Sophie Scott

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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 over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Squirrel poop drops Ice Age clues + The neuroscience of laughter · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

So everyone laughs together at the end of a sentence and then they carry on and they start and stop at the same time.

So that kind of motor control, that's not possible with spontaneous laughter.

Is that just a fake laughter then?

Well, it's probably like a world of laughter, actually, because as I say, most laughter actually fits in that more kind of volitional way.

So if you look at people, well, there was a fantastic American psychologist called Robert Provine, and he pointed out that though we think laughter is about jokes and comedy, most laughter happens for social reasons.

And of course, conversations, what we're doing now, that's how...

humans around the world maintain social interactions so that laughter sort of is natural home is in those conversations and in those conversations sometimes people are laughing because something's funny that does happen but also they're laughing because they might just catch a laugh from somebody else they're laughing contagiously or they're laughing to show agreement or understanding

And people will use laughter to cover up embarrassment or other emotions, or they'll use laughter to deal with stress.

So it's like a hall of mirrors.

And most of that I've just described would fit probably under that volitional network.

I'd been thinking about the fact that it had to relate in some way to these different motor networks, but we didn't have good evidence for this.

And what was really nice about getting to work on this paper with Fausto Caruana is that he does really detailed mapping studies of what happens when you stimulate different brain areas.

And he'd become interested in laughter because sometimes when you stimulate brain areas, you do get laughter.

It's what is called pre-surgical mapping.

You are looking to see, identify brain areas which are involved in epilepsy.

And we've been using these data to study laughter because what it lets us do is actually relate in a really precise way which brain areas people are stimulating when they record examples of people laughing.

So it gives us much greater precision and the ability to actually record while people are laughing because a lot of other techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging, they really can't cope with the fact that people move a lot when they're laughing.

So this really does give us both precision and also it makes it actually possible.

Yeah.

And sometimes the laughter just seems to happen and the people go and it's sort of mirthless.

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