Not a funny bone, but a funny....muscle?
November 17, 2015 8:41 AM   Subscribe

What is the reason that a leg massage would give me uncontrollable fits of laughter?

My partner has always been able to trigger me to laugh by finding a spot in my upper calf where if he digs his fingers in slightly and moves a nerve(?) fiber kind of back and forth, it causes me to laugh (a bit like being tickled, but with a slight edge of pain?)

Yesterday I had sore legs, and he was using a muscle roller stick on the back of my legs (thigh and calf), and it caused me to have sudden, deep, loud, absolutely uncontrollable laughing fits. Like, to the point that it kind of scarily felt like it wasn't really me laughing, and my partner said it didn't even sound like me laughing. Again, it was slightly painful, but in a 'good' way; the laughing continued until the knots were rolled out (even persisting just in one calf that was particularly knotty even when the others didn't cause it anymore).

What is the biological reason for what is going on here? A google search brings up laughing causing pain, or laughter therapy, rather than massage/pain causing laughing. The closest I could find was this video of a dude seemingly having a similar reaction.
posted by atlantica to Health & Fitness (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I get that when I foam roll along my hamstrings, and for me the laughter response is because it FUCKING HURTS but it also FEELS FANTASTIC and helpless laughter is how I tend to express my feelings when I have two nominally opposing emotional reactions at the same time.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:17 AM on November 17, 2015


Tickle and pain travel along the same nerve pathway - I have seen plenty of clients who perceive tickle first before pain. If the muscle in your calf is that adhesed to the muscles around it, pain is the sensation you would feel

(I work as a massage therapist)
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 10:57 AM on November 17, 2015


My sister and I used to "tickle" each other by using our elbows to grind into the other person's thighs and calves. It feels like regular tickling to me.
posted by pintapicasso at 11:00 AM on November 17, 2015


This happens to me during sports massages. My massage therapist said that it's because those particular spots are suuuper tight. It triggers the kind of response thebotanyofsouls mentioned.
posted by Flipping_Hades_Terwilliger at 11:16 AM on November 17, 2015


Sobbing, gasping in pain, and laughing all involve a repeated exhalatory vocalization. We easily associate sobbing and gasping in pain with something painful, but consider that a great many things that we laugh at are painful or tragic or horrible or at the very least embarrassing.

Example:

Q: What do you call a skeleton in the closet?
A: Last year's hide-and-go-seek winner.

Now picture something like that in real life - finding someone who had been missing for a year and who had died of thirst or suffocation? You'd be absolutely troubled and grieved, and sickened and probably replay a whole bunch of "If only I had..." scenarios in your head.

Q:What's the difference between bird flu and swine flu?
A:If you have bird flu, you need tweetment. If you have swine flu, you need oink-ment.

You can make a joke about bird flu and swine flu only because we fear an influenza pandemic that could kill thousands or millions of people.

Because we enjoy laughing we seldom think about how such a huge number of jokes represents someone having a devastatingly bad experience. The more horrible the experience, the funnier the joke. Laughter is absolutely a pain response, but it is specifically the pain response to something where you escaped the bad consequences. If a chunk of concrete and rebar comes crashing down on your car as you drive under an overpass and you survive completely unhurt you are quite likely to stand beside your destroyed car and laugh your head off. Oh my God. One foot closer and I'd have been dead! Six inches closer!

In some cultures and with some people laughing is the stoical way of dealing with pain. If may be that you are far too tough to howl and beg the masseur to stop, but you can't stop yourself from breaking out in sobs anyway; some very deep, very sensitive pain receptor nerves are providing strong signals. The nerves are there to tell you if you have just received a massive bruise or been punctured with something sharp. You haven't. You're not actually damaged at all. And yet the message from the nerve is an imperative one telling you that you are in a crisis situation, which is being over-ridden by your brain that knows that far from being injured your muscles are getting well treated.
posted by Jane the Brown at 12:15 PM on November 17, 2015


Whenever a very active baby stands on my legs (like, I'm holding them up, they stand on my thighs as I sit) this happens to me if they really dig in with their little baby feet. Uncontrollable. Sometimes alarms them. I've learned to shift them to a different position.

I think laughing releases tension and for some reason, some kinds of tension trigger laughs instead of groans of pain. There is probably a great medical study to be done about it, if one hasn't been already.
posted by emjaybee at 3:06 PM on November 17, 2015


I have the same response whenever anybody touches my calves. It's out of pain. I don't know why my brain has substituted uncontrollable laughter in place of screams of pain but it's less alienating to whomever's touching me I guess so I look at it as a feature not a bug.
posted by Hermione Granger at 3:45 PM on November 17, 2015


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