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Stuart Brown, M.D. is our guest blogger during the week of March 2nd. If you have any questions for Stuart Brown, M.D., add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is some more information about Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, M.D. and Christopher Vaughan:

From a leading expert, a groundbreaking book on the science of play, and its essential role in fueling our intelligence and happiness throughout our lives.

We’ve all seen the happiness in the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing with glee across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless and all-consuming. And, most important, it’s fun.

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I'm not writing. Just a few years ago, four or five if I want to be near exact, in what I like to call my Jesus freak phase, I told myself that procrastination was a sin. This didn't make me stop procrastinating or even curtailing it much, but it did create a tremendous guilt complex, which among other things made me procrastinate even more.

Until last November's election I often wrote about how I was still waiting for the 21st century to start. That so much of what we were going through; far right politics, homophobia and sexism, basic ignorance and prejudice were such twentieth century problems that I was depressed that we had dragged them into the 21st. I kept waiting for new politics, new thinking, hell a new cut of jeans, anything that said categorically that we had set off a new explosion, and were not coasting on the last century's fallout.