Sophie Scott
speaker
374 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Sophie Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And there are quite a lot of behaviours that work this way.
So blinking is quite contagious.
Coughing is contagious.
Scratching is contagious.
It's pretty complex.
If you look at orangutans, they scratch contagiously.
Actually, it's a sign of anxiety in orangutans.
If an orangutan is scratching itself, that means it's anxious.
If another orangutan picks up that, it mirrors back that scratching.
They're basically indicating, oh yeah, I know what you mean.
This isn't great.
You have this whole world of contagious behaviours and they tend to have this affiliative element to them.
And it's also true for laughter.
However, humans are the only animals where contagious laughter has been shown.
So other animals laugh, but they don't laugh contagiously.
They don't just catch a laugh, which makes it very interesting, partly also because it's something we learn to do.
So contagious behaviors are not things we're born doing.
Babies don't blink unless they need to refresh their eyes.
They don't yawn when somebody else yawns.
They don't laugh when somebody else laughs.
Showing 221–240 of 374 · page 12 of 19
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