A “seemingly quirky finding” peers into animal minds. It may
also help show how Nazis abused play and laughter to horrid ends.
Nature’s Edge Notebook #19
Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions
What is it like to be a squirrel?
Or, say, a bat… or a giraffe, or a chickadee?
Suppose you could actually feel what it’s like to
be another
animal … not just guess, after observing its actions and behavior from
the outside, but actually break through the prison of subjectivity —
both yours and the squirrel’s — and know you can feel it, as if from
inside the squirrel’s brain.
Of course, no two species have exactly the same set of sensory
inputs. For example, we lack the bat’s special sonic radar, its
“echolocation” systems. So ultimately we humans could only guess what
it’s fully “like.”
But one scientist’s “seemingly quirky finding” — that rats emit a
sort of giggling laughter when they are tickled by humans — is opening a
new path for scientists and philosophers in their quest to answer this
ancient question.
It’s all about emotion, and especially joy, that great reward in the
brain, which, once experienced, we then naturally seek to achieve again …
and which can help “make life worth living.”
As a result of their discovery that tickling rats makes them laugh,
brain scientist Jaak Panksepp and his colleagues are now producing what
they hope will prove to be more effective anti-depressants — chemicals
that not only dull negative feelings, but safely enhance positive ones.
Their work on how play and laughter can automatically produce the
feeling of joy in the brain may also help clarify the difference between
the artificially induced “high” produced by addictive drugs and the
true “joy” that may be produced naturally and safely.
On the dark side, his work on animal laughter offers insights into
how the group-bonding effects of play behavior may be susceptible to
manipulation for cruel ends. It seems to illuminate such abuses as the
Nazi’s manipulation of the Olympic Games to advance racist ideology, and
even an infamous anti-Semitic board game marketed in Hitler’s Germany
in 1936.
The Hunt For Hard Evidence
To believe that you may well be able to “feel” at least something of
what it’s “like” to be another kind of animal would, of course, need
some sort of evidence that your feelings and those of the other animal
could be reasonably presumed to be in any way the same and that you
experience those similar feelings in similar ways — be they in a human
and a squirrel, or a human and a bat … or a salamander, or a Dover sole
on the floor of the English Channel, or a goldfish in a fishbowl on a
dresser peering down at a sleeping child.
After Panksepp made his delightful discovery in the 1990s that rats
emit repeated chirps of laughter when tickled (as seen in this brief
video in our previous Nature’s Edge
Notebook), he and his team began to suspect they might just have
discovered a way to get rats (and eventually perhaps other animals) to,
in effect, tell us what they were feeling … and even, in a sense,
something of what it is generally like to be a rat or a race horse or a
three-wattled bell-bird.
(To
see and hear a three-wattled bell-bird make its otherworldly “bell
call”… and ponder what it might be like to be that bellbird, you can
watch a brief tree-top video here.)
Some scientists are even playing with the idea that the happily
chirping lab rats might eventually lead the way to new notions of how
consciousness itself, or at least the general feeling of awareness,
might be similar, if not exactly the same, in many species.
Towards a Solid Science of the Emotional Feelings of Animals
(though other neuroscientists remain doubtful)
In an email to ABC News, Panksepp explains that his team is still
exploring the chirping laughter of tickled lab rats 15 years after they
discovered it, partly because “the laughter response … allows us to
monitor the positive affective states (feelings) of animals
objectively.”
He speaks of his “intent in really making a solid science of this
seemingly quirky finding, … a science of the emotional feelings of
animals … as opposed to just (of their) behaviors.”
Panksepp says that “most neuroscientists are still dead-set against
talking about the feelings of animals — as if it were just a matter of
opinion, as opposed to a conclusion based on the weight of abundant
evidence.”
Enter his ticklish laughing rats.
In experiment after experiment, Panksepp’s labs have found them
reacting to the feelings of joy in ways similar to humans and
(apparently) other animals – seeking it out, “self-stimulating” for it,
sometimes in ways that even demonstrate that such play-induced joy has a
liability to addiction.”
If Panksepp is right, his rats could, in effect, be laughing in the
faces of those scientists who, he says, still “deem the emotional
feelings of animals to be outside the bounds of empirical measurement.”
His discovery that his rats’ laughter arises from inborn structures
deep in the brain, combined with years of experiments to determine what
sort of activity and other stimulation does and does not produce “rat
vocalizations” (laughing chirps), has led Panksepp to declare (in the
journal “Future Neurology”) that the happy chirps may indeed “be used as
direct readouts of emotional states.”
What Pet Owners May Already ‘Know’
This may all seem rather obvious to pet owners, in a non-scientific
sort of way.
They often report that they and their beloved dogs or cats share
mutual languages rich in vocabularies of an endless variety of modulated
meows and purrs, yips and barks, growls and groans, sweet whimpers, sly
screeches, subtle hums, and half-gurgles, ruffs, gruffs and rawls.
These subtly varied sounds, say pet owners, communicate emotions
common to human and cat, or human and dog — and even, they claim, can
convey not only emotions but plain and practical “intellectual ideas”
involving food, shelter, and the need for creative play, as well as
observations about important disruptions in the status quo.
But after years of steady work in his lab, Panksepp says he and his
colleagues can now present something far more testable — more scientific
— than the declarations of happy pet owners.
They report that they have now tracked communicative sounds (at least
in rats, but with well-established and reasonable analogues in other
animals including humans) to the specific deep-brain structures that
produce specific emotions.
For his fellow scientists, he labels these sounds “validated
emotional vocalizations.”
If you’re not a scientist, you can get a sense of their work — have a
bit of fun, engage in a little word play — by reading just the titles
of three of the jargon-rich and peer-reviewed scientific articles in
which he and his team have reported these findings over the years.
Don’t be afraid.
This reporter is certainly no scientist either, but I find that if
you read these titles slowly and calmly, they start to make sense pretty
quickly:
“‘Laughing rats’ and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?”
(Panksepp and Bergdorf in Physiology & Behavior, 4/2003.)
“Cross-Species Affective Neuroscience Decoding of the Primal
Affective Experiences of Humans and Related Animals.” (Panksepp in PLoS
Public Library of Science 9/2011)
(That phrase, “Primal Affective Experiences,” refers roughly to basic
emotions or feelings that evolved long ago in various species…
including in those animals that eventually evolved into the likes of
us.)
And if you’re really feeling frisky, try this:
“Frequency-modulated 50 kHz ultrasonic vocalizations: a tool for
uncovering the molecular substrates of positive affect” (Burgdorf,
Panksepp, Moskal in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews35 / 2011)
(Rough translation: how “ultrasonic vocalizations” — i.e., the
laughter of tickled rats — may help lead scientists to find “molecular
substrates of positive affect” – i.e., those structures in the brain
that help make you feel good.)
‘The Dark Side of Laughter’… and ‘An Ancient Heritage’
The study of laughter and play has a long lineage.
Many philosophers have offered their insights. Aristotle and Plato
wrote that laughter showed derision, asserted superiority.
The Bible’s Book of Proverbs says, “a merry heart doeth good like a
medicine.”
Modern writer Umberto Eco built an entire detective novel around,
among other things, the subversive power of laughter:
Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” set in a remote monastery in medieval
Liguria in the coastal mountains of northwest Italy, circles around the
vexed (for some) theological question of whether Jesus Christ ever
laughed.
(Some grouchy monks apparently just couldn’t stand the idea, thought
it dangerous.)
In their 2003 article above,
“‘Laughing rats’ and the evolutionary antecedents of human
joy?“,
Panksepp and Burgdorf assert that there has been little meaningful
scientific work on the nature and purpose of laughter since French
physician Laurent Joubert published his “Treatise on Laughter” in 1579,
until now.
This fascinating article is not all that hard to read — at least the
one-paragraph summary “Abstract” at the beginning.
It also tells how it all started — how one day, sometime “during the
spring in 1997, the senior author came to the Lab, and suggested to the
junior author, ‘Let’s go tickle some rats.’ ”
In considering the nature and the mystery of human laughter, they
remark on the fact that laughter first appears in human babies soon
after birth, and thus seems to be inborn:
They say the fact that the “vocal pattern of human laughter, that
first appears in rudimentary form at 2-3 months of age, suggests an
ancient heritage.”
In other words, that laughter seems to have evolved long ago in
animals far more “primitive” than us, and survived through the bloody
struggles of natural selection (the fittest not making it to pass on
their laughter-loving DNA)… making survival more likely, and thus being
“preserved” (kept) by evolution right up to the modern human, to say
nothing of the modern lab rat.
All of which suggests that laughter can help confer a powerful
advantage in the world’s hard struggles in which an animal must stay
alive long enough to pass on its genes… otherwise why would laughter be
so widespread and long-lived down through the great eons of time?
A sobering section in the article is headed, “… And the dark side of
laughter.”
It cites evidence that “Usually the children that prevail in play
tend to laugh the most, suggesting that, to some extent, laughter may
reflect a social dominance-seeking response, which may pave the way for
laughter to stigmatize and degrade others through such behavior.”
The authors also evoke painful playground memories:
“All too often, especially in children, laughter tends to become a
psychological tool for teasing and taunting — the establishment of
exclusionary group identities that can set the stage for finding mirth
in the misfortunes of others. These tendencies may arise rather
naturally from the fact that within-group laughter promotes group
solidarity, which can then be used to ostracize and exhibit scorn toward
those outside the group.”
They are careful to say: “We doubt if most other animals are capable
of exhibiting such psychological tendencies, but such possibilities
certainly need to be considered in future research…”
But they go on to cite other studies of human laughter and play that
open the possibility of play behavior (and the instinctive inborn
laughter and joy that attends it) being used even for horrendous ends,
since laughter “can also serve as the basis for social ridicule.”
An Insight Into the Horrors of Hitler?
We asked a scholar of the Third Reich, Professor Geoffrey Cocks,
author of several books on psychiatry and medicine in Hitler’s Germany,
for his general thoughts about whether play and laughter might have been
enlisted in that regime’s development — something that might resonate
with the above description of how “within-group laughter promotes group
solidarity, which can then be used to ostracize and exhibit scorn toward
those outside the group.”
Cocks replied to ABC News in an email that “First, there is a
sequence in Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will (1935) in
which Hitler Youth at the 1934 Nuremberg rally are shown at play: one
scene shows boys being tossed high in the air off a tarpaulin and
another scene shows ‘chariot races’ with two boys the ‘horses’ and
another standing on their backs as the ‘charioteer.’”
Director Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”
shows Hitler’s massively choreographed rallies in Nuremburg — enormous
plays of pageantry — apparently reinforcing group solidarity.
She followed it with her 1938 film “Olympia,” which depicts the 1936
Olympic Games in Berlin Germany as a similarly cohesive display of
imputed German “Aryan” racial superiority, displayed through the
muscular German teamwork in these “games.”
The film was advertised with a poster of happily smiling young blond
women.
Cocks also suggested a possible example of the abuse of play in the
Hitler Youth: “It is true that the Nazi youth organizations in
particular did put a special emphasis on physical activity, including
play, as a means of ‘toughening’ Germany’s youth as well promoting
solidarity.”
He added this grim note:
“There were board games in Nazi Germany that were designed to
strengthen racial and national resolve. The most infamous was the board
game
Juden Raus! ["Out With the Jews!"] (1936), in which the
object was to collect the most Jews and throw them out of town.”
But a quick check online, after Googling the three words “Nazi board
games,” suggests some ironic news about the limits of this dark side of
play and laughter.
It seems that the board game “
Juden Raus!” was an
“unsuccessful commercial product,” attempting to ride the wave of
official anti-Semitism and racism that was being whipped up by Hitler
and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Ironically, according to citations in recent historical research,
this board game was “criticized by an SS journal that felt it
trivialized anti-Semitic policies.”
Perhaps not serious enough? — And let’s have no laughter; you never
know where it might be redirected?
Did even the mere possibility of fun and play, whatever might trigger
it, frighten the SS as being somehow too free?
Modern play studies find abundant evidence that play has evolved to
keep brains and minds open and flexible, free to consider a wide range
of options — something dictators might well fear.
‘By and Large a Grim and Humorless Group’
In any case, Cocks, while noting that “It may well be that
the subject of laughter and humor as a weapon of exclusion under Nazism
is a subject waiting to be explored,” does reflect that the Nazis “were
by and large a grim, humorless group.”
Which is, of course, in no way to say that they might not still have
won World War Two. History tells of many victories by grim and humorless
leaders who led brutal regimes.
But we instinctively sense a big difference between derisive vaunting
laughter that excludes and truly joyful laughter that seems evidence of
open-heartedness, the kind of laughter we’d find it hard to imagine in a
cruel despot.
It seems that something in addition to “mere play” — perhaps from
brain structures that promote empathy and sympathy — needs to moderate
pure play if it is to resist abuse for cruel ends.
A Possible Explanation of the Modern ‘Roast’
As Panksepp and Burgdorf point out, the
neurobiological study of laughter (and its attendant emotion, joy) as
inborn impulses of the brain — both seated deeply in the brainstem right
alongside other basic impulses including fear, lust and rage — is in
its infancy.
But they do offer a hint about our society’s evolving use of laughter
as a way to keep dominant personalities from taking themselves too
seriously, which can always be a dangerous characteristic, especially in
potential role models.
They point out the complex play of dominance and group-building in a
recent comic invention that might have been incomprehensible to some
past cultures that took dominance very seriously — the modern “roast.”
“In adults, most laughter occurs in the midst of simple friendly
social interactions while greeting and ‘ribbing’ each other rather than
in response to explicit verbal jokes,” they write in the “‘laughing’
rats…” article:
“The two are brought together in our institution of ‘roasting’ those
we love and admire: The more dominant the targets of the roast, the more
mirth there is to be had at their good-humored expense.”
It may lead you to think of the annual Correspondents’ Dinner in
Washington, D.C.
In it, the president of the richest and most powerful country on
earth is expected to publicly suffer probing jibes of wit and humor —
possibly even offer some of his own — to the accompaniment of a great
deal of merry laughter, that fertile signal of instructive play in
which, say scientists, we learn a great deal about each other …
knowledge that may be vital when, all together, we must face some future
crisis.
Dementia and Alzheimer's have moved ahead of cancer on the list of most feared
diseases. 
This undated handout artist rendering
provided by the Schneider Lab, University of Pittsburgh shows an
experimental type of scan showing damage to the brain's nerve fibers
after a traumatic brain injury. The yellow shows missing fibers on one
side of the brain, as compared to the uninjured side in green, in a man
left with limited use of his left arm and hand. The soldier on the
fringes of an explosion. The survivor of a car wreck. The football
player who took yet another skull-rattling hit. Too often, only time can
tell when a traumatic brain injury will leave lasting harm _ there's no
good way to diagnose the damage. Now scientists are testing a tool that
promises to light up breaks that these injuries leave in the brain's
wiring, much like X-rays show broken bones. (AP Photo/Schneider Lab,
University of Pittsburgh)