[Wild-Woman]

Originally Posted by badgerwatcher

Maybe depression, to which I succumb occasionally, is a 'luxury' of modern times! If your days revolved around finding sufficient food and shelter to get you through until tomorrow, maybe there wasn't much time for phylosophical thought! And anyone sitting around staring gloomily into space probably just got eaten by something big and fierce! Or maybe our adreniline balances were better tuned and therefore we were less chemically predisposed to depressive illnesses. I have had cognitive therapy for agorophobia, and once I could visualise the rush of adreniline which fear produces as a bottle of chemical which would flow out of the system in its own time, I broke the fear cycle and gained some control over the agorophobia. Maybe using that chemical to fight an aggressor or run away is much healthier than what we live with nowadays, where emotions are conventionally supressed. And I'm sure laughter, too, is a reflex which is a tension release mechanism, and therefore built in to us as much as all our other reflexes, so we would be unable under normal circumstances not to laugh when conditions were right.

Clever way of looking at it. I suppose also that when a baby starts to laugh, it's a response to stimuli rather than understanding the joke. Therefore cave babies would surely have been the same.