'Jamu' brand wins Digital Marketing Award 2011

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta, Fri, 09/30/2011

Tolak Angin, a brand of jamu (traditional Indonesian herbal medicine) made by PT Sidomuncul, won the Digital Marketing Award 2011 for its performance in the digital world.

The award was handed out by Marketing Magazine in recognition of brands at the cutting edge of marketing.

Sales of the product have grown 50 percent, while the Tolak Angin for children line has seen sales grow 20 percent, Tolak Angin product manager Retna Widawati said Friday as quoted by tribunnews.com.

The product has also recently become been exported for sale in China.

Do loved ones bid farewell from beyond the grave?

CNN News, by John Blake, CNN, September 23, 2011

Death doesn't sever the connection between loved ones, say people
who've experienced so-called crisis apparitions.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Some people claim that loved ones have contacted them after death
• Paranormal investigators call these events "crisis apparitions" and say they take many forms
• Some witnesses say apparitions appear lifelike, and that the images are reassuring
• Woman who encountered apparition: "He needed to say goodbye"

(CNN) -- Nina De Santo was about to close her New Jersey hair salon one winter's night when she saw him standing outside the shop's glass front door.

It was Michael. He was a soft-spoken customer who'd been going through a brutal patch in his life. His wife had divorced him after having an affair with his stepbrother, and he had lost custody of his boy and girl in the ensuing battle.

He was emotionally shattered, but De Santo had tried to help. She'd listened to his problems, given him pep talks, taken him out for drinks.

When De Santo opened the door that Saturday night, Michael was smiling.

"Nina, I can't stay long," he said, pausing in the doorway. "I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for everything."

They chatted a bit more before Michael left and De Santo went home. On Sunday she received a strange call from a salon employee. Michael's body had been found the previous morning -- at least nine hours before she talked to him at her shop. He had committed suicide.

If Michael was dead, who, or what, did she talk to that night?

"It was very bizarre," she said of the 2001 encounter. "I went through a period of disbelief. How can you tell someone that you saw this man, solid as ever, walk in and talk to you, but he's dead?"

Today, De Santo has a name for what happened that night: "crisis apparition." She stumbled onto the term while reading about paranormal activities after the incident. According to paranormal investigators, a crisis apparition is the spirit of a recently deceased person who visits someone they had a close emotional connection with, usually to say goodbye.

Reports of these eerie encounters are materializing in online discussion groups, books such as "Messages" -- which features stories of people making contact with loved ones lost on September 11 -- and local ghost hunting groups that have sprung up across the country amid a surge of interest in the paranormal.

Although such encounters are chilling, they can also be comforting, witnesses and paranormal investigators say. These encounters suggest the bond that exists between loved ones is not erased by death.

"We don't know what to do with these stories. Some people say that they are proof that there's life after death," said Steve Volk, author of "Fringe-ology," a book on paranormal experiences such as telepathy, psychics and house hauntings.

Scientific research on crisis apparitions is scant, but theories abound.

One theory: A person in crisis -- someone who is critically ill or dying -- telepathically transmits an image of themselves to someone they have a close relationship with, but they're usually unaware they're sending a message.

Others suggest crisis apparitions are guardian angels sent to comfort the grieving. Another theory says it's all a trick of the brain -- that people in mourning unconsciously produce apparitions to console themselves after losing a loved one.

A telepathic link between loved ones

Whatever the source for these apparitions, they often leave people shaken.

Nor are apparitions limited to visions. The spirit of a dead person can communicate with a loved one through something as subtle as the sudden whiff of a favorite perfume, Volk says.

"Sometimes you just sense the presence of someone close to you, and it seemingly comes out of nowhere," Volk said. "And afterward, you find out that person was in some kind of crisis at the time of the vision."

Many people who don't even believe in ghosts still experience a mini-version of a crisis-apparition encounter, paranormal investigators say.

Did you ever hear a story of a mother who somehow knows before anyone told her that something awful has happened to her child? Have you ever met a set of twins who seem to be able to read each other's minds?

People who are extremely close develop a virtual telepathic link that exists in, and beyond, this world, said Jeff Belanger, a journalist who collected ghost stories for his book, "Our Haunted Lives: True Life Ghost Encounters."

"People have these experiences all the time," Belanger said. "There's an interconnectedness between people. Do you know how you're close to someone, and you just know they're sick or something is wrong?"

An eerie phone call at night

Simma Lieberman said she's experienced that ominous feeling and has never forgotten it -- though it took place more than 40 years ago.

Today, Lieberman is a workplace diversity consultant based in Albany, California. In the late 1960s though, she was a young woman in love.

Her boyfriend, Johnny, was a mellow hippie "who loved everybody," a guy so nice that friends called him a pushover, she said. She loved Johnny, and they purchased an apartment together and decided to marry.

Then one night, while Lieberman was at her mother's home in the Bronx, the phone rang and she answered. Johnny was on the line, sounding rushed and far away. Static crackled.

"I just want you to know that I love you, and I'll never be mean to anybody again," he said.

There was more static, and then the line went dead. Lieberman was left with just a dial tone.

Nina De Santo says one of her friends stopped by
her salon to thank her -- a day after his death.

She tried to call him back to no avail. When she awoke the next morning, an unsettled feeling came over her. She said it's hard to put into words, but she could no longer feel Johnny's presence.

Then she found out why.

"Several hours later, I got a call from his mother that he had been murdered the night before," she said.

Johnny was shot in the head as he sat in a car that night. Lieberman thinks Johnny somehow contacted her after his death -- a crisis apparition reaching out not through a vision or a whiff of perfume, but across telephone lines.

She's sorted through the alternatives over the years. Could he have called before or during his murder? Lieberman doesn't think so.

This was the era before cell phones. She said the murderer wasn't likely to let him use a pay phone, and he couldn't have called after he was shot because he died instantly.

Only years later, when she read an article about other static-filled calls people claimed to have received from beyond the grave, did it make sense, she said.

Johnny was calling to say goodbye.

"The whole thing was so bizarre," she said. "I could never understand it."

He had a 'whitish glow'

Josh Harris' experience baffled him as well. It involved his grandfather, Raymond Harris.

Josh was Raymond's first grandchild. They spent countless hours together fishing and doing yardwork in their hometown of Hackleburg, Alabama. You saw one, you saw the other.

Those days came to an end in 1997 when Raymond Harris was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors gave him weeks to live. Josh, 12 at the time, visited his grandfather's house one night to keep vigil as his "pa-pa" weakened, but his family ordered him to return home, about two miles away.

Josh said he was asleep on the couch in his home around 2 a.m. when he snapped awake. He looked up. His grandfather was standing over him.

"At first, it kind of took me by surprise," said Harris, a maintenance worker with a gravelly Southern accent. "I wondered why he was standing in the hallway and not in his house with everyone else."

His grandfather then spoke, Harris said.

"He just looked at me, smiled and said, 'Everything will be OK.' "

His grandfather then turned around and started walking toward the kitchen. Harris rose to follow but spun around when the phone rang. An aunt who was in another room answered.

"When I turned back around to look, he was gone," Harris said.

As if on cue, his aunt came out of the room crying, "Josh, your pa-pa is gone."

"No, he was just here," Harris told his aunt, insisting that his grandfather had just stopped by to say everything was OK. He said it took him a day to accept that his grandfather had died.

"Honestly, before that, I never believed in the paranormal," he said. "I thought it was all fake and made up. But I just woke up and I saw him. It couldn't be my mind playing a trick. He looked solid."

Fourteen years after his grandfather's death, there's another detail from that night that's still lodged in Harris' memory.

As he watched his grandfather walk to the kitchen, he said he noticed something unusual.

"It looked like there was a whitish glow around him."

'Can you come out and play?'

Childhood is supposed to be a time of innocence, a time when thoughts of death are far away. But crisis apparition stories aren't confined to adults and teens.

Donna Stewart was 6 years old and growing up in Coos Bay, Oregon. One of her best friends was Danny. One day, Danny had to go to the hospital to have his tonsils removed. Stewart played with him on the morning of the surgery before saying goodbye.

She said she was in her bedroom the next day when she looked up and saw Danny standing there. He wanted to know if she wanted to go out and play.

Stewart trotted to her mother's bedroom to ask her if she could play with Danny. Her mother froze.

"She went white," Stewart said. "She told me that wasn't possible."

Her mother broke the news. Danny had an allergic reaction during surgery and died, Stewart said.

"When I went back to my room, he was gone," she said.

Stewart, now an Oregon homemaker and a member of PSI of Oregon, a paranormal investigative team, said the encounter changed the way she looked at death.

"These experiences have made me believe that those we love are really not that far away at all and know when we are not doing as well as we could," she said. "Just as they did in life, they offer comfort during crisis.''

Josh Harris says his grandfather, Raymond, pictured
with his wife, Barbara, appeared to him in an apparition.

Still, Stewart often replays the encounter in her mind. She asks the same questions others who've had such encounters ask: Did my mind play tricks on me? Could he have been alive? Did it all really happen after he died?

De Santo, the former New Jersey hair salon owner, has taken the same self-inventory. The experience affected her so much she later joined the Eastern PennsylvaniaParanormal Society, which investigates the paranormal.

She said she checked with Michael's relatives and poured through a coroner's report to confirm the time of his death, which was put at Friday night -- almost 24 hours before she saw him at her salon on Saturday night.

She said Michael's body had been discovered by his cousin around 11 Saturday morning. Michael was slumped over his kitchen table, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

De Santo was baffled at first, but now she has a theory.

Michael started off as a customer, but she became his confidant. Once, after one of her pep talks, Michael told her, "You make me feel as if I can conquer the world."

Maybe Michael had to settle affairs in this world before he could move on to the next, De Santo said.

"A lot of times when a person dies tragically, there's a certain amount of guilt or turmoil," she said. "I don't think they leave this Earth. They stay here. I think he kind of felt he had unfinished business. He needed to say goodbye."

And so he did, she said. This is how she described their last conversation:

As they chatted face to face in the doorway of her shop, De Santo said they never touched, never even shook hands. But she didn't remember anything unusual about him -- no disembodied voice, no translucent body, no "I see dead people" vibe as in the movie "The Sixth Sense."

"I'm in a really good place now," she recalled him saying.

There were, however, two odd details she noticed at the time but couldn't put together until later, she said.

When she first opened the door to greet Michael, she said she felt an unsettling chill. Then she noticed his face -- it was grayish and pale.

And when she held the door open for him, he refused to come in. He just chatted before finally saying, "Thanks again, Nina."

Michael then smiled at her, turned and walked away into the winter's night.

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Govt calls for breastfeeding in workplaces

The Jakarta Post, Tue, 09/27/2011

Given the rising number of female employees in their reproductive years, the health ministry has urged employers to accommodate breastfeeding for mothers in workplaces, to ensure optimal growth and development for babies.

“Sufficient attention is needed so that the status of working mothers does not become an excuse for stopping breastfeeding,” the ministry’s nutrition education and mother and child health director Slamet Riyadi Yuwono said on Tuesday as quoted by kompas.com.

Slamet said companies could provide breastfeeding time during work hours, a special breastfeeding area for mothers and their babies and facilities to pump and store breast milk in the workplace.

“Such activities can support mothers to breastfeed their children. Children are the successors of development, therefore we must give them a good environment to grow and develop optimally…,” he said.

According to the ministry, of the 40.74 million female workers in Indonesia, around 25 million are in their reproductive years or a period when they experience pregnancy, labor and breastfeeding.

'Islamic medicine' on the rise in Southeast Asia

The Jakarta Post, Associated Press, Jakarta | Mon, 09/26/2011

A 47-year-old housewife who recently started using Islamic medicine emerged tearfully from an exorcism, speaking of newfound tranquility after a turbulent period. Also, her abdominal pains are finally easing.

Suratmi, who suffers from an ovarian cyst, has been taking a mix of herbal medicine harking back to the dawn of Islam, as well as undergoing exorcisms at a clinic in Jakarta.

She is among a growing number of Muslims in Southeast Asia turning away from Western medical care in favor of al-Tibb al-Nawabi, or Medicine of the Prophet, a loosely defined discipline based on the Quran and other Islamic texts and traditional herbal remedies.

"I heard that so many people have been healed, so I hope Allah can help me. I followed His path here," said Suratmi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

The Islamic medicine trend is often associated with fundamentalists who charge that Western, chemically laced prescriptions aim to poison Muslims or defile them with insulin and other medicines made from pigs. Members of terrorist groups have been involved in Islamic medicine as healers and sellers, while some clinics are used as recruiting grounds for Islamist causes.

But the bulk of those seeking out Islamic clinics, hospitals and pharmacies, appear to be moderate Muslims, reflecting a rise in Islamic consciousness worldwide.

"Islamic medicine carries a cachet that, by taking it, you are reinforcing your faith - and the profits go to Muslims," says Sidney Jones, an expert on Islam in Southeast Asia with the International Crisis Group.

Islamic medicine, toiletries and beauty products have become a big business with a customer base in Southeast Asia alone of roughly 250 million Muslims.

The industry's advertising is as gimmicky as any in the West.

Capitalizing on the popularity of U.S. President Barack Obama, who spent four of his childhood years in Indonesia, one company produces a popular anti-stress concoction called Obahama - in a corruption of an Indonesian phrase for herbal medicine.

Siwak-F, also exported to the Middle East, is hailed as "toothpaste just like the Prophet used to use."

The industry also is going high-tech.

Malaysia's Petronas University of Technology is developing an application for mobile devices to query what Islamic remedies are recommended for anything from toothaches to depression, says Hanita Daud, one of the developers.

Like much of Islamic medicine, it's grounded on the saying that "Allah did not create a disease for which he did not also create a cure." This is taken from Prophet Mohammed's teachings known as hadiths, which along with the Quran make frequent references to diseases, remedies and healthy living.

What is termed classical Islamic medicine developed in medieval times when it far outshone that in Christian Europe, and exerted a significant influence on it.

Practitioners say many ingredients in today's treatments were used in Mohammed's time, including honey, olive oil, bee pollen, dates and black caraway - which one ad claims is "a cure for every disease but death."

In Indonesia, traditional medicine really took off after a government promotional campaign in 2009, says Brury Machendra, owner of the Insani Herbal Clinic in suburban Jakarta where Suratmi and up to 400 other patients per month seek treatment.

Only one such clinic existed in the Depok suburb two years ago, but now there are 20, with 70 others waiting for government permits.

Machendra, who also is secretary-general of the Traditional Herbal Medicine Association of Indonesia, says most Indonesian Muslims don't doubt conventional medicine. But he says Indonesia's health services are so poor and expensive that many people seek out alternatives.

His clinic offers herbal medicine, a bloodletting treatment known as bekam and exorcisms in which a white-gloved therapist places a hand on a patient's head while chanting verses from the Quran.

An exorcism costs about $12, while Machendra's government-certified herbal products such as the anticancer BioCarnoma and anti-diabetes BioGlukol go for no more than $5 for 60 capsules.

He acknowledges that clinics such as his benefit from traditional Muslim rules forbidding certain ingredients and that many fundamentalists "tell people not to go to infidel doctors and say that buying Western medicine is forbidden."

Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaida-linked militant network that is essentially banned in Indonesia, is believed to have links to some herbal manufacturers and operate many of the country's Islamic medicine clinics, International Crisis Group says.

But Jones says the clinics are aimed more at building solidarity among Islamists rather than recruiting militants.

Some doctors are trying to bring Muslim elements into the Western tradition.

"We practice evidence-based medicine but we incorporate the spiritual for both our patients and staff," says Dr. Ishak Mas'ud, director of Al Islam hospital in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

This approach, he says, allows such normally taboo practices as abortions and pig heart transplants if these can save lives.

"I don't agree with some clinics which say that, 'This is Islamic, so it has to be good,' " says Ishak, who was trained in Australia and Great Britain.

The 60-bed hospital, which attracts patients as far away as Somalia and Saudi Arabia, stresses holistic diagnoses, refrains from giving definite prognoses since "death is in the hands of Allah," and believes it is wrong to practice medicine with profit in mind, he says.

Fees are 20 to 30 percent lower than at most Malaysian hospitals.

"I am just the instrument of Allah and doctors must tell their patients this," Ishak says. "You know doctors can be arrogant. They will tell you that they can cure you in five days and five days later you can be six feet underground. It's not me that is healing. We are not powerful. In Islamic medicine, this is the key, the main concept."

Related Article:

Islamic Healing on the Rise in SE Asia

A man receives a treatment of bekam, or blood-letting by use
 of suction cups, at Insani Herbal Clinic in Depok on the outskirts
 of Jakarta. A growing number of Muslims in Southeast Asia are
turning away from Western medical care in favor of al-Tibb al-Nawabi,
or Medicine of the Prophet. (AP Photo/Irwin Ferdiansyah)

Bruce Lipton: being a cell of Humanity & Letting go of the illusion of separation

Bruce H Lipton, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit. He has been a guest speaker on dozens of TV and radio shows, as well as keynote presenter for national conferences. http://www.brucelipton.com

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German student arrested for smuggling 2.4 kg of crystal meth

The JakartaPost, Jakarta, Fri, 09/23/2011

German student Franco Holinski, 26, was arrested on Wednesday by Customs and Excise officers at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport for allegedly smuggling 2.4 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine worth Rp 4 billion (US$456,000) into the country.

Holinski is a student at a university in Germany. He is the first ever German citizen arrested for drug smuggling in Indonesia.

“He is the first,” Soekarno-Hatta's Customs and Excise enforcement and investigation unit head Gatot Sugeng Wibowo said Friday as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

He said that Franco had concealed the drugs in his luggage. “He was arrested on Wednesday but we have only revealed it today for investigative purposes,” he said.

Gatot said Franco arrived on Garuda Indonesia flight GA 098 from Dubai on Wednesday at 9 p.m.. When he got off the plane, customs officers pulled him over for showing suspicious behavior.

“Our suspicions were proven right when we checked his luggage and found packages of drugs concealed in it,” Gatot said.

After arresting Franco and interrogating him, the police's drug division along with the customs and excise team went to Fave Hotel in Wahid Hasyim, Central Jakarta, where they arrested the intended recipient of the packages, identified as Indian national Khanna Narendragangga, 53.

Gatot said he suspected they were part of the Iranian international drug ring.

Major Drug Bust at Bali International Airport

JakartaGlobe, September 22, 2011

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Indonesian customs arrested an Iranian man for allegedly attempting to smuggle methamphetamine worth $2 million hidden in oxygen tanks into the country, officials said on Thursday.

Rosul Solihikan, 30, was arrested on Monday when he went to pick up the two tanks filled with 18 kilograms of drugs he sent from Iran, said the customs chief investigator at Jakarta Airport.

“He and the package arrived on the same day last week on different flights from Iran,” Gatot Sugeng Wibowo told AFP, adding that airport officials always pay extra attention to packages from Iran.

The suspect, who claimed to be a technician for diving equipment, arrived on Saturday on Emirates and the package was on Qatar Airways cargo.

Iranian drugs syndicates have become the main suppliers of heroin and crystal methamphetamine to Indonesia, replacing West African countries, police say.

“He’s now under investigation of an anti-narcotics police unit,” said Wibowo.

Indonesia enforces stiff penalties, including life imprisonment and death, for drug trafficking.

Eight Iranians were sentenced to life last year for smuggling hundreds of methamphetamine tablets in their stomachs into the resort island of Bali.

Agence France-Presse

US Fights Poor Nations Over Medicine

Jakarta Globe, Gardiner Harris, September 19, 2011

Chinese and Indian drugmakers have taken over much of the global trade in medicines and now manufacture more than 80 percent of the active ingredients in drugs sold worldwide. But they had never been able to copy the complex and expensive biotech medicines increasingly used to treat cancer, diabetes and other diseases in rich nations like the United States — until now.

These generic drug companies say they are on the verge of selling cheaper copies of such huge sellers as Herceptin for breast cancer, Avastin for colon cancer, Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Enbrel for rheumatoid arthritis. Their entry into the market in the next year — made possible by hundreds of millions of dollars invested in biotechnology plants — could not only transform the care of patients in much of the world but also ignite a counterattack by major pharmaceutical companies and diplomats from richer countries.

Already, the Obama administration has been trying to stop an effort by poorer nations to strike a new international bargain that would allow them to get around patent rights and import cheaper Indian and Chinese knock-off drugs for cancer and other diseases, as they did to fight AIDS. The debate turns on whether diseases like cancer can be characterized as emergencies, or “epidemics.”

Rich nations and the pharmaceutical industry agreed 10 years ago to give up patent rights and the profits that come with them in the face of an AIDS pandemic that threatened to depopulate much of Africa, but they see deaths from cancer, diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases as less dire and, in some cases, the inevitable consequence of better and longer living.

The debate has intensified in recent weeks, before world leaders gathered at the United Nations for a two-day meeting ending today to confront surging deaths from noncommunicable diseases, which cause two-thirds of all deaths. It is only the second global health issue that the UN General Assembly has deemed urgent enough to call a meeting to discuss.

Participants in the negotiations, which include nongovernmental organizations, described the Obama administration’s position on the issue and provided emails from European diplomats that laid out the American stance, which has been adopted in the agreement’s working draft.

Although the draft agreement for this week’s meeting at the United Nations offers no support for poor nations seeking freer patent rules to fight cancer and other noncommunicable diseases, their advocates have vowed to continue fighting to loosen those restrictions not only this week in New York but in continuing international trade negotiations around the world as well.

US officials repeatedly declined to explain the US position, though Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said on Friday, “Regardless of what you call it, this is clearly such a pressing challenge globally that world leaders are gathering in New York next week to discuss ways to confront this threat.” The US government has a long history of pushing for strong patent protections in international trade and other agreements to protect important domestic industries like pharmaceuticals and ensure continued incentives for further inventions.

The new biotech copycats are likely to stir sharp debate among advocates for the poor.

Already, some contend that the billions spent to treat AIDS have crowded out cheap and simple solutions to other afflictions of poverty, such as childhood diarrhea.

The new biotech copycats will be less expensive than the originals, but they will never be cheap. It is unlikely that many African nations will be able to afford such a costly medicine for breast cancer, when far cheaper ones for colon and testicular cancer are lacking.

Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of the Indian drug giant Cipla, electrified the global health community a decade ago when he said he could produce cocktails of AIDS medicines for $1 per day — a small fraction of the price charged by branded pharmaceutical companies.

That price has since fallen to 20 cents per day, and more than 6 million people in the developing world now receive treatment, up from little more than 2,000 in 2001.

Hamied said last week that he and a Chinese partner, BioMab, had together invested $165 million to build plants in India and China to produce at least a dozen biotech medicines. Other Indian companies have also built such plants. Since these medicines are made with genetically engineered bacteria, they must be tested extensively in patients before sale.

Patents generally provide inventors rights to 20 years of exclusive sales, but international law allows countries to force companies to share those rights with competitors under a variety of circumstances, including to protect public health. Even then, countries are generally not allowed to export the products that result from forced patent sharing except under dire circumstances.

The New York Times

New Study Shows That Laughter Really Is the Best Medicine

Jakarta Globe, September 14, 2011

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Paris. A rattling good laugh with friends will help you deal with pain thanks to opiate-like chemicals that flood the brain, according to a British study released on Wednesday.

Researchers carried out lab experiments in which volunteers watched either comedy clips from “Mr Bean” or “Friends,” or non-humorous items such as golf or wildlife programs, while their resistance to mild pain was monitored.

Another test was conducted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where the volunteers watched either a stand-up comedy show or a theatrical drama.

In lab conditions, the pain came from a deep-frozen wine-cooler sleeve which was slipped onto the arm or from a blood-pressure cuff that was pumped to the threshold of tolerance.

For the Fringe Festival, the volunteers were asked to do a tough exercise -- leaning against the wall with their legs at right angles, as if sitting on a straight-backed chair -- before and immediately after the performance, to see if laughter had helped with the pain.

Just 15 minutes of laughter increased the level of pain tolerance by around 10 percent, the study found.

In the lab experiments, the neutral, non-funny programming had no pain-alleviating effect at all. Nor did watching drama at the Fringe Festival.

However, the study notes two important distinctions.

The only laughter that worked was relaxed, unforced laughter that creases the eyes, as opposed to a polite titter.

And this kind of belly laugh is far likelier to happen when you are with others, rather than being alone.

“Very little research has been done into why we laugh and what role it plays in society,” said Robin Dunbar, head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

“Using microphones, we were able to record each of the participants and found that in a comedy show, they laughed for about a third of the time, and their pain tolerance rose as a consequence.”

The protection apparently comes from endorphins, a complex chemical that helps to transmit messages between neurons but also dulls signals of physical pain and psychological stress.

Endorphins are the famous product of physical exercise -- they help create the “buzz” that comes from running, swimming, rowing, yoga and so on.

In laughter, the release comes from an involuntary, repeated muscular exertion that comes from exhaling without drawing a breath, the scientists believe. The exertion leaves us exhausted and thereby triggers the endorphins.

Great apes are also believed to be able to laugh but, unlike humans, they breathe in as well as out when they do so.

The investigators believe the experiments help to understand the physiological and social mechanism of how laughter is generated.

The group seems vital in unleashing the right kind of endorphin-making laughter, they contend.

Previous studies have focused more on why humans laugh, as opposed to how they do it.

One theory is that laughter helps transmit mating signals or cements bonding between individuals.

Another idea is that, in a group setting, laughter promotes social cooperation and collective identity. It is thus an evolutionary tool to help survival.

The paper appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal published by Britain’s defacto academy of sciences.

Agence France-Presse