15 Things That Happen To Your Brain And Body When You Laugh

A lot is being said about the importance of healthy diet and lifestyle for being fit but there is one more thing which is quite necessary for a person to remain healthy and that is laughter!

If an individual doesn’t feel good or happy, he can never be considered healthy, whether physically or emotionally. Now we don’t recommend you to eat junk food or sugary items because you might feel good after consuming them but we are intended to say that most of the times, happy people are healthy people.

We smile if something good or funny happens but this smile turns into laughter when someone cracks a joke or does something extremely hilarious.

There is no denying the fact that laughter is good for not just our mind but our body as well. The study of laughter is called gelotology and it is not a simple process but a lot of things happen in brain and body during this procedure.

1How does the process start?

An electrical wave runs to the cerebral cortex, the largest part of the brain, if a person gets to hear something funny or sees some hilarious thing and all this happens within the four-tenth of the second. The giggle happens if the wave took a negative charge but if it takes a positive charge, nothing happens.

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2Analysis of a joke by the brain

Brain’s left side analyzes words and structure of the joke as the left side is responsible for judgment and checking the rationality. This is why, an individual who is more analytical and methodical in his approach is said to be left-brained. One more function that the left-side of the brain does is to control the right side of the body.

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3What if it’s without words?

As we said, it is the brain which analyzes the words and structure of the joke but what if it is without words or non-verbal? In that case, the left side of the brain takes into consideration the situation and facts related to it; for example, the analysis of facial expressions.

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4Frontal lobe starts its work

Now the brain’s frontal lobe starts working as it is responsible for thinking and it begins studying the details of the joke. After this, the emotionally active side of the brain, i.e., right hemisphere of the cortex, which is creative and fluid, tries to find the probability of humor and makes an attempt to get the joke. The neurons also get activated as the stimulus is received by the occipital lobe, the visual processing area, which has to be very fast to understand what our eyes have just seen.

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5Joke gets processed

When the joke is processed, an output response is also triggered and this is directly related to how funny the joke has been considered by the brain. This can result in the contraction of 15 facial muscles and eyes get half-shut while breathing gets irregular as we laugh.

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