by Chip Walter
14. R. R. Provine and Y. L. Yong, “Laughter: A Stereotyped Human Vocalization,” Ethology 89 (1991): 115–24.
15. This is because with each stride the trunk of a four-legged animal has to brace itself with an inward breath when its paw or hoof hits the ground. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to keep the air they need in their lungs.
16. When we run we can breathe as many as four times for every stride, depending on how fast and how long we have been running. Other mammals, however, have no choice but to breathe each time they take a step, which would lead you to believe that when a cheetah is chasing down a gazelle at sixty miles an hour, it is breathing at very high speed. Robert Provine, “Laughter, Tickling, and the Evolution of Speech and Self,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13(6) (December 2004): 215.
17. One indication that our new anatomy shapes the nature of our laughter is that usually the muscles that control speech take ascendancy when we consciously decide they should. Usually we can stop laughing, gain control over our breathing, and speak when we want. But there are times when we laugh so hard that the primal mechanics refuse to give up control and we just can’t get a word out until the laughter subsides.
18. At least part of this piece is an extension of Morris’s early theory that laughter evolved from “play” attacks, scary situations that are, in fact, not scary. Smiling and laughter are ritualized versions of attack, so these expressions are related to play in animals where facial expressions and reactions are ritualized. The laughter comes from the relief in the tension when an animal figures out the bad situation isn’t real. In our case, having expressive faces helps send even clearer messages.
19. This is also true of crying and sobbing. It is often difficult to talk and cry at the same time. That we can’t control laughing and crying means that the motor systems that command lips and tongue, diaphragm and lungs are not under conscious control of the parts of the brain that generate the sounds of laughter. Speech inverts this relationship. It controls capabilities such as breathing and prosody and modifies vocal output in extremely subtle and facile ways. In other words, though laughter and crying as we know them may have evolved after speech, or along with it, thei roots go back to much earlier forms of nonconscious communication, such as hoots and calls.
20. See Jane Goodall’s book The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
21. N. Cousins, The Anatomy of an Illness (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1991), and “The Laughter Connection” in Head First: The Biology of Hope and the Healing Power of the Human Spirit (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).
22. “Psychoneuroimmunology of Laughter.” An interview with Lee Berk, Dr. PH, from Journal of Nursing Jocularity 7, no. 3 (1997): 46–47;
www.jesthealth.com/art26jnj9.html.
23. Robert R. Provine, “Laughter,” American Scientist 84, no. 1 (1996): 38–47.
24. According to Esquire magazine (February 7, 1999), more than anything else, women want men to make them laugh.
25. See “Reconsidering the Evolution of Nonlinguistic Communication: The Case of Laughter” by Michael J. Owren, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, and Jo-Anne Bachorowski, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University. Their basic theory is that laughter evolved from animal calls, but they don’t believe as others do that animals call out with a specific message in mind. They theorize that animals call out to influence fellow animals to do a certain thing. So a gorilla may scream before he hits and then learns eventually that the scream will be as good as hitting. But he doesn’t initially scream to scare those around him. In other words, the call doesn’t have a specific, symbolic meaning. It’s just there to evoke a reaction. This, they believe, also applies to laughter.
Chapter 9: The Creature That Weeps
1. According to at least one study, most of us entered the world wailing at C or C-sharp, the sound most easily heard by the human ear and the key at the center of the piano. See Tom Lutz, Crying, A Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p.161.
2. S. Chevalier-Skolnikoff, “Facial Expression of Emotion in Nonhuman Primates,” in P. Ekman, ed., Darwin and Facial Expressions (New York: Academic Press, 1973), pp. 11–89.
3. This is also why crying is so difficult to fake. We can lie with sincerity, but we have a hard time prevaricating when it comes to tears. Even actors who work to cry on cue generally have to call up some feeling that taps deep emotions to bring tears on. We don’t naturally have control over crying. Related to this is Terrence Deacon’s thought from his book The Symbolic Species (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 236. “The reflex like links between perceiving and producing calls, and the emotional states associated with them, are made evident by the ‘infectiousness’ of some of our own species’ innate calls, specifically laughter and crying.”
4. According to a survey conducted by Rupert Sheldrake; see
www.sheldrake.org/papers/Telepathy/babies.html
for more.
5. See www.24hourscholar.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_n1_v30/ai_19013604#continue.
6. Zahavi is an Israeli biologist whose idea was ridiculed when he first put it forward in 1975, but he has recently been vindicated by some clever mathematical modeling by Alan Grafen at Oxford University. Zahavi and Grafen state that in any encounter in animals where advertisement is important—and that’s very, very often—an advertisement is believed only if it’s validated by being costly.
7. For more insights into “crying wolf,” check the work of Dario Maestripieri, “Parent-Offspring Conflict in Primates,” International Journal of Primatology 23, no. 4, August 2002.
8. For more on babies and crying, please see
www.signonsandiego.com/-uniontrib/20050316/news_1c16crying.html.
Chapter 10: The Language of Lips
1. During the Renaissance Italian upper-class women made themselves more attractive by taking belladonna (which means beautiful woman) to dilate their pupils. Unfortunately, belladonna is also poisonous, so in the short term it may have had the desired effect, but in the long run it may not have been such a good idea.
2. According to one Web site
(www.coolnurse.com/kissing.htm),
Dr. Peter Gorden, dental adviser at the British Dental Association, says, “After eating, your mouth is full of sugar solution and acidic saliva, which cause plaque build up. Kissing is nature’s own cleaning process. It stimulates saliva flow and brings plaque levels down to normal.”
3. This according to Professor Gus McGrouther, who is head of plastic reconstructive surgery at University College, London. McGrouther studied the mechanics of kissing to help him find a solution to overcoming oral deformities in patients, and his research has helped sufferers of Bell’s palsy.
4. Remember something similar may be true of women’s breasts, too. They may be frontal recapitulations of females’ rumps. See chapter 1.
5. Meg Cohen Ragas and Karen Kozlowski, Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998).
6. In an essay titled “Loathsomeness of Long Haire,” published in 1653.
7. Kristoffer Nyrop, The Kiss and Its History (Auburn, Calif.: Singing Tree Press, 1968); Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York Vintage Books, 1990).
8. Women who were taking birth control pills and were, therefore, basically infertile, did not prefer shirts belonging to men with complementary immune systems. They preferred men whose systems were similar to theirs. The women in the test also said that the T-shirts they liked most often reminded them of former boyfriends. Is there a pattern here?
9. See www.antecint.co.uk/main/rm/boarmate.ram.
10. See: www.mum.org/mensy71a.htm;
Matha K. McClintock, “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression,” Nature 229 (1971): 244–245.
11. According to Assistant Professor Jianzhi Zhang from the University of Michigan, the evolution of color vision eliminated any need for pheromones to
attract mates. In a 2003 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 17, 2003), Zhang argued that color vision may have enabled male monkeys as well as our early ancestors in Africa and Asia to notice subtle changes in female sexual skins. Zhang’s team concluded that though humans and some apes still carry genes that should create pheromone receptors in our noses, they have mutated and no longer function.
12. Randolph E. Schmid, “Gay Men Respond Differently to Pheromones,” Associated Press, May 10, 2005.
13. The hypothalamus is a hub that links the nervous system to the endocrine system, and it is a great illustration of the entangled and interwoven nature of the brain and its relationship to our bodies. It manages to communicate with our bodies by synthesizing and secreting neurohormones, sometimes called releasing hormones, that stimulate the secretion of still other hormones from the anterior pituitary gland. One of these is known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). Neurons that secrete GnRH are linked to the limbic system, which is deeply involved in the control of both sex and emotions.
14. See Nicholas J. Perella, The Kiss: Sacred and Profane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
15. Raj Kaushik, “Science of a Kiss,” Toronto Star, February 10, 2004.
16. Richard J. Haier, Rex E. Jung, Ronald A. Yeo, Kevin Head, and Michael T. Alkire, “The Neuroanatomy of General Intelligence: Sex Matters,” NeuroImage 25 (2005): 320–27.
17. Doreen Kimura, “Sex Differences in the Brain,” Scientific American 12(1) (2002): 32–37.
18. Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (New York: Perseus, 2003).
19. There is no direct evidence, but it is interesting that this same area of the brain is so near the area where the first mirror neurons evolved.
20. Kimura, “Sex Differences in the Brain.”
21. On the other hand, these very same traits could shape a mind so thoughtful that it might tend to fret too much about relationships, and overly dwell on what could go wrong with them. This might offer some clue as to why women are, as a group, more prone to depression than men.
22. Aeons ago it might have helped alert them to the possibility of abandonment while they were busy raising the children. Today, however, there’s a clear downside. Ruminators are unpleasant to be around, with their oversize need for reassurance. Of course, men have their own ways of inadvertently fending off people. As pronounced as the female tilt to depression is the male excess of alcoholism, drug abuse, and antisocial behavior.
University of Michigan psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D., has found that women ruminate over upsetting situations, going over and over negative thoughts and feelings, especially if they have to do with relationships. Too often they get caught in downward spirals of hopelessness and despair.
23. In what was called the “trial of the century,” Thaw’s defense immediately made “brainstorm” one of the English language’s newest words.
24. Christine R. Harris, “The Evolution of Jealousy,” American Scientist (January–February 2004): 61–71.
25. The methods for doing in a rival sibling are inexhaustible, even for toddlers. When Hannah, my youngest daughter, was born, her three-year-old sister Molly had an idea as we headed off to the hospital to pick up her mom and the new sibling. “Let’s throw Hannah down the steps,” she said. When I explained why that might not be a good idea, she thought about it a second and then said, “Okay, only halfway down the steps.”
26. Harris, “The Evolution of Jealousy,” 61–71.
27. In their book A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage, 2001).
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