Something I’ve always wondered, and I’m sure we all have, is…why are we ticklish? And to make things more complicated, why do we laugh?

What makes the subject of laughter so mind-baffling is that it seems to be instinctive. Despite having hundreds of different cultures and languages around the world, we all still laugh the same. Babies even laugh before they can talk! Why is this? Is it in human nature? Is it a method of communication? Well…no. One thing I’ve learned in researching for this blog is that people actually study these kinds of things (and humor in its entirety). They’re called gelotologists and they’ve found several different theories explaining these occurrences. You can research them if you’d like…but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll talk about one… the “Incongruity Theory of Humor”.

What this basically says is that we laugh when things surprise us. All jokes seem to start out in such a way that we think we can predict how they’ll end. However, most of them leave us in a stupor because we didn’t expect the outcome, or punch-line, and our reaction is laughter. The start was incongruent, or incompatible, with the ending.

To add to this, every time we are humored, we learn something, which explains why things aren’t usually funny a second time around…because we’ve already learned it (like that fact that “lol” looks like a drowning man flailing his arms in the air).

We all laugh when tickled because it’s also unexpected and creates a tingling sensation in the areas where we are “ticklish”. These areas also seem to be the same on most of us. This is because we are ticklish in our most vulnerable areas, therefore, we feel sensations as a defense mechanism (we learn this as children. This also explains why we cannot tickle ourselves, because we see it coming…it’s expected.

I hope you enjoyed! Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddV6jyDeCKA

Something that has always been a question of mine, seemingly arbitrary, but extremely hard to answer is this, “why is yawning contagious”? Well, the host of “V Sauce”, Michael, explains this occurrence. When we yawn, what’s physically happening is that we’re inhaling air through our mouths and ears and stretching our eardrums. We then enter this process called “pandiculation”, in which we yawn AND stretch our bodies (out stretching our arms, etc.). The reason that we do this is because, through being exhausted and tired, our brain actually heats up. We yawn to cool it off! Our brain uses that air it has filtered through our ears and mouths to cool itself off. Therefore, it has been shown in studies that when we put ice packs on our heads, we have less of a chance at yawning because we’re already cool! This is one way to stop the effects of contagious yawning.

Every species has different reasons for yawning, however. Snakes yawn to readjust jaw alignment. Rats and Mice yawn to scare off predators and because yawning is contagious, big cats yawn to induce yawning in other members of the pride to keep them alert. Humans, however, yawn because we are empathetic. Just as we are happy in the presence of other happy people, we yawn when others yawn. Studies have even shown that children who are socially dysfunctional, such as Autistic children,  yawn less than people who do not have Autism.

Here is the link to the video. I hope you enjoy!