In recent months, Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford university, has been inflicting pain on volunteers as part of an experiment in cognitive development. These pain tests come with a twist. Some of the volunteers have suffered their ordeals before and after watching golf videos or a serious theatre play (Dunbar travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe festival for a number of experiments). Others have watched comedy shows.
Dunbar’s exercise is producing a powerful insight: if you want to minimise pain, watch something funny, not golf videos. Better still, do it as part of a group of four people, since this typically increases laughter levels by up to 30 times. “The National Health Service could cut its costs dramatically just by doing this,” Dunbar observes, arguing that similar pain-reducing results can also be achieved by getting groups of people to dance together or perform religious rituals.
This should come as no surprise: we all instinctively know that dancing, laughing or going to jolly parties tends to put us in a better mood. But Dunbar thinks there is a more important evolutionary twist at work. Two decades ago, he shot to fame by declaring that the optimum size of a social group was about 150-strong; our human brains are simply not large enough to cope with the cognitive stress and complexities of maintaining close social ties with more people. Thus, if you look at the size of medieval European villages or how the Romans organised their armies – or even how many Christmas cards people typically send – that 150 number keeps cropping up. Primates, however, instinctively huddle in much smaller groups than humans because their brains are smaller.