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1712 drawing by Charles Le Brun

“Laughter,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”

Putting an evolutionary tweak on that idea, Albert Rapp, in his 1951 treatise Origins of Wit and Humour, opined that “all laughter has developed from one primitive behavior, the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel.”

It seems a bit of a stretch to lump all of laughter together like that, but it is instructive to note just how ubiquitous sadistic laughter is.

To cite but a few famous examples: Romans laughed heartily at Christians being mauled by lions; and torture and execution were considered fun for the whole family until practically yesterday—in the late Middle Ages, the citizens of Mons actually purchased a condemned man from a neighboring town so they could have the pleasure of quartering him themselves. In the 18th century, the well-heeled would visit insane asylums to amuse themselves by taunting the inmates.

Laughter was widely reported during the ethnic violence in Kosovo, Indonesia, and Rwanda; and was allegedly present at many lynchings in the South. The boys who shot up Columbine were said to have been laughing throughout much of the massacre.

And it could be plausibly argued that such gleeful sadism is very much in evidence in some versions of so-called “reality television.”

Type “face plant” into YouTube and ask yourself why, oh why it’s so irresistibly funny to watch people fall down. (There’s an especially pleasing subgenre of falling models, among which videos you will find a pole-dancer face-plant that’s a touch too racy for this family program.)

If you’re too sophisticated or compassionate to laugh at suffering, remember the last time you laughed at Bush’s verbal blunders, or even a malapropism in Shakespeare, and consider Rapp’s claim that “frailty, deformity, and error are modern substitutes for the battered appearance of one’s opponent.”

Yet another listener has sent in a youtube that makes us stop what we’re doing and gather around ye olde computer screen to gaze upon its offerings. Darn you, Ross Bennett, for indulging our desire to procrastinate! You want to us to finish Season 5, don’t you? Alas. This one’s too good not to pass along. Behold, the transcendent power of lullabies:

Here’s what listener Ross Bennet thought about the video:

It’s a short video of a man singing a song to a litter of very active but attentive boxer puppies. The instant he begins singing, the entire litter of puppies begins shuffling around for a place to sleep like some narcoleptic version of musical chairs. By the time he’s been through two refrains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart” the pups are out cold. It’s definitely worth the 1:40 to watch it.

Now watch closely. This is more than just providing a soothing sound that creates a comforting environment conducive to relaxation. There’s something triggering sleep. These puppies zonk out as quickly as a trained dog will “sit” or “shake.”

As I’m watching this, recalling your episodes on sleep and musical language, so many questions come to mind.

What is a lullaby?
What is this connection between music and sleep?
Is this an inborn trait that we reinforce to become a conditioned behavior? Or is there something else going on here?
What makes a good lullaby?
Who was the brilliant person who hit on the idea of a bedside clock radio with a sleep timer?
Have there been any clinical studies about using music to treat insomnia?
And what exactly is insomnia? Could it be a lack of music?
What does a lullaby look or feel like to a synaesthesia patient? Do they look or feel different than other music?

image courtesy of Cabinet Magazine

The excellent Brooklyn-based quarterly Cabinet dedicated its Spring ‘05 issue to laughter. You’re just going to have to buy a copy, because only a very small portion is available online…including this fine essay by Chris Turner on the fluid boundary between laughing and crying:

“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalene”?

To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of expression and posture, codified in handbooks such as Charles Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1667), in which Le Brun adapted Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649) into a visual lexicon of twenty-four emotions. Here, a menacing portrayal of the laughing face immediately precedes the illustration of a crumpled, crying one, almost as if the expressions were modulations of one another, but with certain differences artificially accentuated, especially in relation to the ruffling of the brow. Thus Le Brun created a stylized, histrionic vocabulary of the passions easily recognizable as tragic or comic on both canvas and stage.

wikicommons

Hydrogen sulfide stinks, but you knew that already, didn’t you. Hydrogen sulfide is flammable, but you probably knew that too (and I won’t ask how). But did you know hydrogen sulfide lowers blood pressure? and might protect the body from injury?

As little as 10 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide can irritate your eyes. 1000 ppm can kill you almost instantly. But some scientists like John Wallace of the University of Calgary say it also possesses some protective properties as low doses can stimulate gastric ulcer healing. It even protects mouse hearts from artificially induced heart attack says David Lefer of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Of course, how all this works is a bit harder to squeeze out (sorry..) and some say it could be that the gas soothes the perturbed mitochondria in the cells, effectively dodging the trigger to self-destruct.

But the key to the little stink bomb’s success might have to do with Sleep. Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that it can induce a sort of suspended animation:

Exposed to 80 ppm of hydrogen sulfide, mice enter into what we call a “hibernation-like” state, where their core temperature can be reduced as much as 11 degrees and their metabolic rate as judged by carbon dioxide production and oxygen consumption drops 10-fold. We’ve kept the animals in this state for 6 hours and they recover completely.

He and others in the field note that hydrogen sulfide and other mechanisms to alter the metabolic rate might make it possible to slow down the clock for trauma victims and preserve human organs for transplant. But nothing’s FDA approved.. so you don’t need to plug your nose at the ER just yet.

Last week, the band Neurotic and the PVCs brought new meaning to the idea of cultivating an audience. The band played to a crowd of human fans and a set of three robots. The robots are rigged with “neural networks” based on human neurology that allow them to make their own neural connections…and therefore develop a taste for music. Fiddian Warman, the band’s frontman, conditioned the robots to appreciate punk by playing them selections from his own favorite artists. The idea then, was to bring the robots to a performance in London, and see how they responded to the live music. (The robots are programmed to show pleasure and displeasure through a “pogoing action.”) Would they recognize Neurotic and the PVCs as punk musicians? Judging by this BBC video, it looks like the band got the nod from the bots.

curlyqcuties/flickr

Helene Meyer Tvinnereim and a team of Norwegian scientists are collecting milk teeth from 100,000 kids to create what may be the world’s largest tooth bank. A dental biomaterials researcher at U Bergen in Norway, Tvinnereim seeks to find links between diseases and prenatal/childhood exposure to chemicals. The normally discarded teeth function as a ‘black-box’ recording of the chemicals children are exposed to, and have excellent shelf-life when dried and stored. Of course, this is a lot easier to do when you have a streamlined national health-care and record keeping system..

GodzillaRockit/Flickr

A listener recently sent us an email alerting us to a new dietary supplement released in June called Obecalp. Obecalp, which is Placebo spelled backwards, is a cherry-flavored chewable dextrose pill meant to trick children into believing they are getting a medicine that will make them feel better. Jennifer Buettner, the creator of the pill, has this to say on her website:

Hi. I’m Jen. I am a mommy. It’s what I love. It’s my job to make owies go away. Whether it’s a kiss or a Band-aid, the magic happens immediately. This is the power of placebo. I have a baby girl and two sons. One of them always needs my comfort and the knowledge that I will make them feel better. I invented Obecalp when I realized that children might need a little more than a kiss to make it go away. Obecalp fills the gap when medicine is not needed but my children need something more to make them feel better. You’ll know when Obecalp is necessary.

At first glance, the idea of it seemed absurd and possibly irresponsible. But searching the topic turned up a New York Times article on Obecalp that brought up an interesting point. Despite the fact that most medical professionals interviewed scoffed at the idea of Obecalp or even protested that it might be dangerous, the reality is that many doctors have admitted to prescribing antibiotics under pressure to patients whom they are nearly certain are suffering from a viral illness that antibiotics won’t cure. Few would argue that this is a good practice, but it’s certainly common enough that doctors sometimes find it easier to send patients home with an actual drug just to make them feel better psychologically.

What do you think about this? Would you give an upset child a sugar pill and tell them it would make them feel better?

And if you haven’t heard our Placebo show, check it out.

Kagedfish/flickr

In the early 1940s, Esmond Emerson Snell (1914-2003) was trying to figure out why baby chicks who were fed raw egg whites (I know.. how cruel..) showed symptoms of biotin deficiency despite having plenty of it in the diet.

So who’s getting the biotin? Turned out the egg white itself just wouldn’t release the biotin for the chicks to use. So Snell purified the protein that held the biotin so tightly, which is no small feat today and even harder to do back then. He called it “avidin” (avid + biotin or “hungry for biotin”).

Snell said of his work: “The ability of this substance to take up and release biotin specifically and quantitatively suggests its possible use as a tool in the purification of biotin.”

He underestimated his contribution because this very strong and very reproducible interaction has become the foundation for probing all sorts of biological processes.

Hexadecimal Time/flickr

“Have you quantified that?”

Answering “no” to this question will usually trigger a collective humph from the crowd at a scientific meeting. We don’t want to know that there’s more or less of some biological activity unless you can say exactly how much different it is from normal.

Now Ron Milo, Paul Jorgensen and Mike Springer at the Systems Biology department in Harvard have attempted to sate this appetite for numbers with a new site called BioNumbers, which contains referenced entries for numbers like the total nasal epithelial cell surface area in a mouse nose (about 300 square millimeters in case you didn’t know).

And the Top Ten Bionumbers are?! drumroll…

1. Rate of ribosome translation in E. coli = 12-21 amino acids per second
2. Doubling time of cell lines in humans (check database)
3. Number of ribosomes/cell in E. coli = 6,800-72,000
4. Absolute abundance of tumor protein p53 in humans = 160,000
5. Number of mRNA/cell in E. coli = 1,380
6. Average number of neurons in the mouse brain = 75,000,000
7. Average number of neurons in the human brain = 100,000,000,000
8. Number of synapses for a “typical” human neuron = 1,000-10,000
9. Concentration of ATP in rat neuron = 2.59 mM
10. Ribosome + RNAn –> Ribosome·RNAn+1 in E. coli = 100 base pairs/sec

I know what you’re thinking.. How many BioNumbers are currently known?

..1718 and climbing.

Phitar/Flickr

British behavioral psychologist Richard Wiseman set out to track humor on an international scale and discover the funniest joke in the world.

After analyzing 1.5 million Internet ratings of 40,000 jokes, Wiseman’s Laugh Lab discovered that Germans were easiest to please, ranking first among nations in finding all sorts of jokes hilarious. Americans squeaked in at number eight with their love of put-downs, right behind the Belgians, with their penchant for the surreal.

Of course the results are extremely skewed, since they take into account only that portion of the populace willing and able to fill out surveys about jokes on the Internet.

Details from the study, as well as the official winning joke, are here.