Play

Last, play provides a continuation desire. We desire to keep doing it, and the pleasure of the experience drives that desire. We find ways to keep it going. If something threatens to stop the fun, we improvise new rules or conditions so that the play doesn’t have to end. And when it is over, we want to do it again.

And as lab managers at JPL discovered, object play with the hands creates a brain that is better suited for understanding and solving problems of all sorts.

Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It’s not formed or motivated solely by others. Real play interacts with and involves the outside world, but it fundamentally expresses the needs and desires of the player. It emerges from the imaginative force within. That’s part of the adaptive power of play: with a pinch of pleasure, it integrates ou

The play-driven pleasures associated with exploratory body movements, rhythmic early speech (moving vocal cords), locomotor and rotational activity are done for their own sake; they are pleasurable and intrinsically playful. Yet they also help sculpt the brain.

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.

Because play is a nonessential activity, this testing is done safely, when survival is not at stake. Play seems to be a driving force helping to sculpt how the brain continues to grow and develop.

Little Leo is a cherub. At eighteen months, he is bursting with glee and laughter. He clearly and exuberantly loves who he is. His true feelings are written in his every move, unmistakable in his body actions, voice, and expressions. He is fully “here,” and the contagion of his joy sweeps his parents and those he meets into a shared state of raptur

This leads to . . . Surprise, the unexpected, a discovery, a new sensation or idea, or shifting perspective. This produces . . . Pleasure, a good feeling, like the pleasure we feel at the unexpected twist in the punch line of a good joke. Next we have . . . Understanding, the acquisition of new knowledge, a synthesizing of distinct and separate con

Play provides freedom from time. When we are fully engaged in play, we lose a sense of the passage of time. We also experience diminished consciousness of self. We stop worrying about whether we look good or awkward, smart or stupid. We stop thinking about the fact that we are thinking. In imaginative play, we can even be a different self. We are f

From the same play histories, I believe that we have anecdotal evidence that with enough play, the brain works better. We feel more optimistic and more creative. We revel in novelties—a new fashion, new car, a new joke. And through our embrace of the new we are attracted to situations that test skills we do not need now, but may need in the future.