MSNBC It's no joke: Even animals 'laugh'

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> Technology & Science

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>It's no joke: Even animals 'laugh'

>LiveScience: Studies by various groups suggest monkeys, dogs and

>even rats love a good laugh.

>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7348880/

>

It's no joke: Even animals 'laugh'

Expert says dogs pant and rats chirp to express mirth

By Robert Roy Britt

Senior writer

LiveScience

Updated: 5:01 p.m. ET March 31, 2005

 

 

Life can be funny, and not just for humans.

 

Studies by various groups suggest monkeys, dogs and even rats love a

good laugh. People, meanwhile, have been laughing since before they

could talk.

 

" Indeed, neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions

of the brain, and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in

other animals eons before we humans came along with our 'ha-ha-has'

and verbal repartee, " says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling

Green State University.

 

When chimps play and chase each other, they pant in a manner that is

strikingly like human laughter, Panksepp writes in Friday's issue of

the journal Science. Dogs have a similar response.

 

Rats chirp while they play, again in a way that resembles our

giggles. Panksepp found in a previous study that when rats are

playfully tickled, they chirp and bond socially with their human

tickler. And they seem to like it, seeking to be tickled more.

Apparently joyful rats also preferred to hang out with other chirpers.

 

The first laugh

Laughter in humans starts young, another clue that it's a deep-seated

brain function.

 

" Young children, whose semantic sense of humor is marginal, laugh and

shriek abundantly in the midst of their other rough-and-tumble

activities, " Panksepp notes.

 

Importantly, various recent studies on the topic suggest that

laughter in animals typically involves similar play chasing. It could

be that verbal jokes tickle ancient, playful circuits in our brains.

 

More study is needed to figure out whether animals are really

laughing. The results could explain why humans like to joke around.

And Panksepp speculates it might even lead to the development of

treatments for laughter's dark side: depression.

 

Meanwhile, there's the question of what's so darn funny in the animal world.

 

" Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humor, if it

exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick, " Panksepp

figures. " Even if adult rodents have no well-developed cognitive

sense of humor, young rats have a marvelous sense of fun. "

 

Science has traditionally deemed animals incapable of joy and woe.

 

Panksepp's response: " Although some still regard laughter as a

uniquely human trait, honed in the Pleistocene, the joke's on them. "

 

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0504010071apr01,1,7102895.story?col\

l=chi-news-hed & ctrack=1 & cset=true

 

Animals enjoy good laugh too, scientists say

 

By Peter Gorner

Tribune science reporter

Published April 1, 2005

 

 

Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a

scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to

revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest.

 

Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human traits.

 

Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of excitement, their

version of " ha-ha-ha " limited only by their anatomy and lack of breath

control, researchers contend.

 

Dogs have their own sound to spur other dogs to play, and recordings of

the sound can dramatically reduce stress levels in shelters and kennels,

according to the scientist who discovered it.

 

Even laboratory rats have been shown to chirp delightedly above the range

of human hearing when wrestling with each other or being tickled by a

keeper--the same vocalizations they make before receiving morphine or

having sex.

 

Studying sounds of joy may help us understand the evolution of human

emotions and the brain chemistry underlying such emotional problems as

autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders, said Jaak Panksepp,

a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered rat laughter.

 

Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, sums up the latest

studies in this week's edition of the journal Science in hopes of alerting

colleagues to results that he terms " spectacular. " The research suggests

that studying animal emotions, once a scientific taboo, seems to be moving

rapidly into the mainstream.

 

" It's very, very difficult to find skeptics these days. The study of

animal emotions has really matured.

 

Things have changed completely from as recently as five years ago, " said

Mark Bekoff, an expert in canine play behavior and professor of biology at

the University of Colorado, Boulder.

 

Biologists suggest that nature apparently considers sounds of joy

important enough to have conserved them during the evolutionary process.

 

" Neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the brain, "

Panksepp said, " and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in other

animals eons before we humans came along. "

 

Research in this area " is just the beginning wave of the future, " said

comparative ethologist Gordon Burghardt, of the University of Tennessee,

who studies the evolution of play. " It will allow us to bridge the gap

with other species. "

 

New investigative techniques often rely on super high-tech scanning

wizardry, but the most important tool for scientists in this field is much

more simple.

 

" Tickles are the key, " Panksepp said. " They open up a previously hidden

world. "

 

Panksepp had studied play vocalizations in animals for years before it

occurred to him that they might be an ancestral form of laughter.

 

" Then I went to the lab and tickled some rats. Tickled them gently around

the nape of their necks. Wow! "

 

The tickling made the rats chirp happily-- " as long as the animal's

friendly toward you, " he said. " If not, you won't get a single chirp, just

like a child that might be suspicious of an adult. "

 

Rats that were repeatedly tickled became socially bonded to the

researchers and would seek out tickles. The researchers also found that

rats would rather spend time with animals that chirp a lot than with those

that don't.

 

During human laughter, the dopamine reward circuits in the brain light up.

When researchers neurochemically tickled those same areas in rat brains,

the rats chirped.

 

Rat humor remains to be investigated, but if it exists, a prime component

will be slapstick, Panksepp speculated. " Young rats, in particular, have a

marvelous sense of fun. "

 

Panksepp said that laughter, at least in response to a direct physical

stimulus such as tickling, may be a common trait shared by all mammals.

 

Psychologist and neuroscientist Robert Provine, author of " Laughter: A

Scientific Investigation, " tickled and played with chimpanzees at the

Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta while researching the origins of

the human laugh.

 

Laughter in chimps, our closest genetic relatives, is associated with

rough-and-tumble play and tickling, Provine found. That came as no

surprise.

 

" It's like the behavior of young children, " said Provine, of the

University of Maryland Baltimore County. " A tickle and laughter are the

first means of communication between a mother and her baby, so laughter

appears by about four months after birth. "

 

The importance of such an early behavior is apparent.

 

" We're talking about a life-and-death deal here--the bonding and survival

of babies, " Provine said.

 

When chimps laugh, they make unique panting sounds, ranging from barely

audible to hard grunting, with each inward and outward breath.

 

" We humans laugh on outward breaths. When we say `ha-ha-ha,' we're

chopping an outward breath, " Provine said. " Chimps can't do that. They

make one sound per inward and outward breath. They don't have the breath

control to ... make the traditional human laugh. "

 

The breakthrough in dog laughter was accomplished by University of Nevada,

Reno, researcher Patricia Simonet while working with undergraduates at

Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.

 

With extensive chimp research behind her, Simonet was open to the idea of

animal emotions, but the laughing sound she discovered in dogs was

unexpected: a " breathy, pronounced, forced exhalation " that sounds to the

untrained ear like a normal dog pant.

 

But a spectrograph showed a burst of frequencies, some beyond human

hearing. A plain pant is simpler, limited to just a few frequencies.

 

Hearing a tape of the dog laugh made single animals take up toys and play

by themselves, Simonet said. It never initiated aggressive responses.

 

" If you want to invite your dog to play using the dog laugh, say `hee,

hee, hee' without pronouncing the `ee,' " Simonet said. " Force out the air

in a burst, as if you're receiving the Heimlich maneuver. "

 

When she played a recording of a laughing dog at an animal shelter,

Simonet found that even 8-week-old puppies reacted by starting to play,

something they hadn't done when exposed to other dog sounds.

 

" Some sounds, like growls, confused the puppies. But the dog laugh caused

sheer joy and brought down the stress levels in the shelter immediately. "

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