Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here,
Speaker 1: a laughter can be contagious, which can lead to some
Speaker 1: happy good times. As social animals, we humans laugh a
Speaker 1: lot more heartily when others are laughing too. But laughter
Speaker 1: isn't always a gleeful response. Like other more negative coded
Speaker 1: symptoms like crying, fainting, and shortness of breath, it can
Speaker 1: be a sign that someone is feeling really distressed. In
Speaker 1: January of nineteen sixty two, in a small British run
Speaker 1: boarding school in a remote town on the coast of
Speaker 1: Lake Victoria in what's now Tanzania, three girls began laughing,
Speaker 1: possibly in response to a joke, and couldn't stop. Soon,
Speaker 1: the fit of giggles spread to their classmates until nearly
Speaker 1: sixty percent of the students. We're experiencing a rare collection
Speaker 1: of symptoms. The students were restless, alternating between uncontrollable bouts
Speaker 1: of laughter and sobbing that lasted from a few minutes
Speaker 1: to a few hours at a time. Some of the
Speaker 1: girls experienced other symptoms like physical pain, respiratory problems, fainting,
Speaker 1: and rashes. Psychologists, doctors and other scientists were called in,
Speaker 1: all of them at a loss for an explanation for
Speaker 1: what was happening. No toxins or other environmental factors seemed
Speaker 1: to be causing the laughter epidemic, and all of the
Speaker 1: girl's lab tests came back normal. By March, the school
Speaker 1: officials gave up and requested that parents take their daughters home.
Speaker 1: But as the girls fanned out into their respective communities
Speaker 1: around the country, their families and people and their villages
Speaker 1: started laughing too. Other schools became affected, and fourteen shut
Speaker 1: down temporarily. In all, hundreds of people were infected by
Speaker 1: laughter over the course of eighteen ten months, mostly young
Speaker 1: people and primarily girls, but people of all demographics came
Speaker 1: down with the laughing sickness. Luckily, there were no fatalities.
Speaker 1: Experts who have assessed this bizarre and singular epidemic, both
Speaker 1: at the time and more recently, say that it was
Speaker 1: a mass psychogenic illness or MPI, what might colloquially be
Speaker 1: termed as mass hysteria. This can involve fast spreading physiological
Speaker 1: symptoms that happen as a result of a stressful situation
Speaker 1: experienced by a group of people. Symptoms don't usually involve laughter,
Speaker 1: but often include some of the other symptoms seen here,
Speaker 1: like fainting, chest pressure, trouble breathing, facial ticks, and crying.
Speaker 1: The powerful collective trauma that seems to have occurred at
Speaker 1: the Tanzanian boarding school might have resulted from the students
Speaker 1: feeling trapped in a strict environment run by British foreigners
Speaker 1: and from being away from their families. However, that wouldn't
Speaker 1: explain the hundreds of other people up and down the
Speaker 1: coast of Lake Victoria coming down with the same symptoms.
Speaker 1: The most plausible hypothesis for hundreds of people in rural
Speaker 1: communities coming down with a mass sociogenic illness has to
Speaker 1: do with what happened in the country in the months
Speaker 1: leading up to it. In late nineteen sixty one, the
Speaker 1: territory that would become Tanzania, then called Tenganyika, gained independence.
Speaker 1: It had been a colony of Germany and then the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom since the eighteen eighties. Although this sounds like
Speaker 1: a positive step, it through the country into cultural chaos.
Speaker 1: About a month before the laughter epidemic began. What became
Speaker 1: Tanzania was suddenly a socialist state, and the new government
Speaker 1: was eager to make changes. Local clans were broken up
Speaker 1: and land changed hands almost overnight. There was a huge
Speaker 1: amount of pressure to adopt Christianity and new s systems
Speaker 1: of government, replacing the belief systems and social structures that
Speaker 1: had endured in various measures for hundreds or even thousands
Speaker 1: of years. People were even offered money to choose one
Speaker 1: church over another. Life there became very different all at once,
Speaker 1: and it's easy to imagine how stressful that must have
Speaker 1: been for everyone. Humans looked to each other to know
Speaker 1: how to behave, and it's possible that the first girls
Speaker 1: who couldn't stop laughing had just had enough, maybe of
Speaker 1: boarding school, maybe of the new order or disorder of things.
Speaker 1: Their schoolmates might have seen their uncontrollable laughter and thought,
Speaker 1: maybe subconsciously, I feel like that too. Over the next
Speaker 1: eighteen months, people all over the country expressed their fear, anxiety, grief, confusion,
Speaker 1: and sense of overwhelming stress through laughter. Sometimes a good
Speaker 1: laugh can make you feel better, but experts are doubtful
Speaker 1: that this laughter improved anybody's existential crisis. A wave after
Speaker 1: wave of the laughing epidemic shivered through Tanzania until it
Speaker 1: eventually stopped altogether. It's the only one of its kind
Speaker 1: to have ever been recorded, and researchers are still trying
Speaker 1: to detangle the stigma around such quote unquote hysterical behavior,
Speaker 1: to figure out how to report it, how to treat
Speaker 1: it when it does crop up, and ultimately how to
Speaker 1: help populations recognize and dissipate these levels of stress before
Speaker 1: they become no laughing matter. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article not So Funny the mysterious nineteen sixty two
Speaker 1: Tanganika laughter Epidemic on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Jeslynshields.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
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