- A person slipping on a banana peel
a cat riding a roomba,
a cat in a shark costume
riding a roomba that's chasing a duck.
(upbeat music)
These are universally funny
things that say something about
the absurdity of life
but what does it say when
someone laughs at a badly
parked car or a barking dog?
Researchers at University
College London found that
laughing at not so funny
situations or even tragic ones
could be a sign of a subset of dementia
called fronto temporal dementia or FTD.
This type of dementia is often
found in people 55 and under
and unlike in alzheimer's
pervasive faults in memory
are not in early indicator of FTD.
Instead a skewed sense of
humor could be a red flag.
Researchers questioned friends
and family of 48 patients
with dementia all of whom
knew the patient for at least
15 years and before the
condition took root.
The questionnaires revealed
that many of the friends
and family noted changes in
a key personality marker,
a significant shift in a sense of humor.
There were anecdotes
of patients laughing at
natural disasters, and poorly parked cars.
In one scenario when a
patient scalded herself
instead of screaming in
pain she began to laugh.
The researchers also noticed
that for FTD patients
absurdist and satirical
humor like Monty Python
didn't do it for them.
Compared to healthy
people of a similar age
FTD patients were far more
likely to chuckle at slapstick
like The Three Stooges.
The findings from
University College London
underscored two points, first,
that our personalities the
behaviors that make us who we are
are not set in stone, and second,
that all it can take to
fundamentally change the person
who we and others think we are is
something like nerve
cell damage to the brain.
These slight but crucial
changes to the brain can cause a
different version of the self
to emerge one that filters
reality a little further away
from the universal experience
which makes the answer to
the question of who we are
wholly dependent on the
brain we just happen to have
at that very moment.
According to laugh
researcher Robert Provine,
there are only three sounds
we can make while chortling:
hehehehehe
hahahahahaha
hohohohohoho.
That was three right?
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