Sophie Scott

So I had a horrible situation at work, just horrible, when a colleague rang up

A colleague with whom I already had quite a difficult relationship.

Not someone I knew well, but I relied on facilities associated with this person.

So I had to keep them sweet.

And they called up to complain about something.

And while they were calling up to complain, someone in the room with me started laughing.

And nothing I could say could prevent them from believing that not only had I offended them and they were complaining about it, but now we were all laughing at them.

Now, they were anticipating negativity.

They were not in a good mood with me.

But that's not why the laughter happened.

In fact, the laughter was me looking at a student going, what have you done?

Seriously, what's going on here?

And the student laughed because she was embarrassed.

But it didn't matter.

It didn't matter what I said.

So the complexity is manifold.

It's complex in terms of why we produce it.

And it's complex in terms of how somebody perceives it and how they choose to interpret it.

I suspect probably one of the nice things about spontaneous laughter, because you feel really good when you've been laughing anyway, but spontaneous laughter, it sounds like the sun coming out and it feels wonderful.

You do get big physiological changes when you laugh full stop, but particularly if you start laughing hard, like a real spontaneous laugh.