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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here,

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Speaker 1: a laughter can be contagious, which can lead to some

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Speaker 1: happy good times. As social animals, we humans laugh a

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Speaker 1: lot more heartily when others are laughing too. But laughter

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Speaker 1: isn't always a gleeful response. Like other more negative coded

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Speaker 1: symptoms like crying, fainting, and shortness of breath, it can

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Speaker 1: be a sign that someone is feeling really distressed. In

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Speaker 1: January of nineteen sixty two, in a small British run

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Speaker 1: boarding school in a remote town on the coast of

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Speaker 1: Lake Victoria in what's now Tanzania, three girls began laughing,

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Speaker 1: possibly in response to a joke, and couldn't stop. Soon,

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Speaker 1: the fit of giggles spread to their classmates until nearly

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Speaker 1: sixty percent of the students. We're experiencing a rare collection

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Speaker 1: of symptoms. The students were restless, alternating between uncontrollable bouts

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Speaker 1: of laughter and sobbing that lasted from a few minutes

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Speaker 1: to a few hours at a time. Some of the

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Speaker 1: girls experienced other symptoms like physical pain, respiratory problems, fainting,

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Speaker 1: and rashes. Psychologists, doctors and other scientists were called in,

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Speaker 1: all of them at a loss for an explanation for

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Speaker 1: what was happening. No toxins or other environmental factors seemed

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Speaker 1: to be causing the laughter epidemic, and all of the

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Speaker 1: girl's lab tests came back normal. By March, the school

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Speaker 1: officials gave up and requested that parents take their daughters home.

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Speaker 1: But as the girls fanned out into their respective communities

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Speaker 1: around the country, their families and people and their villages

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Speaker 1: started laughing too. Other schools became affected, and fourteen shut

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Speaker 1: down temporarily. In all, hundreds of people were infected by

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Speaker 1: laughter over the course of eighteen ten months, mostly young

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Speaker 1: people and primarily girls, but people of all demographics came

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Speaker 1: down with the laughing sickness. Luckily, there were no fatalities.

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Speaker 1: Experts who have assessed this bizarre and singular epidemic, both

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Speaker 1: at the time and more recently, say that it was

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Speaker 1: a mass psychogenic illness or MPI, what might colloquially be

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Speaker 1: termed as mass hysteria. This can involve fast spreading physiological

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Speaker 1: symptoms that happen as a result of a stressful situation

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Speaker 1: experienced by a group of people. Symptoms don't usually involve laughter,

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Speaker 1: but often include some of the other symptoms seen here,

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Speaker 1: like fainting, chest pressure, trouble breathing, facial ticks, and crying.

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Speaker 1: The powerful collective trauma that seems to have occurred at

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Speaker 1: the Tanzanian boarding school might have resulted from the students

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Speaker 1: feeling trapped in a strict environment run by British foreigners

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Speaker 1: and from being away from their families. However, that wouldn't

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Speaker 1: explain the hundreds of other people up and down the

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Speaker 1: coast of Lake Victoria coming down with the same symptoms.

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Speaker 1: The most plausible hypothesis for hundreds of people in rural

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Speaker 1: communities coming down with a mass sociogenic illness has to

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Speaker 1: do with what happened in the country in the months

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Speaker 1: leading up to it. In late nineteen sixty one, the

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Speaker 1: territory that would become Tanzania, then called Tenganyika, gained independence.

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Speaker 1: It had been a colony of Germany and then the

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Speaker 1: United Kingdom since the eighteen eighties. Although this sounds like

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Speaker 1: a positive step, it through the country into cultural chaos.

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Speaker 1: About a month before the laughter epidemic began. What became

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Speaker 1: Tanzania was suddenly a socialist state, and the new government

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Speaker 1: was eager to make changes. Local clans were broken up

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Speaker 1: and land changed hands almost overnight. There was a huge

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Speaker 1: amount of pressure to adopt Christianity and new s systems

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Speaker 1: of government, replacing the belief systems and social structures that

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Speaker 1: had endured in various measures for hundreds or even thousands

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Speaker 1: of years. People were even offered money to choose one

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Speaker 1: church over another. Life there became very different all at once,

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Speaker 1: and it's easy to imagine how stressful that must have

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Speaker 1: been for everyone. Humans looked to each other to know

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Speaker 1: how to behave, and it's possible that the first girls

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Speaker 1: who couldn't stop laughing had just had enough, maybe of

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Speaker 1: boarding school, maybe of the new order or disorder of things.

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Speaker 1: Their schoolmates might have seen their uncontrollable laughter and thought,

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Speaker 1: maybe subconsciously, I feel like that too. Over the next

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Speaker 1: eighteen months, people all over the country expressed their fear, anxiety, grief, confusion,

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Speaker 1: and sense of overwhelming stress through laughter. Sometimes a good

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Speaker 1: laugh can make you feel better, but experts are doubtful

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Speaker 1: that this laughter improved anybody's existential crisis. A wave after

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Speaker 1: wave of the laughing epidemic shivered through Tanzania until it

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Speaker 1: eventually stopped altogether. It's the only one of its kind

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Speaker 1: to have ever been recorded, and researchers are still trying

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Speaker 1: to detangle the stigma around such quote unquote hysterical behavior,

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Speaker 1: to figure out how to report it, how to treat

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Speaker 1: it when it does crop up, and ultimately how to

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Speaker 1: help populations recognize and dissipate these levels of stress before

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Speaker 1: they become no laughing matter. Today's episode is based on

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Speaker 1: the article not So Funny the mysterious nineteen sixty two

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Speaker 1: Tanganika laughter Epidemic on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Jeslynshields.

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Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how

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Speaker 1: stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four

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Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app,

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Speaker 1: M