English Unlimited HAK/HUM 2, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

85 Your emotions 07 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE LOOK AGAIN EXTRAS Read the articles again. Which ideas do you find most interesting / surprising? Why? Make notes in the table below. Compare your notes with a partner. Do you have the same? b Why do people laugh? Why do people yawn? Why do people cry? Babies start laughing very soon after they’re born. Deaf and blind people can laugh even though they’ve never seen or heard anyone laughing. Laughing seems to be a part of human nature, but what’s it for? Many people think that we laugh because we see or hear something funny, but most of the time this isn’t true. In one study, a professor of psychology and his students listened in and made notes on hundreds of conversations in public places. They heard about 1,200 laughs, but only 10–20 percent came after a joke or something funny. The other 80– 90 percent followed normal, everyday expressions like, “I’ll see you later” or, “It was nice to meet you”. No one really knows why we laugh, but one idea is that the most important reason for laughing is to make other people feel good. When you laugh, the people around you often start laughing too. Soon, the whole group is cheerful and relaxed. Laughter can stop negative feelings and help people to feel closer to each other. It may be that thousands of years ago, before people could speak, laughter helped them to form groups and work together. It also seems that laughter can be good for your health. Laughing a hundred times uses the same energy as riding on an exercise bike for fifteen minutes. The writer Norman Cousins, who suffers from back pain, wrote that watching comedy programmes on TV helped him to feel better. He said that ten minutes of laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Everyone yawns – babies, children, teenagers, adults – but the truth is that we don’t completely understand why. Many people think that we yawn when we’re tired or bored because our bodies are trying to get more oxygen to the brain. In 1987, Robert Provine from the University of Maryland decided to test this idea. He asked groups of students to breathe different levels of oxygen for 30 minutes, and counted how many times they yawned. The result? All the students yawned about the same number of times. So the traditional theory probably isn’t true. It also fails to answer a lot of other questions. Why do some illnesses make people yawnmore?Why do Olympic athletes sometimes yawn before a race? And what about ‘group yawning’, when people start yawning because they see other people yawning? One study suggests we yawn when our brains are too hot. Yawning is simply a way of cooling the brain and helping it to work better. In the study, students were asked to watch videos of other people yawning, and the number of times they yawned in response was counted. It was found that the students yawned less often if they had something cold on their heads. People who breathed through their noses – another way of cooling the brain – did not yawn at all. So it seems that we yawn not when we’re bored, but as a way of cooling our brains when we’re tired or ill. ‘Group yawning’ probably started many thousands of years ago, when it helped small groups of people to concentrate and notice dangers. Why do people laugh? Why do people yawn? 4 a Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv