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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them with the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Are you smiling there, Dar?

I am.

I am.

I think this is a really good topic.

A jolly topic.

It's jolly, certainly, but it's a really interesting topic.

Yeah.

Yes.

I mean, I would hope it was something that you had a few things to say on.

Because today, we've got a question in from a listener in Oregon in the USA.

Here she is.

Hello, curious cases.

My name is Taylor, and I would like to know what science might have to say about the nature of laughter.

What is laughter?

Why do humans laugh and why does it feel so good?

Do any other animal species have an equivalent of laughter or of humor?

And I've always assumed that biologically it probably had some kind of social bonding function, but it still seems mysterious.

Thank you so much.

A great question.

It is.

I'm just...

Sorry, I was enjoying you conducting there.

Okay here's the thing right?

You've spent your entire professional career surrounded by people laughing.

Yeah absolutely.

I mean I'm either doing it trying to make them do it or watching other people try and make them do it or attending shows in which I hopefully do it as well and for all that I think it's irrelevant to this.

I think comedy is not what this is going to be about.

Okay, hang on a second.

Yeah, I think that what we do is just an impersonation of actual laughter.

Okay, this feels like quite a big headline news flash.

Dara Brienne, one of the UK's most successful comedians of all time.

It's not really

a problem.

Never got a real laugh in my life.

And there'd be people who agree, who are like turning to their partners and going, I've always said that too.

I've always said he's never got a real laugh.

But I think that what we do is so mannered and strange that it's actually just trying to impersonate genuine laughter.

And I think a friend of mine is a comedy writer says that the only real laughter, the best real laughter, is two siblings at the back of a funeral.

And that you know that that kind of laughter, that kind of private joke, and it's uncontrollable.

And I think at the end of this debate, you'll find that comedy is only a tiny little subset, a tiny little corner of this entire debate.

All right, challenge accepted.

Okay, well, we are joined by two experts in the science of laughter.

We have Professor Greg Bryant from UCLA and Professor Sophie Scott from University College London.

Now, Sophie, Dara seems to think that laughter is a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of what happens in comedy, or maybe comedy is a tiny bit of a lot of people.

What's your take?

Well it's true that out in the wild, out in normal human social interactions, you

very rarely are laughing at jokes and comedy.

Most of the time when you laugh, you're laughing for purely social reasons.

You're laughing because there's other people with you.

You're 30 times more likely to laugh if there's someone else with you than if you're on your own.

And the more you like those people, the more you love those people, the more laughter there's going to be.

It lives lives in social interactions.

But interestingly, within those social interactions,

there are two different kinds of laugh.

And sometimes, like, you can be laughing absolutely helplessly, and you cannot stop.

And I think the last time that happened with me, I was reading out something from a newspaper to my partner, and I just thought it was so funny.

And I couldn't stop laughing.

I was properly crying.

I couldn't say what I wanted to say.

And that's a genuinely involuntary vocalisation.

But actually, most of the time in conversational speech, the laughter is so well-timed, it's people laugh together at the ends of sentences.

So, actually, in conversational laughter, it's most of the time not helpless involuntary laughter, it's more kind of communicative laughter.

And in fact, I think what happens in comedy isn't that people aren't laughing for real, they're laughing as they would do in a conversation.

And in fact, stand-up comedy has a lot of things in common with a conversation, it has that sort of rhythm, that to and fro, it's just all other things being equal, there's only one person talking.

So, you are controlling and guiding that laughter.

It's not, it's not fake, it's real.

Does that make you feel better, Dara?

I know,

I was never putting my self-esteem on the line here.

I'm just saying that I find it interesting that laughter is a mechanism in that situation because I've read a bit about how the research was done in these kind of things, which was people tried

sitting people in a room and putting a DVD on of a comedy show.

And when you sit on your own, you don't laugh out loud.

Nope.

Yeah.

And so then they just went out in the field and essentially eavesdropped.

Yeah, exactly.

exactly.

It was a guy called Robert Provine and he took the view that you should study humans the same way Jane Goodall was studying chimps.

Don't put them in a lab, go out and look at them.

He called it sidewalk neuroscience and there's a lot of strength doing it.

You find out a lot that way.

Like the fact that people mostly aren't laughing at jokes.

Like the fact that when someone's having a conversation, the person who laughs most, most of the time, is actually the person who's talking.

So they're using the laughter to get the people they're talking to to laugh as well.

So there's a real

very strong communicative element to that.

Give me an example.

I just want to picture it where it doesn't involve humour.

So, this morning I was leaving my house to go for the world's slowest jog, and I was just ahead of my downstairs neighbour who I could hear coming out of his flat.

So, I held the door open for him, not realising it's quarter past six in the morning and everything's completely dark.

And he jumped out of his skin.

And then I said, I'm really sorry.

And he started laughing, and I started laughing, and we laughed.

And because he's quite a big bloke, he could have also hit me.

This could have gone either way.

and in that sense we were both immediately using laughter because we do know each other and we are you know we're not like best friends but we've lived each above each other and below each other for years and we'd be using the laughter immediately as a way of kind of dispelling a stressful slightly frightening moment that actually had scared him and that's like an immediate that's maintaining a social bond and avoiding conflict when you already have or I was once on a train going all the way up to Lancaster and the woman across from me had got four seats all to herself and was like spreading out and then these two men got on just before the train left and sat down, one opposite her, one next to her and she said, her words were, I'm going to have to move.

I can't I can't I don't like the smell of coffee'cause they've both got coffees.

But what she did was she laughed as she said it.

She was like, I'm laughing at myself, sorry, this is ridiculous.

They laughed as well.

And what was rude I don't want to sit next to you because you smell was

managed completely smoothly, so they'll probably never meet again.

But it's an incredibly skilful use of this and and there's nothing funny happening, but we behave as if our intentions are positive and sort of we are we're on this kind of friendly, slightly playful footing and it makes everything just goes more smoothly.

So when you look around, you see those sorts of things happening all the time.

Yeah, I mean there was part of that research into into

was it sidewalk neuroscience?

They would see when there was a burst of laughter and then they would, because they were recording it, go back to the sentence that preceded it.

And the vast majority of them were just, oh well, or no, or something like that, or just factual statements or whatever.

I'll have a coffee, I'll miss my bus.

Yeah, it eases tension.

It helps you sort of show, I understand, I recognise, I remember that same thing, I agree with you.

I have an affection for you.

Exactly.

Does that mean that the comedian standing on stage doing stand-up, it's like the audience sort of communicating with the comedian that they like them?

Yes.

So I

used to think that

like in a comedy audience, because I'm an idiot and I have never done stand-up, I thought that people were sort of sitting sitting there going, oh, I like that joke and now I'll laugh.

And then I did a bit of stand-up myself and I realised it's not, no, it's really dynamic.

It is being coordinated by the comedian on stage much more than I'd realised.

And if you look at people having a conversation, you start to align your behavior in a way you haven't noticed.

So although we didn't agree to do this and nobody counted us in, as soon as we started having a conversation, we'll have started to breathe together because it helps us align our voices.

And that kind of that when you're having a conversation, you start to converge on the rhythm and the pitch of your voices.

Again, it helps you sort of do the the turn-taking.

And I'm really interested in, as a scientist, I want to spoil stand-up comedy for everybody, but I'd love to be able to get my hands on a comedy audience.

And I have tried a couple of times, quite hard to get people to laugh under these conditions, but to actually look at that kind of timing, coordination between what the comedian on stage is doing to the breath and the movement of the audience that's actually kind of queuing them in, in addition to everything he or she is saying.

how they're also kind of queuing that now is the time to laugh how you're leading them up to that yeah i mean i mean because a lot of it is basically you're creating tension and releasing tension.

That seems to be a lot of what happens.

And the most obvious example to give weirdly isn't from comedy, it's Wimbledon.

Wimbledon, where the crowd will watch everything on the edge of their seats, and something tiny, like a ball boy drops a ball or a bird flies in, and it gets this massive laugh from the audience.

That drives comedians insane because we go, that's not funny.

That's not a funny thing that just happened.

But it is a tension being released.

So a lot of the time, what you're doing in comedy is you're artificially ratcheting up tension in order to drop them, in order to lift the audience and just drop them.

And that release of tension causes a laugh because you're just aping that social phenomenon.

Are you saying you're actually a conductor for real?

I am the master puppeteer

of people's emotions and energy.

So we are just a contrivance in what is a far more interesting, rich, natural symphony of people laughing for 17 million different reasons.

Amazing.

I mean, so fascinating.

Greg, I want to bring you in here because Sophie there was talking about two different types of laughter, Greg.

Are these, I guess, distinct in the way that science thinks about them?

Yeah.

So as Sophie mentioned, there was

the kind of laughter that's produced by an evolutionarily conserved emotional vocal system that generates crying and laughter and then screaming.

And then there's the speech system, which is underlying our control of our articulators, our tongue, and allows us to make speech sounds and also allows us to imitate almost any sound we can hear great great can i ask you about another distinction as well um between real and fake laughter the say the volitional laughter and a spontaneous laugh involuntary laughter because they sound different are they give different we can recognize the difference in them can't we yes i mean for the most part when the people aren't perfect at it and so i think there's variation in people's ability to produce very real sounding volitional laughs.

I need to vouch for this.

And my brother can fake a glottal whistle when he laughs in a conversation.

That glottal whistle is that kind of

like whistling sound in muddy laughs.

Yeah.

And it's

normally generated under tremendous pressure, and that's why you get it in genuine laughs rather than sort of conversational laughs.

But all I'm saying is, don't trust my brother

because he's too good.

She's too good at faking it.

Well, I was going to say, you know, actors and other psychopaths are very good at producing real laughs.

No, You used the word, but I couldn't possibly comment.

I want to play.

I know, I know, I know.

We have an example of this.

It's quick, by the way.

It's very, very quick.

And there are four different laughs on it.

And they'll vary between spontaneous and volitional.

And you tell me which ones.

Which one do you think of spontaneous?

Spontaneous being involuntary and volitional is fake.

Yes.

Well, fake is a harsh word.

Yeah, well, it's socially.

It's a shorthand.

Gone.

Gone.

Okay, the last one's definitely volitional.

Okay, I definitely should hear it again because obviously

in experiments, we warm people up with examples so they know what to expect.

Go on, go, go, go again, go again.

Okay, I think real fake, real fake.

You're absolutely right.

I just said that.

Yeah.

You can hear the difference in pitch.

You produce

such forces when you laugh in an involuntary way.

You start generating really high pitches.

I've got an incredibly high-pitched laugh.

You probably notice it when I'm in an audience.

I have a very big loud laugh.

And

sometimes I ask my children if they enjoy sitting beside me when I'm really enjoying a show.

As a matter of fact, it is...

real, fake, real, fake, or let's say spontaneous volitional, spontaneous volitional.

We're just going to play it again so you can hear that as an example.

So you can hear it now that you know that.

The religion ones sounds so sarcastic.

It's almost like somebody is just.

So, okay, how good were people at picking up on this thing, Greg?

I think in that experiment, the average was about 65% correct.

And it would be 50-50 if they were guessing at random, would they?

That's right.

Right.

Greg, I'm intrigued by this notion that you can tell the strength of a relationship from the laugh.

Yeah, well, what we did is in conversations we recorded, we extracted people when they're laughing together.

We call it co-laughter.

And these are like little snippets that are around a second long on average where two people are laughing on top of each other.

And then we had those from conversations between friends and conversations between just newly acquainted and strangers.

And then we play those for listeners and we play them for listeners all around the world.

And we found that people were much better than chance at identifying whether the people were friends or strangers when they heard those.

Well, as much as if you're laughing on top of each other, then you're halfway there to having a successful relationship.

Did any of the strangers become friends?

Don't know, but I mean, strangers do it a lot less than friends, but they do do it.

There's something really interesting there as well about the fact that you were picking up on the co-laughter because it's when people share laughter, when people laugh together, that you find things like it helps them manage stressful situations.

There was a paper that just came out about politicians being asked difficult questions, responding with laughter.

And they found that if people's perception of them doing that was completely coloured by whether or not the person who asked the question joined in with the laughter.

Really?

So the person who's asked the question also laughs.

Everyone's like, yes, that was a great answer.

And if the person who asked the question is like, not getting a laugh out of me, then everyone's like, ooh, that's coming very badly.

So there's something very interesting about that kind of sharing.

Is it like there's no social communication between them if one of them isn't laughing at all?

There's probably at least two things that's going on.

One seems to be, and this is work by Robert Levinson in the US, that he's doing this longitudinal study of relationships.

And he gets married couples into the lab and he makes them stressed out while he measures their physiological responses and he stresses them by asking them a question about their relationship.

Tell me about a problem in your marriage.

Just run that one through your head for a second, how that feels.

And what he finds is everyone gets stressed out by that, and you see that in the polygraph.

But what he finds is that couples who use what he calls positive emotion, but he means laughter and smiling, get less stressed immediately and also in the long term are more likely to stay together and are happier in their relationship, but it only works if they both laugh.

So if one person's going, I snore terribly, don't I?

and the other person's going, It's a massive problem, you've got to stop.

No one feels better, in fact, if anything, you feel worse.

And so it's not that the laughter's making everything okay, it's that you you're negotiating your way to the laughter.

And that's so it's it's not just the shared laughter, it's that you you got there together Seems to be the thing that's really good about that, that kind of the magic of the co-laughter.

I mean, I just like the fact that we're setting a test for any couple who are listening now going, do we laugh the right way?

Are we laughing together?

Oh, no, we're not.

Hey, this is Sarah.

Look, I'm standing out front of AM PM right now, and well, you're sweet and all, but I found something more fulfilling, even kind of cheesy, but I like it.

Sure, you met some of my dietary needs, but we've just got it all.

So farewell, oatmeal.

So long, you strange soggy.

Break up with planned breakfast and taste AMPM's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit made with catry eggs, smoked bacon, and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit.

AMPM, too much good stuff.

And a fit of laughter, like a proper episode of Involuntary Laughter, you and a friend.

What's the...

What's going on chemically in terms of endorphins or chemicals in the brain?

Um, actually endorphins, they're they're they're cheeky little things.

They you get an endorphin hit from laughter, but you also get it from fake laughter.

Even comedy.

Oh, yeah, really.

Um Robin Dunbar's shown this.

You get a measurable change in pain thresholds when you've been to a comedy gig, when you've laughed helplessly, or even when you've just sort of gone, ha ha ha ha ha

it seems to be something about maybe the endorphin load of the intercostal muscles in the ribs that you're using to laugh.

You also get a reduction in adrenaline, so you are immediately.

In fact, I've found that if you measure people's heart rate, very sensitive to adrenaline levels, people's adrenaline levels start to drop in anticipation of something that will make them laugh, and their heartbeats start to slow.

But if you're laughing, if you measure heartbeats before and after laughing, it will be slower afterwards because of the drop in adrenaline.

And over a longer time scale, you also get a reduction in cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

So, on a long, longer time scale, you're more relaxed.

So, you feel better, you get high, you are calmer when you've been laughing.

While we're playing playing clips of spontaneous and volitional laughter, I um

I can't resist but play one of my favourite clips of all time, um which is Charlotte Greene presenting the Today programme in 2008.

Um and she's trying desperately to share some very serious news, but uh the clip it it sort of takes her and her co-presenter by surprise.

Have a listen.

American historians have discovered what they think is the earliest recording of the human voice.

It was made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison first demonstrated the gramophone, and featured an excerpt from a French song, Au Claire de la Lune.

The award-winning screenwriter Abby Mann has died at the age of 80.

He won an Academy Award in 1961 for judgment at Nuremberg.

Excuse me, sorry, Abbey Mann also won several Emmys,

including one in 1973 for

a film which featured

a police detective called Figueroa Kutchuck.

The character on whom a long-running TV series was eventually based.

Oh, isn't that delightful?

It's lovely.

It's absolutely lovely.

And also, Priscilla, because you know you shouldn't do that.

This is laughing at a funeral.

This is that.

I mean, there's a taboo element to this as well.

Absolutely.

Well, the BBC does not like its news broadcasters or its sports broadcasters showing emotion in the voice.

You know, so

it's a faux pas.

It's unprofessional.

But that's the power of the laughter.

That set her off.

And I think there was somebody who said, like, whispered to her, it sounds like a bee.

There's somebody on the room with her.

She's not on her own.

And they are trying to make her laugh.

And it's terrifyingly successful.

And she's desperately trying not to.

There was a in the training in back in Orchie, in Ireland, where I had training, there was a there was a note left of about that corpse thing, it's called, where you just collapse into laughter, and it had a withering line: if you are finding it difficult to stop laughing, the mere thought that this may be the end of your career should be enough to get the laughter under control.

Touche, okay, fair for you.

How about you, Greg?

Can you remember the last time you had uncontrollable fits of laughter?

I remember, I mean, I have a really old, good memory of being in court once with my brother.

And my brother was my legal guardian.

And we were sitting in court and we got the giggles, and we almost got thrown out of court because we couldn't stop laughing.

But we weren't trying to talk, but we were definitely not supposed to be laughing.

It is, it's siblings.

Siblings in a formal situation.

It really is.

Like the kind of closest relationship that you can have in many ways, like having grown up with them and then, yeah, and

perfect social communication in a tense setting.

Um, okay, well, all right, so we have we've established then we know that laughter's got all these kinds of social functions, but um, we've sort of touched on it a little bit with the strangers because I want to talk about flirting as well.

I uh don't know how many first dates um you guys have been on uh with boring men, but

the only way to make them tolerable is to find them.

Absolutely hilarious,

but if you do go on a first date and find yourself laughing a lot, turns out good start.

Because here is Professor Betty LaFrance from Northern Illinois University on why laughter is such a promising signal.

We love laughing when we have met somebody for the first time.

So it correlates with lots of other kinds of outcomes.

I would expect that individuals who produce and experience positive humor and relationships that they would last longer.

We know that they should actually report higher levels of satisfaction, likely higher levels of commitment, likely higher levels of this feeling of interpersonal solidarity.

I would expect all of those relational outcomes actually.

And even in courting behaviors, even early on, that's again, that is the glue that says we can give this a go.

that this is good for right now.

I feel comfortable with you, but I'm also opening up the possibility to the next stage, whatever that might be.

So, there's that glue mentioned again.

It does feel very intuitive.

So, what is going on here?

I mean, part of me thinks that it's the

laughter can remain very truthful.

You know, it's completely truthful with babies, and it's often truthful throughout your life, by which it means it's telling you something that you really feel.

So, I think one of the reasons why we laugh more in successful dates is because you like the person, and you're laughing because you like them.

and that's not necessarily something that's

going to be in an objective way completely linked to how funny they are or how funny you're being.

It's telling you something, the people that you want to laugh with and the people you do not want to laugh with really are telling you something very important that you can't really

argue away in terms of how you're feeling differently about those people.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think it does.

If anything, it goes the other way around.

It's not that they're doing a funny thing and that makes you like them.

It's feeling you in.

Yeah, it's you like them and therefore what they're doing is funnier because of it and what about it's an emotional truth like it's a very bare emotion it is um darwin thought that it was an expression of joy and

uh pank sap who's done beautiful work on laughter and rats thought that it's a it's an invitation to play that seems to be where you find it in across nature and greg's done lots of work on this it's associated with strongly associated with play vocalizations.

I think the main thing that we could kind of fold in for humans is that it's a social joy.

It's something that you experience when you're with other people and I think that's kind of how I think about it now.

It's a joyful expression but it is so totally associated with interactions with other people and not just anybody with the right people in the right places that that kind of joy starts shining through.

Are there other animals that do this?

I mean this idea of laughter being very primal, very emotional.

Do you see it in other creatures?

Well what we see is what we call play vocalizations.

And so yeah we have a paper recently showing that it's been documented in at least 65 species, mostly mammals, though there's three species of birds that have been reported to do it.

And a play vocalization is essentially a vocalization that happens immediately prior to a play bout, where the signal is designed to communicate, this is just play.

So these behaviors that are coming right afterward now should not be interpreted.

you know, as aggression.

So play is often play fighting or prey, predator, chase simulation.

And so if you come in growling and biting, biting, you need to vocalize first or signal in some way that you're not actually threatening.

So, we think that that function is actually highly conserved in humans as well.

And even to the extent of things like I'm making a verbal joke or I'm being sarcastic or something like that, people laugh first quite often, and that can help make it sound less threatening.

And you can say, I'm just playing.

And so, I have data showing that people think things are more indirect and more ironic when there's laugh associated with it.

And it has to do with the playfulness sound of the laughter.

But it is interesting, though, that it's like mostly mammals.

Has anyone ever seen a lizard laugh?

They don't play.

There's no lizards in the play.

Birds are lizards, so

some birds play, but non-bird lizards don't play.

Hey.

There's no evidence of laughter that's outside of a play context.

So do we use laughter?

to turn situations into play.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's an absolute hallmark of

arguably something like, you know, the first things that elicit laughter in babies are sort of playful things done by the parents, which can be tickling, doesn't have to be tickling.

But you've got to sort of show your intentions.

You don't just march up to a baby and tickle it.

You kind of set it up with lots of this is what my intention.

I'm going to do something here.

And the baby's like, oh, what's this going to be?

So there's,

it's a very strong hallmark, and it goes all the way through.

You know, children play or laugh all the time when they're playing.

And we tend to regard play as being a thing that children do, but people do less and less as they get older.

Is the same true for laughter?

Well, it's hard to say because one of the things that's definitely true about laughter is we have terrible insight into how often we do it.

So there aren't massive numbers of studies, but every study that's looked at it has found that people, everybody laughs more than they think they do.

So if you ask people how often they laugh, they're always wrong.

They're always laughing more than that.

So any study that you read that says, you know, children laugh a thousand times a day, and adults only laugh twice, it's just wrong because the adults will not be telling you something truthful.

We've found that

we've

created a questionnaire about people's experiences with laughter.

And one of the big things that comes out of this is how often people think they laugh.

And people really vary, very robustly in how much they think they laugh.

And that just does not predict how often people laugh.

One of the other elements in the questionnaire is how much people like laughter.

And that predicts how much people laugh.

And that does change with age.

So the older you get, you do like laughter more.

So if anything.

really?

Well, we haven't got data showing it.

We haven't got data showing it, but you know, you could easily come up with a thing describing things going in the opposite direction, certainly based on our, you know, extrapolating from our questionnaire.

Because there's one of the things I remember reading about tickling is that tickling tends to happen down in age.

You tickle children, you go, nobody tickles old people, essentially.

I remember something at the Royal Society when I was doing a presentation about laughter came up and went, I really like being tickled.

I was like, okay, right, so we're not going there.

Thank you for sharing that, but that's going to be the end of this whole conversation.

But I think, even actually, babies don't really like it.

There's an interesting thing where it's like, even with a baby, when you've got that kind of link set up, you just have to look like you're going to tickle them, and they'll start laughing.

Like, you got your laughter, you can stop now.

Don't go ahead with this.

Don't actually do it.

Yeah, don't actually do this.

Yeah.

So

there's something very complex.

Even with tickling, it's very complicated.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

So comedy is a small part of this.

Tickling, an even smaller part of it.

And if anything, should be less.

And as I said, it's a far richer, more complicated subject,

but reassuring that ultimately it's our ability to play with what it comes down to.

Yeah, it's very beautiful about that.

It's very nice.

Thank you to our guests, Professor Greg Bryant and Professor Sophie Scott.

Turns out you were right.

Yeah, I mean, honestly,

my job is really unimportant.

Well, no, you're a conductor now.

You're a

play conductor.

Yes, I am.

And I basically move the energy of the room around the place.

I mean, that's all I do.

Update your LinkedIn.

And buy a baton.

So

I will have nightmares about that fake laugh, though.

Ha ha ha ha.

That's, you know, everyone people are going, ha ha ha.

Do you think it's different because you're a comedian?

Oh, my God, it's the worst thing in the world.

Ha ha ha.

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Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

A brand new series with me, Armanda Unucci, and me, Helen Lewis.

A show all about the use and abuse of political language where we take back control of the airwaves.

And tell you what we're hearing on the doorstep.

Just what do these phrases actually mean?

Can you be part of the Metropolitan Elite if you live in the countryside?

And what does turbo charge mean?

And why do politicians need to say it every five minutes?

Exploring the verbal tricks of the trade.

And the effect it has on the rest of us.

Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Listen now on BBC Sons.