Laughter is the best analgesic

Why does laughter make you forget or relieve pain? When you laugh with your friends, endorphins, the analgesic chemical, are released from your brain, according to a study published in the proceedings of the Royal Society B: bioscience "The binding effect of endorphin surge can explain why laughter plays such an important role in our social life," said Robin Dunbar, a researcher at Oxford University In addition to laughing, it also produces endogenous peptides during exercise, excitement, pain, spicy food, love and orgasm In the researchers' experiment to determine whether laughter can release endorphins, they first tested subjects' pain threshold (the minimum amount of stimulation that causes pain), then induced them to laugh, and then tested their pain threshold again In the test, the subjects watched funny film and television clips and a live comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe Art Festival At the same time, because people laugh more when they are with others than when they are alone (30 times the probability), the researchers tested the subjects both in the team and when they are alone The pain threshold test involves wrapping the arm in a frozen sleeve or blood pressure sleeve If the subject can't stand the pain, the test will end In the live comedy test, the researchers asked the subjects to squat against the wall and watch, until they could not bear to fall to the ground, the researchers tested the pain threshold again In all the tests, the subjects' pain tolerance increased after laughing, and the pain threshold of the group who watched the comedy for 15 minutes increased by 10% on average, but the pain threshold of the alone subjects only increased slightly The report points out that when people are amused, the pain threshold is significantly increased, but when the subjects are forced to laugh at something that is not amusing, the pain threshold does not change (sometimes even decrease) Laughter, accompanied by a series of deep breaths, can cause abdominal muscle fatigue and trigger the release of endorphins, the researchers said (compiled by Xu Yan)