Collection 3: "Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect" by Frans de Waal

This is why comedy shows on television have laugh tracks and why theater
audiences are sometimes sprinkled with “laugh plants”: people paid to produce raucous laughing at any joke that comes along.

Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance.

Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably
the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance.

This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start—not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation.

It began much more simply, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn.

Virtually all animals show the peculiar “paroxystic respiratory cycle characterized by a standard cascade of movements over a five- to ten-second period,” which is the way the yawn has been defined.

I once attended a lecture on involuntary pandiculation (the medical term for
stretching and yawning) with slides of horses, lions, and monkeys—and soon the entire audience was pandiculating.

Yawn contagion reflects the power of unconscious synchrony, which is as deeply ingrained in us as in many other animals.

If my companions are feeding, I’d better do the same, because once they move off, my chance to forage will be gone.

Finding himself in front of the cameras next to his pal President George W. Bush, former British prime minister Tony Blair—known to walk normally at home—would suddenly metamorphose into a distinctly un-English cowboy.

Identification is the hook that draws us in and makes us adopt the situation, emotions, and behavior of those we’re close to. They become role models: We empathize with them and emulate them.

Maybe all that the watching ape needs to understand is how the thing works. He may notice that the door slides to the side or that something needs to be lifted up. The first kind of imitation involves reenactment of observed manipulations; the second merely requires technical know-how.

Thanks to ingenious studies in which chimps were presented with a so-called ghost box, we know which of these two explanations is correct.

A ghost box derives its name from the fact that it magically opens and closes by itself so that no actor is needed.

We're beginning to realize how much human and animal cognition runs via the body. Instead of our brain being like a little computer that orders the body around, the body-brain relation is a two-way street.

The field of “embodied” cognition is still very much in its infancy but has profound implications for how we look at human relations.

The field of “embodied” cognition is still very much in its infancy but has profound implications for how we look at human relations.

The field of “embodied” cognition is still very much in its infancy but has profound implications for how we look at human relations.

One ape, Grande, stands on boxes that she has stacked up to reach bananas hung from the ceiling, while Sultan watches intently.

When I see synchrony and mimicry—whether it concerns yawning, laughing, dancing, or aping—I see social connection and bonding.

For example, I knew an old monkey matriarch with a curious drinking style. Instead of the typical slurping with her lips from the surface, she’d dip her entire underarm in the water, then lick the hair on her arm. Her children
started doing the same, and then her grandchildren. The entire family was easy to recognize.

Instead of each individual independently weighing the pros and cons of his or her own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind.