Laughing is the new pilates

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 4th, 2005

Hardly a month goes by that we don’t see some report of the positive health effects of humor. Ever since Norman Cousins got a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine– and subsequently rolled that up into “Anatomy of an Illness” and a cottage industry promoting laughter as healing– people have been making decent bucks peddling the notion that all manner of ill can be cured by laughter. Today, Associated Press reports that:

…American researchers have found that 10-15 minutes of genuine giggling can burn off the number of calories found in a medium square of chocolate.[…]

Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, recruited 45 pairs of friends, shut them in a room decorated like a cheap hotel– scientifically known as a metabolic chamber– played them comedy clips on a TV screen and measured how many calories they burned when they laughed.

We’ve stayed in many of those metabolic chambers! Our favorites are the metabolic chambers with a decent continental breakfast.

The most fascinating part, however, was this quote from the lead researcher:

“We didn’t tell them that the goal of the study was to measure laughter, because then they might have forced it and forced laughter is regulated by a totally different part of the brain. We wanted it to be genuine laughter.”

Forced laughter is regulated by a totally different part of the brain? To hell with healing… this merits further investigation. (And, we’ve always been skeptical of these workshops that corporations pay thousands of dollars for that make all the employees stand in a circle and laugh, laugh, laugh! It always seemed forced (and excruciating for those involved… and, we thought, of dubious value, therapeutic or otherwise. We suspect that the part of the brain that regulates forced laughter is right next to the part of the brain that regulates our urge to grab the nearest sharp object and plunge it into the person conducting the Laughter Is Good For Team Building! seminar.

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