"Laugh The War Out"-Japanese Professor Yoji Kimura

And so the expert on communications has invented a machine to chart out laughter -- and a new unit of "aH" to calculate it.

"We have found that children laugh more freely, releasing 10 aH per second, which is about twice as much as an adult," Kimura, a professor at Kansai University in the western city of Osaka, told AFP on Friday.

"Adults tend to calculate whether it's appropriate to laugh and under those restraints they eventually forget how," he said.

"Laughing is like a restart function on a computer. Laughing freely is very important in the course of human evolution," he said.

Kimura, who believes in "a shift from a century of wars to a century of humour and tolerance," has studied the science of laughter for decades in Osaka, the hub of Japan's stand-up comedy scene.

In his theory, human laughter is produced in four successive emotional stages -- letting loose, then deviating from the norm, followed by freely laughing and then having the laughter overflow.

"I believe there is a circuit in the human brain that creates laughter through these steps to the stage of overflowing," Kimura said confidently. "Understanding this mechanism is the door to resolving one secret of human beings."