A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (24 page)

That’s one reason that many arts schools now offer degrees in game art and design. DigiPen Institute of Technology, near Seattle, which awards a four-year degree in video gaming, is, as
USA Today
puts it, “fast becoming the Harvard among joystick-clenching students fresh out of high school.” The school’s nickname: Donkey Kong U.
²¹
The University of Southern California’s renowned School of Cinema-Television now offers a master of fine arts degree in game studies. “When USC started a film school 75 years ago, there were skeptics,” says Chris Swain, who teaches game design at USC. “We believe games are the literature of the twenty-first century. When you look at games today, it may be difficult to see that. But the pieces are in place for this to happen.”
²²

The purest expression of the centrality of gaming in the emerging economy might exist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, a collaboration between its College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon offers an entirely new degree: a master’s in entertainment technology, which it bills as “a graduate program for the left and right brain.” Students study everything from programming to business to improvisational theater—and earn neither an arts degree nor a science degree but an interdisciplinary degree that the school says is “the academic pinnacle of studies in this field, thus having greater significance than the M.A. or M.S., and the equivalent academic weight of the M.F.A. and/or M.B.A. degree.” If the MFA is the new MBA, one day soon the MET might be the new MFA. It’s a degree that requires and enables a whole new mind.

Humor

With the subject of games fresh in our heads, let’s play a game. I call it “Pick the Punch Line.” Here’s how it works. I’ll give you the first part of a joke—the setup. Then you select the correct punch line from four choices. Ready?

It’s a Saturday in June and Mr. Jones sees his next-door neighbor, Mr. Smith, outside and walks toward him. “Hey, Smith,” Jones asks. “Are you using your lawn-mower this afternoon?” Smith replies warily, “Uh, yes I am.” Then Jones says:

(a) “Oh well, can I borrow it when you’re done?”

(b) “Great. Then you won’t be using your golf clubs. Can I borrow them?”

(c) “Oops!” as he steps on a rake that nearly hits him in the face.

(d) “The birds are always eating my grass seed.”

The correct punch line, of course, is (b). Answer (a) is logical but not surprising or funny. Answer (c) is surprising, and its slapstick quality might elicit laughs, but it doesn’t follow coherently from the setup. Answer (d) is a complete non sequitur.

I didn’t hear this joke at a nightclub or on an HBO comedy special. I plucked it from a 1999 neuroscience study published in the journal
Brain
(which might explain why the joke isn’t exactly a side-splitter). To test the role the two hemispheres of the brain play in processing humor, two neuroscientists, Prabitha Shammi and Donald Stuss, conducted an experiment in which they administered this pick-the-punch-line test to a series of subjects. The control group, people with intact brains, chose (b), the punch line you probably selected. But the experimental group, which consisted of people with damage to their right hemisphere (in particular, that hemisphere’s frontal lobe), rarely chose that answer. Instead, they usually selected one of the other answers, with a slight preference for answer (c), in which Mr. Jones gets clonked in the nose by a rake.

From their research, the neuroscientists concluded that the right hemisphere plays an essential role in understanding and appreciating humor. When that hemisphere is impaired, the brain’s ability to process even semisophisticated comedy suffers. The reason has to do with both the nature of humor and the particular specialties of the right hemisphere. Humor often involves incongruity. A story is moving along when suddenly something surprising and incongruous occurs. The left hemisphere doesn’t like surprise or incongruity. (“Golf clubs?” it yelps. “What does that have to do with mowing the lawn? This doesn’t make any sense.”) So, as with metaphors and nonverbal expression, it calls over for help from its companion hemisphere—which in this case resolves the incongruity by making sense of the comment in a new way. (“You see,” explains the right side, “Jones is tricking Smith. Har, har, har.”) But if the joke-loving, incongruity-resolving right hemisphere becomes hobbled, the brain has much greater difficulty understanding humor. Instead of surprise being followed by coherence—the chain reaction of an effective joke—the attempted yuk just lingers, an incongruous, confusing set of events.

The importance of this joke-getting specialization goes beyond the ease with which someone can choose the proper punch line.
*
Shammi and Stuss maintain that humor represents one of the highest forms of human intelligence. “This entire story has profound implications,” they write. “The right frontal lobe has been (and in some cases still is) considered the most silent of brain areas. In contrast, it may represent one of the most important human brain regions . . . [and] is critical to the highest and most evolved human cognitive functions.”
²³

Humor embodies many of the right hemisphere’s most powerful attributes—the ability to place situations in context, to glimpse the big picture, and to combine differing perspectives into new alignments. And that makes this aspect of Play increasingly valuable in the world of work. “More than four decades of study by various researchers confirms some common-sense wisdom: Humor, used skillfully, greases the management wheels,” writes Fabio Sala in the
Harvard Business Review.
“It reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.”
²⁴
According to the research, the most effective executives deployed humor twice as often as middle-of-the-pack managers. “A natural facility with humor,” Sala says, “is intertwined with, and appears to be a marker for, a much broader managerial trait: high emotional intelligence.”
²⁵

"There is no question that a playfully light attitude is characteristic of creative individuals."

—
MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Humor can be a volatile substance in organizations, of course. “Attempts to manufacture humor can actually suppress it, while the suppression of jocularity may also lead to its resurgence,” writes David Collinson, who related the tale of the dour Ford plant and who studies humor in organizations.
²⁶
And it comes in different strengths with varying side effects. Negative humor, for instance, can be especially destructive. It can rip through an organization, carving divisions that are difficult to bridge. “Far from always being a source of social cohesion, humor can reflect and reinforce, articulate and highlight workplace divisions, tensions, conflicts, power asymmetries, and inequalities,” Collinson writes.
²⁷

But used more sensibly, humor can be a clarifying organizational elixir. “Jokes that people tell at the workplace can reveal as much or perhaps more about the organization, its management, its culture, and its conflicts than answers to carefully administered surveys,” Collinson says.
²⁸
Thomas A. Stewart, editor in chief of the
Harvard Business Review,
has suggested mining corporate skits for clues about an organization’s soul—after he discovered that many of Enron’s shady dealings were lampooned at the company’s talent show well before auditors had any inkling of wrongdoing at the now notorious energy company.
²⁹
And humor can be a cohesive force in organizations—as anyone who’s ever traded jokes at the water cooler or laughed over lunch with colleagues understands. Instead of disciplining the joke-crackers, as Ford did in the last century, organizations should be seeking them out and treating a sense of humor as an asset. It’s time to rescue humor from its status as mere entertainment and recognize it for what it is—a sophisticated and peculiarly human form of intelligence that can’t be replicated by computers and that is becoming increasingly valuable in a high-concept, high-touch world.

Joyfulness

Everything always starts a little late in India, except the laughter club, which begins exactly on time. At 6:30 A.M., Kiri Agarawal blows her whistle, and forty-three people—including Dr. Kataria, his wife, Madhuri, and I—assemble in a shaggy semicircle. Agarawal pauses—and then all forty-four of us begin walking about, clapping our hands in unison while shouting “Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha . . . Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha” over and over again.

We’re in the Prabodhan Sports Complex, a few miles from Kataria’s home in a residential section of northwest Bombay, where what passes for a “sports complex” is a crumbly concrete wall surrounding a muddy soccer field and a cracked running track. For the next forty minutes, I do things—in public, with strangers—I’ve never done before. With the other members of the laughing club, I move through a series of exercises that resemble yoga and calisthenics—with a little Method acting thrown in for good measure. One of our first exercises is the “Namaste laugh.” We place our palms together, bring them prayerfully before our faces in the traditional Hindu greeting, gaze at another participant, and then laugh. I find it difficult. Self-induced laughter is much tougher than those fake smiles I squeezed out in Chapter 7. So I begin simply bellowing the syllables, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” Then something strange happens. My forced guffaws begin to feel more natural, and the laughter of others seems to call my own out of hiding.

A bit later comes an exercise called “just laughter.” I follow the lead of Kataria, who’s come decked out in jeans, a diamond earring stud, and a red T-shirt that reads
THINK GLOBALLY, LAUGH LOCALLY
. He raises his palms upward, walks in circles, and repeats aloud, “I don’t know why I’m laughing.” I do the same. Kataria’s laugh—he often shuts his eyes tight—seems to transport him to another realm. Then, after each laugh, we do another one-minute round of clapping to the 1-2, 1-2-3 refrain of “Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha.”

The experience is simultaneously weird and invigorating. It’s weird to see forty-three people—most of them older women dressed in saris—doing the “lion laughter,” in which they stick out their tongues, hold up their hands as if they’re claws, and screech like people possessed. But it’s invigorating to be outside and to laugh for no reason, because—despite my skepticism—it does feel good.

Later, when we return to his office, Kataria tells me how laughter came to define his life. He was born, the youngest of eight children, in a small village in the state of Punjab. His parents weren’t educated, he says, but his mother wanted him to become a doctor. Kataria went to medical school and in the 1980s began practicing internal medicine from a mobile unit that he drove around Bombay. In the early 1990s, he began editing a health magazine,
My Doctor,
along with treating patients. After noticing that patients got better faster when they laughed, he wrote an article in 1995 entitled “Laughter: The Best Medicine.”
³⁰

“If laughing is so good,” Kataria says he thought to himself, “why not start a laughter club?” (Roughly one-fourth of the good doctor’s sentences seem to include some variation of the “Why not?” formulation.) “The idea came to my mind as a flash at four in the morning on the 13th of March 1995. And within three hours I went to a public park and started asking people if they wanted to laugh with me in a laughing club.” He had only four takers. But he explained the benefits of laughing. The five of them told a bunch of jokes, and afterward everybody felt good. They continued each following day, but by day ten they encountered an obstacle: they’d run out of jokes. Kataria was stuck. But then he says he realized that they might not need a joke to laugh. He talked to his wife, a yoga teacher, about creating a series of laughter exercises and concluded, “Why not combine yoga breathing with laughter to make laughter yoga?” And thus a movement was born. “If I were not a doctor, people would have laughed at me,” he says. That line always cracks him up. He closes his eyes, throws back his head, and laughs.

For Kataria, humor is not a prerequisite for laughter. The goal of his clubs is “thought-free” laughter. “If you’re laughing, you cannot think. That is the objective we achieve in meditation.” The meditative mind is the route to joyfulness. Joyfulness differs from happiness, Kataria says. Happiness is conditional; joyfulness is unconditional. “When you depend on something else to make you laugh, the laughter doesn’t belong to you. That’s a conditional laugh. But in laughter clubs, the source of laughter is not outside the body; it is within us.” Kataria points out that children don’t really grasp humor early in life, yet they laugh from the time they are infants. In fact, folklore has it that children laugh hundreds of times a day and adults barely a dozen. Yogic laughter in a group, he says, can help people go from the conditional happiness of adults to the unconditional joyfulness of children. “I want to help people reclaim their childlike playfulness,” he tells me.