Spit-up Night at the Improv | Kinderlab Blog

Infant laughter typically been ignored by the scientific community, says Caspar Addyman, these early laughs could be a window into the way infants start communicating with the world. “Babies can laugh long before they can talk, so perhaps laughter has a more important role being one of the earliest forms of back and forth communication,” he says. Addyman is a research fellow who runs the Baby Laughter project at Birkbeck, University of London. He began to think about baby laughter after looking around his family: his brother is a stand-up comedian, and his sister just had a baby. “I’d been doing research with babies for 8 years, and in the lab we sort of miss out on laughter. Most of the time we’re trying to bore babies to tears a little bit, and making a baby laugh is one of the best things about a baby,” says Addyman. more at Spit-up Night at the Improv | Popular Science. I wasn’t very on the ball when she called me up but Kate has done a great job of turning my confused rambling into clever sounding quotes. Her blog has only been running for a short while but it has already set a high standard in communicating cutting edge research on the mysteries of infancy. So it was a pleasure and an honour for our project to be featured. Although the biggest mystery is how she manages to combine writing such an excellent blog with raising a brand new baby of her own.]]>