Institute For The Future

Laughter might really be the best medicine, and money *can* buy happiness (at least to some extent)

This weekend, I read with interest an article that appeared in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago entitled, "The Laughing Guru."  Turns out that Forbes and TIME have covered laughter yoga recently, as well. The New Yorker piece profiles Madan Kataria, MD, also know as the Guru of Giggling, who is the leader of a worldwide movement that promotes laughter as a cure for all kinds of problems—physical, psychological, or spiritual. Kataria trains others to lead laughter-yoga clubs; the article's author, Raffi Khatchadourian attended a five-day training session and observed:

Kataria told his trainees that laughter yoga “is based upon the scientific fact that, even if you laugh for the sake of laughing, even if you are pretend laughing, your body cannot tell the difference.” There is no such scientific fact, but the idea may contain elements of the truth.

Khatchadourian does a nice job of surveying the limited research that has been conducted since Norman Cousins wrote of his experience with laughter and his health in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1976. But we really do know very little about the scientific basis for the idea that laughter can make us feel better when we are sick, and may have preventive powers, too.  It occurs to me that we will be able to learn much more about these connections in the next ten years, as the granularity of brain imaging and advances in neuroscience reveal new understandings of our emotions and our health.  This is the premise behind our forecasts around neurocentric health (see, for example, our recently released HC2020 Signals & Forecasts Map).

Already, today, the National Institutes of Health’s Blueprint for Neuroscience Research has launched
a $30 million initiative, the Human Connectome Project, to create a functional map of the brain's 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.  It's kind of mind-blowing, so to speak, to imagine the transformative research that is likely to emerge from this kind of knowledge base.

Another story that was all over the news last week was the release of an analysis of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and a colleague of his at Princeton's Center for Health and Well-Being. The Well-Being Index is a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. Kahneman and Angus Deaton (whose work I blogged about briefly two years ago) studied more than 450,000 responses, looking for correlates between emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale).  They explain:

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it.

They found that:

 

 

Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ?$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone.

 

They concluded that "high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being." 

This year, the Health Horizons Program has been looking at the future of well-being in the context of science and technology.  This brings me back to my earlier comment, about neurocentric health, and the possibility that we will someday be able to identify some of the biological connections between external factors in our lives, and our emotional health and sense of well being.

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