Family & Relationships
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.
As we become adults, taking time to play feels like a guilty pleasure—a distraction from “real” work and life. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. In fact, our ability to play throughout life is the single most important factor in determining our success and happiness.
Dr. Brown has spent his career studying animal behavior and conducting more than six thousand “play histories” of humans from all walks of life—from serial murderers to Nobel Prize winners. Backed by the latest research, Play explains why play is essential to our social skills, adaptability, intelligence, creativity, ability to problem solve, and more. Play is hardwired into our brains—it is the mechanism by which we become resilient, smart, and adaptable people.
Beyond play's role in our personal fulfillment, its benefits have profound implications for child development and the way we parent, education and social policy, business innovation, productivity, and even the future of our society. From new research suggesting the direct role of three–dimensional–object play in shaping our brains to animal studies showing the startling effects of the lack of play, Brown provides a sweeping look at the latest breakthroughs in our understanding of the importance of this behavior. A fascinating blend of cutting–edge neuroscience, biology, psychology, social science, and inspiring human stories of the transformative power of play, this book proves why play just might be the most important work we can ever do.
Read chapter one of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (Continued...)
I have spent a career studying play, communicating the science of play to the public, and consulting for Fortune 500 companies on how to incorporate it into business. I have used play therapies to help people who are clinically depressed. I frequently talk with groups of parents who inevitably are concerned and conflicted about what constitutes healthy play for their kids. I have gathered and analyzed thousands of case studies that I call play histories. I have found that remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being. The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships and being a creative, innovative person.
If that seems to be a big claim, consider what the world would be like without play. It's not just an absence of games or sports. Life without play is a life without books, without movies, art, music, jokes, dramatic stories. Imagine a world with no flirting, no day-dreaming, no comedy, no irony. Such a world would be a pretty grim place to live. In a broad sense, play is what lifts people out of the mundane. I sometimes compare play to oxygen—it's all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.
But what happens to play in our lives? Nearly every one of us starts out playing quite naturally. As children, we don't need instruction in how to play. We just find what we enjoy and do it. Whatever "rules" there are to play, we learn from our playmates. And from our play we learn how the world works, and how friends interact. By playing, we learn about the mystery and excitement that the world can hold in a tree house, an old tire swing, or a box of crayons.
At some point as we get older, however, we are made to feel guilty for playing. We are told that it is unproductive, a waste of time, even sinful. The play that remains is, like league sports, mostly very organized, rigid, and competitive. We strive to always be productive, and if an activity doesn't teach us a skill, make us money, or get on the boss's good side, then we feel we should not be doing it. Sometimes the sheer demands of daily living seem to rob us of the ability to play.
The skeptics among the audiences I talk to will say, "Well, duh. Of course you will be happy if you play all the time. But for those of us who aren't rich, or retired, or both, there's simply is no time for play." Or they might say that if they truly gave in to the desire to experience the joy of free play, they would never get anything done.
This is not the case. We don't need to play all the time to be fulfilled. The truth is that in most cases, play is a catalyst. The beneficial effects of getting just a little true play can spread through our lives, actually making us more productive and happier in everything we do.
One example of this is Laurel, the CEO of a successful commercial real estate company. During her late twenties, Laurel married and had two children, all while establishing her business. Her relationship with her husband was close and compatible, and she adored her four-and ten-year-olds. She saw herself as blessed and fortunate.
Her days hummed like a turbocharged engine. Up at five, she usually ran four or five miles on odd days and swam and lifted weights on even days. She didn't work weekends and usually had enough steam left for "quality time" with her supportive husband and kids, church, and her closest friends.
She felt that she had a healthy mix of play and work, but when she passed forty she began to dread her schedule. She didn't yet feel a need to quit any of her commitments or ease off, but slowly she realized that though she had fun with her husband and kids and a sense of enthusiasm about her work, she was missing . . . joy.
So Laurel set about finding where it had gone. She remembered back to her earliest joyful memories and realized they centered on horses. As she reconstructed her own play history, she realized that horses had grabbed her from the first time she saw one. As a toddler she loved bouncing on her hobbyhorse. One of her fondest memories was befriending a local backyard horse and secretly riding it at age seven. She would entice the horse to the fence with carrots and coax it to allow her to climb up and ride bareback, completely unbeknownst to the owner or her parents. As dangerous as it was for a seven-year-old to ride this way, it gave Laurel a sense of her own power. Later she started hanging around stables, becoming an accomplished horsewoman and as a young adult competing as a professional rider. She eventually burned out on horse shows and settled into marriage and business.
Yet she now realized she longed "just to ride."
Laurel decided to make this happen. She found a horse to lease and began to ride again. The feelings of joy and exhilaration came back the first time she climbed onto the horse. Now she makes the time to go riding once a week.
What surprises her most since she incorporated the pure play of riding back into her life is how complete and whole she now feels in all other areas of her life. The bloom of "irrational bliss" she experiences in the care of her horse, from riding it regularly, and even occasionally riding again in small local shows, has spilled over into her family and work lives. The little chores of daily living don't seem so difficult anymore.
She is also surprised by the subtle shift in her relationship with her husband. "It's just easier now. I look forward to talking more often now," Laurel says. Before rediscovering her horse-based play, when she approached her husband for a discussion she was defensively anticipating difficulties or thinking of things that needed doing. "It felt more like job-sharing than being a couple."
At some offices, play is becoming increasingly recognized as an important component of success. And I'm not just talking about Ping-Pong tables in the break room. Employees who have engaged in play throughout their lives outside of work and bring that emotion to the office are able to do well at work-related tasks that at first might seem to have no connection at all to play.
An example: Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been the United States' premier aerospace research facility for more than seven decades. The scientists and engineers at JPL have designed and managed major components of every manned and unmanned mission of our time, and have been completely responsible for dreaming up, building, and operating complex projects like the robot vehicles that landed on Mars and explored the planet's surface for years. You might say that JPL invented the Space Age. No matter how big and ambitious the goal, the researchers could always be relied on to say, "We can do that."
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