The Real Reasons Why Babies Laugh. The Joyful music In Their Heart.

It is quite impossible for Babies to possibly get a joke, then how possible that they can giggle? Or what causes their giggles?

The answers to these natural acts of babies might reveal a lot to us about the makeup of our minds.

Real reason why do babies laugh?

This is one of the funniest questions in the lips of any researcher and or an investigator can ask, think off and investigate.  It was this question that many researchers and scientist s alike want to find answers to. There's a serious scientific reason why Caspar Addyman wants to find out also about why babies laugh, reason for their laugh and what causes them to laugh.

 Caspar Addyman is not the first to ask this question. Darwin also studied laughter, what causes the laughter in his infant son, so also Freud who studied about infant laughter and formed a theory that our tendency to laugh originates in our sense of superiority. The theory also goes toward to say that we take pleasure at seeing another's suffering - slapstick style pratfalls and accidents being good examples - because it isn’t us.

Jean Piaget who is the great psychologist of human development, gave the thought that “babies’ laughter could be used to see into their minds. If you laugh, you must 'get the joke' to some degree - a good joke is balanced in between being completely unexpected and confusing and being predictable and boring. Studying when babies laugh might therefore be a great way of gaining insight into how they understand the world”, he said. These thoughts of Jean Piaget which he proposed in the 1940s despise all other theories and the it’s age long still remains to be properly tested. Despite also the fact that some very famous investigators have studied the same topic, it has been neglected by modern psychology.

The surefire method of how to make a baby laugh is by Tickling.

Casper Addyman, of Birkbeck, University of London, is out to change that fact with his survey result. He with his survey results believes that “we can use laughter to get at exactly how infants understands and views this world.  Casper Addyman who completed the world's largest and most comprehensive survey of what makes babies laugh, why they laugh? Presenting his initial results at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Berlin, last year in Berlin.  Casper Addyman via his website surveyed more than 1000 parents from around the world, asking those questions about when, where and why their babies their babies laugh.

The results from the survey are quite - like the research topic - heart-warming. “A baby's first smile comes at about six weeks, their first laugh at about three and a half months (although some took three times as long to laugh, so don't worry if your baby hasn’t cracked its first cackle just yet). Peekaboo is a sure-fire favourite for making babies laugh (for a variety of reasons I've written about here), but tickling is the single most reported reason that babies laugh”.

“Babies are far more likely to laugh when they fall over, rather than when someone else falls over

Importantly, from the very first chuckle, the survey responses show that babies are laughing with other people, and at what they do. The mere physical sensation of something being ticklish isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to see something disappear or appear suddenly. It’s only funny when an adult makes these things happen for the baby. This shows that way before babies walk, or talk, they - and their laughter - are social. If you tickle a baby they apparently laugh because you are tickling them, not just because they are being tickled.

What's more, babies don't tend to laugh at people falling over. They are far more likely to laugh when they fall over, rather than someone else, or when other people are happy, rather than when they are sad or unpleasantly surprised”.

From these results, the Freud's theory (which, in many cases was developed based on clinical interviews with adults, rather than any rigorous formal study of actual children- infants) - looks dead wrong.

In the Casper Addyman’s survey it was reported by parents that boy babies laugh slightly more than girl babies, both genders find mummy and daddy equally funny.

Do you know that Babies find us funny which caused them in different occasions to laugh even when they are too young to understand/ comprehend why we're funny?

Addyman’s survey even at the publication of this report continues as he still collect data via his website and other research methods, as he hopes that as the results become clearer he'll be able to use his analysis to show how laughter tracks babies' developing understanding of the world - how surprise gives way to anticipation, for example, as their ability to remember objects comes online.

According to Addyman, despite the scientific potential; baby laughter is, as a research topic, “strangely neglected”. Part of the reason is the difficulty of making babies laugh reliably in the lab, although he plans to tackle this in the next phase of the project. But partly the topic has been neglected, he says, because it isn't viewed as a subject for 'proper' science to look into. This is a prejudice Addyman hopes to overturn - for him, the study of laughter is certainly no joke.