2024-11-28
5 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
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Anglophone novelists describing amusement are laughing all the way to the bank.
Depending on context, characters can chortle, chuckle,
titter, hoot, giggle, snigger, howl or guffaw.
This richness of language may suggest to some that laughter itself is a phenomenon of infinite variety,
one that lends itself to endless sub-categorisation.
The joke would be on them.
New work led by Rosa Camelolu, a psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam,
provides evidence that there are just two primary types of laughter,
one generated when people find something funny and one that can be induced only through the physical act of tickling.
The work started with the serious business of laugh collection.
Dr Kamelolu instructed research assistants to search YouTube,
a video platform, for footage featuring spontaneous laughter.
They collected a total of 887 videos that were then categorised based on the inciting comic incident,
ranging from tickler tacks to schadenfreude and verbal jokes.
Roughly 70% of these videos were then used to train a laughter-categorising machine learning algorithm to connect different forms of laughter with the activities that caused them.