Laughing is contagious! (by Júlia Rockenbach)

I was looking for something interesting to write about here when I found a short text called “Why laughing is contagious". It reminded me of Douglas’ “show and tell” in English V, in which he talked about “Yawning”.
This text says that the University College London did a research which found out that the fact of people laugh without a reason, just because they see another person laughing occurs due to the action of “mirror-neurons”. They are located in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobule and are essential for imitation and language acquisition. This way, these mirror-neurons awake the comprehension of the meaning of gestures and body expressions and it makes us imitate what we see. The cause of this reaction hasn’t been known yet, but it might be because of a natural artifice that helps people in the social integration, unconsciously we want to be accepted by the group so we do what they do. This might be the same reason why we yawn when we see other people yawning, don’t you think?

This is not the text I read, but here you can read something about it.

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/061212_laugh.htm