Animal research shows that laughter, joy, cooperation, and even ethics may have evolved out of play, writes academiadam
Animal research shows us that laughter, joy, and cooperation may have evolved out of play.
On a temperate, controlled laboratory-environment day in the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, one of the pioneers of affective, puts on his lab coat and gets to work. He is not conducting brain scans, but rather, conducting “vigorous manual stimulation of the ventral body surface” of a rat . This is science-speak for, “I tickled the rat’s belly with my finger.” He takes out his recording device and notes the “50 kHz ultrasonic vocalizations as indices of positive affect” .
Rats not only like to laugh and be tickled, but to wrestle during play. Panksepp studied this phenomenon scientifically, through the observational coding of “pinning” in rats, the “usually improbable posture of having their dorsal surface to the ground, with another animal hovering above in a ‘dominance’ stance.”, and joy, are evolutionarily ancient behaviors and emotions in mammals . We’ve known for a long time that primates laugh and play like humans do .
Just as children possess an inherent drive for social play, especially when cooped up inside for too long, rats deprived of socialization will be more motivated to play, and play for longer when reintroduced to peers . If deprived of socialization for an extended time during critical developmental periods, adolescent rats’ orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortices will not develop properly .
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