Laughter: the shared, high-speed transmission of supralinguistic intelligence assets. Mourning is similar, but not quite as spontaneously contagious.

Notice that both produce relatively contagious high-pitched vocalizations? This is a clue to the spontaneous unifications these events actively accomplish and the momentous nature of the content they communicate.

If we could only understand what laughter and mourning actually represent, we’d have a shot at sensing why they’re more crucial to our humanity than all the posturings of science, language, art, or artifice…