just tickling people instead of torturing them. No, no, no, I'm saying that while being tortured, if you found enough humor in the scenario, could you know, I guess you could conceivably reduce the level of pain. You could up your pains, right, I wouldn't actually work, but I can't

help but go there with my mind. And you can't self tickle, right, that's a problem. Yeah, I just I think David Eagleman was just talking about that on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. It has to do with it like anticipation. And if you find someone who can self tickle, they are faking it totally. Yeah, right, and they're weird for its probably

a whole movement of self ticklers out there. Um. So here's this idea that came out of that studied though, is that exercise and laughter could have the same benefits, right, this this rise and endorphins. So then it became well, okay, if we know from laughing that laughing is increased in a group situation, could endorphins be increased in an exercise situation. So I think it's interesting how they took one data set and tried to apply it to that to the other. Um.

I think it was a two thousand and nine study. Yeah, it was two thousand nine study that Dunbar, same guy um from the Laughing Experiment and his colleagues studied a group of elite Oxford rowers asking them to work out either on an isolated rowing machine separated from one another in a gym, or on a machine that simulated full synchronized crew rowing um and in that case, the rowers

were exerting themselves in synchrony as a united group. And after they exercised together, the rowers pain thresholds and presumably their endorphin levels right um were significantly higher than they had been at the start, but also higher than when

they rode alone. So even just thinking that you are participating in this group activity apparently helped in terms of the release of endorphins, which is very interesting, which which brings back to the idea of going to a group exercise class such as a group yoga class, but where then you then also engage in group laughing. Right, I'm gonna saying, of course all roads leave to lead to laugh for yoga in this case, because that is the

culmination of what we've described here. Yeah, the universe is saying, Julie Douglas, give this universe is not talking to me, and if it is, I'm insane. Another quick study that I found was the one from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, and they found that patients use laughter to communicate emotionally with their psychotherapists, like using a lot like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence, and that laughing

together also helped seal the bond. So I found that interesting as well in terms of not only physical healing, but emotional healing. Laughter ends up playing a role in therapy session, which uh a few times that I've I've seen a therapist. I mean, I do remember laughing a little, partially because I ended up accidentally going to a children's therapist and there was a sandbox full of toys in the room. She was great, but there was a sandbox

full of toys. She have a clown news on. No, thank God, just have to check all right, well, before we go to our mail should we just listen to that clip one more? Yeah, play the laugh one time, and I actually I encourage everyone to laugh. Try laughing with this man. Laugh aloud. If you're in the car, you're out running, cycling, if you're alone in the truck, whatever, if you're on mass transit, for sure, yes, to start laughing, laugh with this man. All right, here we go, Yeah,

good stuff. What do we have in the mail bag? Yes, let me grab the mail, Uh, the robot will be kind enough to bring it over all right, here's one from our listener Murphy Murphy Rights, and it says, Aloha, Robert and Julie. I just finished the podcast about the Ordovician period. Blew my mind, naturally, but I am here to talk about the listener mail at the end. About maps. One day, I was at a family friend's house when I saw a poster of a map that looked like this,

and she included this image. And it's a It's basically the map of the world as we typically see it inverted, Okay, It's a map of the world, only upside down from its traditional orientation. It got me thinking about how arbitrary north and south were, and how easily our Earth could have eastern and western snowcaps and orbited around the Sun vertically rather than horizontally. It's all about the map maker's perspective and whatever sticks. On the topic of science fiction

and mapps. I also came across this map. Somebody on the Internet mapped out the location of all the Star Wars planet's ever man in the films, games, novels, and comic books. I think they call that the extended universe. There are quite a lot of them, just thought you would appreciate that. And she also included this map, which is really awesome includes all of these star systems and

so forth. So, yeah, that's one of the things we talked about in that episode, the creation of maps that thought all the details of our fantasy settings as well as the bias of our maps regarding the world as it is or the world as we experience it, and its effects on how we experience it. Because again, you have that map of the of the of the world and you basically have the United States, they're in the center of it, or or europe western ist. Yeah, this

is the center of the map. This is the center of the of the place in the world in space. So thanks for us sending that, Tis Murphy. Here's one from a listener by the name of Alberto from Puerto Rico. Alberto Retsina says, hi, Julian Robert, I just finished listening to the three Map podcast and remembered a weird high school experience I had with maps and wanted to share it with you. In a Puerto Rican history class, the teacher to side did that the best thing we could

do was make a lot of maps. The thing is that he had some weird map hypotheses. The first is that each map had a capital or central point, and that if it didn't, the owner or user of the map was the main point of the map. Second, every representation of space was a map, so every representation of any space had a main point. The assignment required that I localized myself on the ever bigger maps, starting with

our house. We had to do maps with the star of for where I lived as a capital of our house, our barrio, neighborhood, reward, our town, our country, Puerto Rico, our area Caribbean, our continent, our planet, and our solar system. I never understood the reasoning behind this, and he never made the connection between this exercise in the history of Puerto Rico. The rest of the assignments of the class were maps related. But we're map related, but not so

far away from the history is this one? Thank you for making my commute entertaining. Well, I think it's an interesting experiment that the class engaged in because it was getting down to what is the nature of the map and what does it say about where I am on

the map and where I position myself in the map? Well, I like it too, because it gives kids the idea that they are citizens of the universe, that, of course, this is the specific street that they live on, specific neighborhood and specific city and so on, and keep going out. It's almost like the powers of ten, right, yeah, yeah, exactly,

so yeah, I really like that one. Certainly of any of the other listeners have any cool map experiences and map activities from school like that right in, we'd love to hear about them. But more importantly, if you have something about the healing power of laughter you would like to share, we'd love to hear any stories you have of of how laughter has affected your physical healing or

emotional healing during trying times in your in your life. Uh, if you are employed in the medical profession in any way, shape or form, we'd also love to hear from you about your thoughts on the nature of humor and if any of your comedians share it as well. You can find us on Facebook and you can find us on Tumbler. On both of those we go by the names have to Blow Your Mind, and on Twitter we used to handle blow the Mind, and you can drop us a line at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for

more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot Com brought to you by the two twelve Toyota Camera. It's ready, are you