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 months

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

And other times the laughter happens and people feel or sense that something was funny.

I do.

Many years ago, I'm talking about like 1998, my father was desperately unwell and dying in a French hospital.

And he lives at the end of the story, don't worry.

But we were all sitting around waiting for doctors to do something.

And he suddenly said, oh, we've laughed a lot, haven't we?

And I said, yes, Dad, you know, we have, we really have laughed a lot.

And I wasn't, well, I didn't work on laughter at the time.

I sort of thought about it, it stayed in my mind.

And then I started working on laughter and I thought, oh, he's right, you know.

The times in your day when you're laughing with people, it can feel trivial and silly, like it's just, you know, frivolous, time-wasting, you know, you're not achieving anything there.

But it's actually probably the most important points in your day in terms of the making and maintaining the bonds you have with other people and feeling better together.

Thank you.

3 Takeaways™ · The Surprising Science of Why We Laugh (#285) · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

I think because it's probably one of the more important emotional expressions that we use socially.

If you ask people about what makes them laugh, they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humor.

But if you actually look at people, what they do is they laugh when they're in company.

Laughter is a social behavior.

You are 30, three zero times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own.

And you'll laugh more if you know those people and you'll laugh more if you like those people.

And that's why you shouldn't think of it as an expression of amusement, actually, because most of the time laughter has got nothing whatsoever to do with jokes.

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