Dr Caspar Addyman
Consulting Infantologist
Caspar Addyman is a developmental psychologist, author, technologist and baby laughter researcher. He is also, somewhat against his better judgement, an expert.
He studied mathematics at Cambridge, which seemed like a good idea at the time. And was refreshingly humbling. Then he spent ten years in international banking writing software for financial derivatives, which seemed like a worse idea. In between, he worked as a chef. None of this was planned.
A BSc and PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, followed by postdoctoral research in Burgundy (the place, not just the wine, though both were involved), and eventually a lectureship at Goldsmiths where he ran the Goldsmiths InfantLab for several years. His research covers how babies acquire language, their sense of time, their responses to music, and — the part that everyone asks about at parties — why they laugh so much.
It turns out babies laugh a lot. More than adults. Significantly more. This seems important.
In 2016, Caspar worked with Grammy-winning musician Imogen Heap to create The Happy Song — a piece of music scientifically designed to make babies smile. It has been heard by more than 150 million people, which is more people than have read any of his academic papers, and he has made his peace with this.
His popular science book The Laughing Baby (Unbound, 2020) is about why babies laugh and what that tells us about the human mind. His Babies Laugh picture book series (Campbell Books) is about the same thing, but written for an audience of babies. The stage show Babies Laugh Out Loud is about the same thing again, but louder.
He is currently Chief Insights Officer at PlayTandem.com, an AI startup focused on early childhood development, and an Extraordinary Lecturer at the Institute for Life Course Health Research at Stellenbosch University. He is part of the team building machine learning tools for the LEGO Global Parenting Initiative, which involves analysing parent-child interaction at scale. It is more joyful than it sounds.
He lives in Brixton, South London.