New Gigglers.tv Shows Laughing Is Contagious

Ever heard someone laugh so hard it made you crack up too? You might be one of many for whom laughing is contagious.

That’s the idea behing Gigglers.tv, a website that mashes up hundreds of ten-second clips featuring the best laughs from around the internet and allows people to upload their favorite sequences.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc[/youtube]

Leonora Furher, one of the students behind the project, tells NoCamels: “Laughter is a border crossing universal language with proven therapeutic effects on the mind and body.”

The idea might sound simplistic, but that’s exactly why it works: Seeing a baby laugh so hard he is almost crying, or a woman rolled over on the floor making hyena-like sounds, somehow causes viewers to start giggling.

And it seems even researchers agree with Gigglers’ motto that laughter can be spread.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHfbpL0NDmw[/youtube]

Researchers at University College London and Imperial College London found in 2006 that positive sounds such as laughter or a triumphant “woo hoo!” trigger a strong response in the listener’s brain.

“It seems that it’s absolutely true that ‘laugh and the whole world laughs with you’,” said Sophie Scott of University College London, one of the researchers.

“Gigglers.tv aspires to make this fact known through our motto ‘spread the laugh,’ and turn the world into a happier place,” Fuhrer says.

“We hope that users from around the world will upload and share laughter videos in order to form an international laughter reservoir for everyone to enjoy.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7mOzWQSnaQ[/youtube]

Gigglers.tv was founded by a group of seven students in the Media Innovation Lab(Milab) of IDC Herzliya in Israel. The Project is sponsored by Shari Arison Awareness Communication Center and by EOL, a non profit organization of the Ted Arison Philanthropy Group.

The group used a development of Youtube’s application programming interface (API) to build their program.

See Gigglers’ video here