Free The Social Animal by David Brooks Page A

over and over. Harold would stare in anticipation of the ball being dropped and then let rip with squeals of delight when he saw it bounce, his head bobbing, his tongue trembling, his eyes moving delightedly from face to face. Rob and Julia matched him squeal for squeal, their voices blending and modulating with his.
    These were the best moments of their days—the little games of peekaboo, the wrestling and tickling on the floor. Sometimes Julia would hold a little washcloth in her mouth over the changing table, and Harold would grab it and hilariously try to cram it back in. It was the repetition of predictable surprise that sent Harold into ecstasy. The games gave him a sense of mastery—that he was beginning to understand the patterns of the world. They gave him that sensation—which is something like pure joy for babies—of feeling in perfect synchronicity with Mom and Dad.
     
    Laughter exists for a reason, and it probably existed before humans developed language. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland has found that people are thirty times more likely to laugh when they are with other people than when they are alone. When people are in bonding situations, laughter flows. Surprisingly, people who are speaking are 46 percent more likely to laugh during conversation than people who are listening. And they’re not exactly laughing at hilarious punch lines. Only 15 percent of the sentences that trigger laughter are funny in any discernable way. Instead, laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances.
     
    Some jokes, like puns, are asocial and are often relished by those suffering from autism. But most jokes are intensely social and bubble up when people find a solution to some social incongruity. Laughter is a language that people use to bond, to cover over social awkwardness or to reinforce bonding that has already occurred. This can be good, as when a crowd laughs together, or bad, as when a crowd ridicules a victim, but laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.”
    Night after night, Harold and his parents would try to fall into rhythm with one another. Sometimes they failed. Rob and Julia would be unable to get inside Harold’s mind and figure out what he needed to soothe his agony. Sometimes they succeeded. And when they did, laughter was the reward.
    If you had to step back and ask where Harold came from, you could give a biological answer, and explain conception and pregnancy and birth. But if you really wanted to explain where the essence of Harold—or the essence of any person—came from, you would have to say that first there was a relationship between Harold and his parents. And that relationship had certain qualities. And then, as Harold matured and developed self-consciousness, those qualities became individualized, and came to exist in him even when he was apart from his parents. That is to say, people don’t develop first and create relationships. People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds.
    As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother’s form years before it can recognize a self in its own.”
     
    Coleridge described how his own child, then three years old, awoke during the night and called out to his mother. “Touch me, only touch me