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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, they're going to clean up.
Oh, dear.
He should be listening to his own station.
No, he's probably bored witless and he's switched over.
8.45.
Yeah.
Science Friday · Squirrel poop drops Ice Age clues + The neuroscience of laughter · 29 Jun 2026
podcast
So there's basically, in the human brain, two different ways that control how sounds are made.
One is called the volitional motor system, and it's associated with brain areas you actually only find in humans.
And they are recruited when you are talking, when you are singing, when you're using your voice in a volitional way.
And by volitional, I don't mean you're kind of paying attention to exactly how you make every single speech sound, but it's a voluntary act.
You could stop at any time.
And we also have an evolutionarily older system that's running down the midline of the brain.
And that is the one that we share with all other mammals.
And it's associated with much more
involuntary reactive emotional sound so if you were really frightened by something you'd be much more likely to start screaming than to say I am frightened and that's very different from that volitional motor network and it seems to be consistent with that spontaneous helpless laughter
It has a very different profile.
As I said, once you've started, you can't stop doing it.
Whereas that volitional laughter, which is actually most of the laughter you encounter is more like that.
And that happens in conversations.
And there in conversations, people time the laughter really, really precisely.
Showing 61–80 of 374 · page 4 of 19
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