Creativity and play 2 - Dr Stuart Brown

Ted Lecture - LINK

A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults -- and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.


They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us.

And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play.

The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain. The brain is in search of a hand, and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way.

Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration.

A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play.

We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play.

if you think about life without play -- no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy -- and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime.

Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do.

So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell -- and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals.

neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability.