3 Things Everyone Should Know Before Growing Up (NPR)

This is a nice post from NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog - numbers one and three would have helped me immeasurably if someone had shared that wisdom. Number two I would ignored, but it has become a cornerstone of how I live my life. There is IQ (what the tests measure) and then there is intelligence, maybe better known as wisdom (knowledge + experience).

3 Things Everyone Should Know Before Growing Up

by TANIA LOMBROZO
June 30, 2014


We take it for granted that children should play. Why not adults? iStockphoto
With peak graduation season just behind us, we've all had the chance to hear and learn from commencement speeches — without even needing to attend a graduation. They're often full of useful advice for the future as seniors move on from high school and college. But what about the stuff you wish you'd been told long before graduation?

Here are just three of the many things I wish I'd known in high school, accumulated at various points along the way to becoming a professor of psychology.

1. People don't judge you as harshly as you think they do.

In a 2001 study, psychologists Kenneth Savitsky, Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich asked college students to consider various social blunders: accidentally setting off the alarm at the library, being the sole guest at a party who failed to bring a gift or being spotted by classmates at the mall while carrying a shopping bag from an unfashionable store. Some students imagined experiencing these awkward moments themselves — let's call them the "offenders" — while others considered how they, or another observer, would respond watching someone else do so. We'll call them the "observers."

The researchers found that offenders thought they'd be judged much more harshly than the observers actually judged people for those offenses. In other words, observers were more charitable than offenders thought they would be.

In another study, students who attempted a difficult set of anagrams thought observers' perception of their intellectual ability would plummet. In fact, observers' opinions hardly shifted at all.

Why do we expect others to judge us more harshly than they do?

One of the main reasons seems to be our obsessive focus on ourselves and our own blunders. If you fail to bring a gift to a party, you might feel embarrassed and focus exclusively on that single bit of information about you. In contrast, other people will form an impression of you based on lots of different sources of information, including your nice smile and your witty banter. They'll also have plenty to keep them occupied besides you: enjoying a conversation, taking in the view, planning their evening or worrying about the impression that they are making. We don't loom nearly as large in other people's narratives as we do in our own.

Now, it isn't the case that others are always charitable. Sometimes they do judge us harshly. What the studies find is that others judge us less harshly than we think they will. But that should be enough to provide some solace. We can take it as an invitation to worry less about what others think of us and as a reminder to be generous in how we judge them.

2. You should think of intelligence as something you develop.

Is a person's intelligence a fixed quantity they're born with? Or is it something malleable, something that can change throughout the lifespan?

The answer is probably a bit of both. But a large body of research suggests you're better off thinking of intelligence as something that can grow — a skill you can develop — and not as something set in stone. Psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have been studying implicit theories or "mindsets" about intelligence for decades, and they find that mindset really matters. People who have a "growth mindset" typically do better in school and beyond than those with a "fixed mindset."

One reason mindset is so important is because it affects how people respond to feedback.

Suppose George and Francine both do poorly on a math test. George has a growth mindset, so he thinks to himself: "I'd better do something to improve my mathematical ability. Next time I'll do more practice problems!" Francine has a fixed mindset, so she thinks to herself: "I guess I'm no good at math. Next time I won't bother with the honors course!" And when George and Francine are given the option of trying to solve a hard problem for extra credit, George will see it as an attractive invitation to grow his mathematical intelligence and Francine as an unwelcome opportunity to confirm she's no good at math.

Small differences in how George and Francine respond will, over time, generate big differences in the experiences they expose themselves to, their attitude toward math and the proficiency they ultimately achieve. (The gendered name choices here are not accidental: Girls often have a fixed mindset when it comes to mathematical ability; mindset probably accounts for some of the gender gap in girls' and boys' performance in mathematics in later school years.)

The good news is that mindsets are themselves malleable. Praising children's effort rather than their intelligence, for example, can help instill a growth mindset. And simply reading about the brain's plasticity might be enough to shift people's mindsets and generate beneficial effects.

That's enough to convince me that whether or not intelligence is malleable, our skills and achievements — the things we do with our intelligence — certainly are. Let's do what we can to "grow" them.

3. Playing isn't a waste of time.

We take it for granted that children can and should play. By adulthood, that outlook is expected to give way as we make time for more "mature" preoccupations. In her recent book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte takes a close look at how American adults spend their leisure time. She isn't too impressed: We don't have much of it (especially women and especially mothers), and we don't enjoy it as much as we could.

Young adults are somewhere in the transition: too old for "child's play" and not yet into adulthood. But the lesson from psychology is that there's a role for play at all ages, whether it's elaborate games of make-believe, rule-based games, unstructured summer playtime or forms of "higher culture," like art, music and literature. Playing is a way to learn about ourselves and about the world. Playing brings with it a host of emotional benefits.

Play is joyful in part because it's an end in itself. It's thus perhaps ironic (but fortuitous) that play is also a means to greater wellbeing and productivity, even outside the playroom. So make time for play; it's not something to outgrow.

Finally, if you're in search of more advice, check out NPR's collection of more than 300 commencement addresses, covering 1774 to the present.

Jaak Panksepp - Affective Continuity? From SEEKING to PLAY -- Science, Therapeutics and Beyond

 

This is a cool two-part talk from the putative founder of affective neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp. His work has been essentially absorbed into the field of interpersonal neurobiology, and his recent book, The Archaeology of Mind: The Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion (2012), was released as part of that series at WW Norton (this is a revised and updated [less sciency] version of Panksepp's seminal 1998 text, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions).

Affective Continuity? From SEEKING to PLAY -- Science, Therapeutics and Beyond

Published on Nov 16, 2012

The reward SEEKING system of the brain is a general purpose emotional process that all mammals use to acquire all the resources needed for survival from daily meals to social bonds—a " go-and-find-and-get what you need and want" system for all rewards. It provides a solid foundation of eager organismic coherence for all the other primary-process emotional functions including positive ones such as LUST, CARE, and PLAY as well as negative ones such as RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC/GRIEF.

This summary will focus on the hierarchical arrangement of the affective BrainMind which provides solid affective foundations for learning and higher mental processes which then can help regulate emotions via developmental progressions where bottom-up maturational processes grounded on affective feelings give way at maturity to various top-down regulations of behavior and feelings. This kind of two-way circular-causality provide important considerations for not only envisioning the maturation of the MindBrain but potentially new Affective Balance Therapies that deploy our increasing appreciation of the importance of social joy and emotional-homeostasis in mental health and disorder. In this vision the positive forces of SEEKING especially in the form of CARE and PLAY can be used to counteract depressive despair that arises from fragile and broken social-bonds key sources of affective insecurity. Direct manipulations of the SEEKING and the closely associated PLAY system may alleviate depressive despair. Clearer images of the evolved infrastructure of the affective mind provide i) controversial new avenues for therapeutic mental-health interventions ii) more naturalistic visions of child rearing practices and iii) new visions of the cognitive facets of human minds and cultures. Some of these issues are further elaborated in The Archaeology of Mind: The Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion (2012).

Part One

Part Two

According to Wikipedia:

John Maxwell Cohn (born February 9, 1959) is an IBM Fellow and chief scientist of design automation at IBM. Cohn has been an innovator in the area of design automation for both analog and digital custom integrated circuits. Cohn has 60 patents issued or pending in the field of design automation, methodology, and circuits.

In this TEDx Talk, he riffs on the importance of play in the success he has had over his life as an engineer. I could not agree more.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has identified play as one of the seven primary affective circuits in the human brain. From an interview with Panksepp in Discover Magazine:

Panksepp has charted seven networks of emotion in the brain: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. He spells them in all caps because they are so fundamental, he says, that they have similar functions across species, from people to cats to, yes, rats.

There is more on the topic of play below the video, also from the Discover Magazine interview.

The importance of play: John Cohn at TEDxDelft

Published on Dec 19, 2013

Dr John Cohn (@johncohnvt) is a self-confessed nerd. He already knew he wanted to be an engineer at the age of eight, found himself a nerdy college, a nerdy job and even a nerdy wife, or at least a fellow-engineer. As a nerd he breaks the mould though. Because onstage, with his rainbow-coloured lab coat, his Einstein-inspired hairdo and his party light headband, he is most of all entertaining and fun. That ties in with his motto: keep things playful. Bring a playful spirit into your work.

John says he is at his most creative, influential, productive and happy when he is playful at his work. With playful he means being in a state of childlike innocence. So playfulness is not just about enjoying your work, you are even more creative, as studies show. You can also reclaim that childlike state, by imagining you are still seven years old.

Life however, has a way of taking play away from us. The harder life gets, the more we have to work at staying playful. If work is not playful anymore, than it is just work. Which is why they call it work, incidentally. Six years ago, life became very difficult for John, when his son Sam died in a car crash. Sam was an organ donor, and when his life ended he saved the life of four other people. Needless to say, John's life changed forever. And trying to get his life back on track involved a playful element, although he didn't think of it like that at the time. John and his family started making SamStones, small stones with Sam's name on it. Now, over six years later, some 40,000 SamStones have travelled all over the world, and each stone tells a story. One of them even went to space and back.

Life will give you reasons not to play, and you have to fight back!

* * * * *

Here are a few of the questions and answers from that interview on the topic of play:

Then you made a U-turn: Instead of studying separation anxiety, you started 
to study play and laughter. Why?

It was the classic masks of theater, sadness and happiness. We had essentially done the work on the sadness mask. I wanted to move to the joy mask. Joy is social, so you’re looking at play. Play is a brain process that feels good, that allows the animal to engage fully with another animal. And if you understand the joy of play, I think you have the foundation of the nature of joy in general. Part of its benefit is simply taking away the psychological pain of separation. Play is engaging in an attachment-like way with strangers, which you have to do later in life.

Time for another animal experiment, right?

To study attachment, we couldn’t use rats or mice. They’re laboratory animals bred inadvertently to live by themselves. But I noticed that rats in the lab are wonderful for play. Psychic pain reduces the inclination to play—but since rats don’t feel it, they can be separated without panic and then when you put them together, bang! They play.

And the rats played with you, too?

After the experiments we’d dim the lights to make the rats more comfortable. That was our time to have fun. You see me sitting there and saying, come on, guys, come on—it’s okay. I knew that if I could tickle them, they would get jazzed up more, and that’s what happened, right in front of the camera.

How did you turn that kind of playing around into a rigorous experiment?

I thought about the hunger research I’d done in the past. If I wanted animals to eat, then the best way was to make sure they hadn’t eaten for a while. If I want animals to play, I’d have to make them hungry for play. So I put them in a cage alone, apart from their family, first for 4 hours, then 8 hours, then 12 hours, and finally 24 hours. I was looking for a behavior that I could use to measure play, like jumping on each other. How often do they bounce and touch each other? Then they run around—it’s too complex to follow unless you do slow-motion movies—and they end up wrestling. These behaviors were very easy to measure. We collected a lot of data on the response to social hunger.

Is play embedded deeply in the brain, the way attachment is?

Many experiments over the years suggested it was, but to be sure I removed the upper brain of the animals at three days of age. Amazingly, the rats still played in a fundamentally normal way. That meant play was a primitive process. We saw, too, that play helped the animals become socially sophisticated in the cortex. That’s why it’s so important to give our kids opportunities for play.

And yet it seems that childhood play has become much more controlled than it was when I was young. 
I have gone to ADHD meetings to consider this childhood problem. But the doctors do not want to hear the possibility that these kids are hyper-playful because they’re starved for real play—because they are giving them anti-play medicines. Teachers are promoting the pipeline of prescription controls as much as any other group, because their lives are hard. They are supposed to be teaching kids at the cortical level of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but if they’ve got kids who are still hungry for play, it’s gonna be classroom chaos. And you can sympathize with them, because they should be getting kids that are sufficiently well regulated to sit and use their upper brains. But the kids’ lower brains are still demanding attention.

What happens to animals if they are deprived of play over 
the long term?

They look normal and they eat normally, they’re just not as socially sophisticated. Animals deprived of play are more liable to get into a serious fight. Play teaches them what they can do to other animals and still remain within the zone of positive relationships. If you have play you become sociosexually more sophisticated. Let’s say you have the classic triangle: two males and one female, because males are competitive for sex. So if you’ve got one animal that’s had lots of play and the other animal hasn’t, guess who is successful? The animal that’s had play knows how to stay between the female and the other male. The other guy’s a klutz.

Did you ever find a way to track and measure the play response in rats?

Yes. I had a postdoctoral student, Brian Knutson, who asked me whether there was a play vocalization. I said, we know they don’t make any audible sounds but maybe there’s ultrasonics. We wound up buying the equipment so his study could be done. Brian came in the first day after it was set up and said, Jaak, there is a sound when the animals are playing. That was the 50-kilohertz chirp [at a pitch far above the range of human hearing].

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Berkeley and an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and development. She was the first to argue that children's minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She was one of the founders of the study of "theory of mind," illuminating how children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the "theory theory," the idea that children learn in the same way that scientists do.

Among her many books are The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (2010), The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (2000), and Words, Thoughts, and Theories (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change) (1998).

Alison Gopnik and the Science of Play

Alison Gopnik and the Science of Play from EG on FORA.tv
Alison Gopnik takes her study of children's play and compares them to scientists performing experiments and thinking about counterfactual realities.

Alison is a Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Berkeley, and one of the most prominent researchers in the effects of language on thought. She is renowned for her work on cognitive development in babies.

All in the Mind - How Children Learn Best

Today's episode of All in the Mind (Australia) focuses on how neuroscience is changing the way we understanding learning and how we teach our children. The guest expert is Dr. Judy Willis, author of How Your Child Learns Best: Brain-Friendly Strategies You Can Use to Ignite Your Child's Learning and Increase School Success.

How children learn best

• Listen now
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Broadcast: Sunday 14 October 2012 5:00PM

Image: Playgroup at Shaping Brains program (Tim Leslie ABC)

Dr Judy Willis applies new knowledge in neuroscience to develop better learning strategies for children. She's found that using video games can be a powerful way to engage young people in effective and enjoyable learning, and mindfulness plays a part too. These techniques are also being employed in the Shaping Brains program in Queensland with some encouraging results.

Guests

• Dr. Judy Willis: Neurologist and school teacher
• Sheryl Batchelor: Co-ordinator Shaping Brains Program Early Years Centres
• Goldie Hawn: Actor, producer, director and writer

 

Publications

Title: How your child learns best

Author: Dr. Judy Willis

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc

 

Further Information

• Radteach - Judy Willis
• Shaping Brains program - Benevolent Society

Credits

Presenter: Lynne Malcolm

Neely Myers - The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation

This intriguing article was posted at Somatosphere - It's actually more of a summary of research and questions from the American Anthropological Association meeting in November.

The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation

By Neely Myers

 

Got Absorption? Towards a Neuroanthropology of Play and Ritual

Cross-posted with Neuroanthropology.

On Thursday, Nov. 17^th at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, Canada, I attended a double panel of neuroanthropologists hosted by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Organized by Christopher Dana Lynn (University of Alabama) and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass (Colorado State University), the panel was entitled “The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation: Research in Ritual, Play, and Entertainment.”

So, I will begin with a warning – this is a pale attempt to summarize the ideas of 12 people plus various discussion questions and theorists mentioned by presenters. With that in mind, let’s get an overview of what happened, which was immensely interesting.

This group of scholars, who call themselves neuroanthropologists, distinguishes themselves from biocultural anthropologists by grounding themselves in rich ethnography, and then using this ethnography to launch dialogues with neuroscience methods in ways that advance both the scientific and anthropological approaches to the study of human adaptation in context.

Read the whole summary.

MIT - Permission to Play: Game Changing Research

An interesting talk from MIT on the study of the American family and how its children play - adults are also included. Play has become much more complicated in the eyes of many parents who grew up (as did I) in a time where children could roam free around neighborhoods without fear of being harmed. Not so true anymore for most parents in urban areas, not to mention the role technology plays in isolating kids from social skills learning.

About the Lecture


Are there now too many issues attached to the practice of play for it to be just plain fun? Nickelodeon executive Jane Gould describes a study on kids’ play that reveals real tensions within the family on the subject. Although parents feel confused and conflicted, and kids stifled and controlled, families are managing to find some happy common ground as well.


Gould’s team spent an “entertaining and exhausting hot summer” traveling around the U.S., and camping out entire days with hundreds of real families to chronicle how kids played and to capture different family members’ take on their activities. Not surprisingly, parents wax nostalgic about their own youth, when play was reportedly much freer and imaginative. Today, these same parents feel the need to keep their children safe, and so confine them more to home, where children inevitably turn to digital entertainment that parents object to. Parents also admit to, and regret, the scheduling of play around their own and their children’s busy lives, and the need to cram education and other ‘purpose-driven’ goals into play. Kids resent play that is about an end result, and in a large majority, declare their preference for spontaneous play, outdoors, shaped by their own rules.


“Technology is both a unifier and divider,” says Gould, providing “moments of absolute closeness, and exasperation.” Parents worry constantly about their children’s exposure to virtual worlds and digital devices, while kids are unabashedly fascinated and excited by technology. Parents admit to using these devices as babysitters, and also note the power of online media to connect their children with friends, or to rich fantasy experiences. Parents “tell us they prefer their kids to engage in traditional play that engages the mind and body, and that their kids don’t know how to entertain themselves without technology,” says Gould. They believe digital fun substitutes scripted for unguided play, and therefore does not qualify as “play play” -- what parents insist they did when they were younger.


This parent cohort wants in on their children’s play, and the children more than welcome their participation -- as long as it does not actually translate to another aspect of supervision. Parents must put down the mobile phones, and mom should stop documenting the action “and just sit down and have fun,” say the kids. Gould eventually hopes to take the benefits of the digital structured world of play, and bring them together with the benefits offered by traditional unstructured play, and develop new toys, content and play experiences so parents can take advantage of what’s needed for these kids.”

Jane Gould is responsible for coordinating all consumer insight research for all Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group assets, including: Nick Jr.; Noggin; The N; Nicktoons Network; Nick at Nite; and Nickelodeon's digital brands including AddictingGames, Shockwave and Nick.com. She is also responsible for conceiving and conducting strategic consumer research on behalf of Nickelodeon's production, consumer products, recreation and public affairs departments.


Gould, a nine-year Nickelodeon veteran, was most recently Director of Programming, Content Development and Research for Nickelodeon Australia. There, she was responsible for implementing several key research projects including: Brain Squeeze, a research project to generate critical data about tweens; and Australia's first research study into interactive pre-school television.


Prior to Nickelodeon, Gould was president and founder of Looking Glass Insights, Inc. in Australia where she provided personalized, strategic, results-driven marketing research and production services for clients including: ACMA; MTVN Australia; Nickelodeon; and Australian Broadcasting Corporation.


Gould holds a master's of business degree from Queensland University of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Macquarie University in Australia.

Tom Bartlett - The Case for Play

From The Chronicle of Higher Education. Below the article they include some books on the topic. One of the worst things we have done is take away unstructured play from our kids - they need that creative space to grow and learn new skills. The article also discusses one of my heroes, Lev Vygotsky.

The Case for Play

How a handful of researchers are trying to save childhood.

Pretend play—being a chef "cooking" with Play-Doh, for example—may be essential to children's development, say some researchers. (Yana Paskova for The Chronicle Review)

By Tom Bartlett

Lucas Sherman and Aniyah McKenzie are building a house in Central Park. It is small, even by Manhattan standards, and the amenities leave something to be desired. But Lucas, who is 6, and Aniyah, who is 7, seem pleased with their handiwork. The house has a skylight (a hole torn in cardboard) and a flat-screen television (a black square of fabric). Lucas is too busy to answer a stranger's annoying questions, but Aniyah, who is holding a feather duster, explains that she must clean the walls because they are very dirty.

Lucas's father, Dan, observes the project from a nearby bench. "It's amazing what you can do with boxes and junk," he says.

That could almost be the slogan of the New York Coalition for Play, which provided the boxes and junk. The nonprofit association ran one of the two dozen booths at the Ultimate Block Party, an event last fall that brought together companies like Disney, Crayola, and Lego, along with researchers from Columbia and MIT, and attracted thousands of parents and children. The goal was to "celebrate the science of play" and to push back against the notion that education happens only when students are seated at their desks, staring at chalkboards, and scribbling furiously in their notebooks.

The rally of sorts was the brainchild of two top play researchers, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, the authors of Einstein Never Used Flashcards (Rodale, 2003) and editors, along with Dorothy Singer, of Play=Learning (Oxford University Press, 2006). They want to take what they've learned in the lab and proclaim it in the park, or wherever else people will listen. The message is this: The emphasis on standardized testing, on attempting to constantly monitor, measure, and quantify what students learn, has forced teachers to spend more of the school day engaged in so-called direct instruction and has substantially reduced or eliminated opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and learning on their own. Recess has, in many districts, vanished from the schedule entirely. After school, parents shuttle their kids from activity to activity, depriving them of unstructured time alone or with friends.

That matters, according to researchers, not just because play reduces stress and makes children more socially competent—which evidence suggests that it does. It matters also because play supposedly improves working memory and self-regulation; in other words, it makes kids sharper and better-behaved. So, ironically, by shortchanging them on play in favor of academics, we may actually be inhibiting their development. Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University, considers the move away from play to be a crisis, even comparing it to global warming, in the sense that it may take years for the consequences to be felt. When it comes to the value of play, she declares: "The science is clear."

Temple U.'s Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: "Even if we don't understand it perfectly, it's silly to take play away." (Yana Paskova for The Chronicle Review)

But how clear is it? Even researchers who've devoted much of their careers to studying play question the more inflated claims of its importance. Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional classroom instruction. No matter whom you're talking with, though, it seems every discussion about play eventually comes around to a prolific Russian psychologist who died more than 75 years ago.

Before tuberculosis claimed him, at just 37, Lev Vygotsky managed to produce a stack of volumes on topics as diverse as the psychology of art, the relationship between thought and language, the problem of consciousness, the behavior of primitive man, scientific language, and child development. While the amount of work he cranked out is notable in itself, what's more impressive is how influential that work has become, even though much of it remained unpublished and untranslated for decades following his death.

For play researchers, no one looms larger than Vygotsky, whose name, along with that of his longer-lived and better-known contemporary, Jean Piaget, pops up on seemingly every other page of the literature. Vygotsky viewed play, particularly pretend play, as a critical part of childhood, allowing a child, as he said in one oft-repeated quote, to stand "a head taller than himself." His biggest theoretical contribution may have been the Zone of Proximal Development: the idea that children are capable of a range of achievement during each stage of their lives. In the right environment, and with the right guidance (which was later dubbed "scaffolding"), children can perform at the top of that range.

For instance, Vygotsky explained, when a child can pretend that a broomstick is a horse, he or she is able to separate the object from the symbol. A broom is not a horse, but it's possible to call a broom a horse, and even to pretend to ride it. That ability to think abstractly is a huge mental leap forward, and play can make it happen.

Among the many who have been influenced by Vygotsky is Deborah J. Leong, the author, along with Elena Bodrova, of Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education, an attempt to turn his theories into practical classroom techniques. Leong, a professor emerita of psychology at Metropolitan State College of Denver, points out that when young children are pretending, they often use bigger words than they normally would and fully inhabit their roles, like mini Method actors. If they're playing doctor, for instance, they might say "injection" or "thermometer." Recently she watched a group of preschoolers pretending to work at a well-known chain hardware store. "Welcome to Home Depot," a 4-year-old said. "You can do it, we can help." Meanwhile another group of children, who were pretending to be airport screeners, informed a would-be passenger that a bottle she was carrying was larger than the permitted three ounces.

Pretend play isn't just about vocabulary. A 2007 study published in Science looked at how 4- and 5-year-olds who were enrolled in a school that used the play-based, Vygotsky-inspired Tools of the Mind curriculum measured up to children in a more typical preschool. The students in the play-based school scored better on cognitive flexibility, self-control, and working memory—attributes of "executive function," which has been consistently linked to academic achievement. The results were so convincing that the experiment was halted earlier than planned so that children in the typical preschool could be switched to the Tools of the Mind curriculum. The authors conclude: "Although play is often thought frivolous, it may be essential."

With evidence like that, you might think that the kind of guided pretend play that Vygotsky favored would be universally embraced. In fact, according to Leong, it's fast disappearing, as the idea of learning becomes synonymous with memorization and standardized tests. Play is steadily losing out to what play proponents refer to as the "drill and kill" method. "We drill more because they can't pay attention, but they can't pay attention because they don't have these underlying play skills, so we drill more," Leong says. "It's pathetic."

Not to mention misguided, according to Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. Whether children play enough isn't an obscure debate among developmental psychologists. If it's true that children who spend too little time playing struggle with executive function, then we may be raising a generation of kids with less self-control, shorter attention spans, and poorer memory skills. If that really is the case, Hirsh-Pasek's talk about a crisis isn't so far-fetched.

She sees the Ultimate Block Party as the first step in a national effort to get people to stop dismissing play and start questioning the way we assume children learn. She wants to speak directly to parents, most of whom aren't poring over every issue of Child Development for the latest research on play. The goal, in a sound bite, is to take that research "into the streets, subways, and supermarkets."

It's not every day that an academic stages a spectacle in Central Park to bring attention to what is, honestly, a fairly small field of research. To pull it off, Hirsh-Pasek hired a public-relations agency and drummed up big-name corporate sponsors. There was a Sesame Street sing-a-long, what was billed as "New York's Largest Simon Says," and a Radio Disney Dance Party. A small company called Ridemakerz hawked its build-your-own remote-control cars. Not to mention the guy selling a nifty iPhone app that lets you play a technologically enhanced game of hide-and-seek using the smartphone's GPS capability.

There were also decidedly less-profit-driven booths, like the one run by the New York Coalition for Play. Rather than whiz-bang gadgets, they offered cardboard boxes and tubes, lots of fabric, ribbon, empty wine crates, and assorted items that would otherwise be found in a recycling bin. One of those overseeing the booth was Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the nonprofit group Alliance for Childhood, part of whose mission is to promote creative play. When asked what he thought of the Ridemakerz booth just a few yards away, he couldn't help rolling his eyes. "We're also concerned about the overcommercialization of play," he said. "The right answer is less programming and more opportunities for kids to make up things on their own."

Hirsh-Pasek is well aware that play purists look askance at including corporations in the pro-play campaign. Those who take a hard line on free play—that is, giving children basic materials like boxes and fabric and then leaving them alone—have zero use for Nickelodeon kid bands and pricey remote-control cars, which they see as just more ways for adults to get in the way. What she has in mind is a big tent, one that doesn't exclude fancy toys or snappy musical productions. Nor does she have much patience for advocates who claim that the only valuable play is the kind that doesn't involve anyone over 18. She wants kids to play on their own, sure, but she also wants them to engage in more guided play, where an adult or older child can take part.

There's research to back her up. A study she recently submitted for publication gave blocks to children divided into three groups. In one group, the blocks had already been assembled into a heliport. A second group was given blocks, and adults helped the children follow directions to build a heliport. A third group was given blocks and told to do whatever it wanted. The researchers then listened to the language children were using as they played. Those who were building a heliport with an adult used the most imaginative and spatial language (like "below," "on top," "next to"); the kids who were playing with the preassembled heliport used the least.

While she's no purist, Hirsh-Pasek is suspicious of some of the toys that purport to be educational. The title of Einstein Never Used Flashcards (subtitled How Our Children Really Learn—and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less) is an apparent slap at the Disney-owned Baby Einstein company. She also cites research that shows that electronic books for kids, the kind that talk and make noises, actually distract young readers: Kids who read them remember less of the narrative than kids who read the story on old-fashioned paper. What's more, Hirsh-Pasek says, she turned down millions of dollars from a corporate sponsor (which she declines to identify) that requested the right to name the Ultimate Block Party.

In many ways, she is placing herself in the middle. She's not trying to run toy companies out of business, but she is willing to criticize products that do more harm than good. She's not attempting to tear down traditional classroom education, but she is pushing hard for more play in schools obsessed with testing. To that end, she's working to make the research on play palatable for teachers and parents.

How good that research is, though, is a matter of debate. Peter K. Smith began studying play in the mid-1970s. At the time, he was a believer in the "play ethos," which he defines in his recent book, Children and Play, as the "very strong and unquestioned view of the importance of play." In that book, he quotes numerous researchers waxing enthusiastic about play's importance, asserting that it is "vital" and "the work of childhood" and "the supreme psychological need."

Later, Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of London, became a skeptic. "I looked at the textbooks of play" from Piaget forward, he says. "They said play is essential for development, that it enhanced this and this, and that and that, but they don't cite any evidence." So he decided to take a closer look. In the late 1980s, he picked a couple of studies that claimed to demonstrate the benefits of play. In one study, researchers had found that playing with small objects helped young children learn how to solve problems. Another showed that play made kids more creative. Smith replicated both using a double-blind procedure to eliminate any potential research bias.

His findings showed no difference in creativity or problem-solving ability between the kids who played and those who didn't. It was a setback for play advocates and made researchers wonder whether the field was based on science or sentimental hype.

More than two decades after Smith's debunking, researchers like Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, are still raising some of the same questions. "I think if you look hard at all the studies people cite as showing that play helps development, they are either correlation studies"—in other words, they don't prove that play actually causes cognitive gains—"or they have problems," she says.

Not that Lillard, or Smith, for that matter, is antiplay. Lillard is the author of the best-selling book Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius and has written about the possible links between pretend play and social cognition. She does, however, believe that the field is in need of newer and better research. "My own view is that I would like for us to have firmer footing to stand on," she says.

But while scientific support for play can be overstated, sometimes the criticism of play can be unfounded. Last September, Time magazine published an article with the headline "Free Play Won't Make Your Child Smarter." The article was prompted by a study that looked at how 2,751 preschoolers fared in programs with a variety of approaches, including free play and traditional group instruction. That study concluded that "more quality instructional time" and "less free play time" would better prepare kids for school.

But the study's case against play in school isn't entirely persuasive. It's true that the kids who spent the largest chunk of their school day (41 percent) engaged in free play were behind their counterparts on skills like naming letters, naming numbers, and writing their names. But those who spent 29 percent of their time in teacher-guided play actually performed at the same level as the kids who played much less (only 13 to 15 percent of the time) when it came to naming numbers, highest number counted, language and literacy, word and letter identification, and writing their names legibly. In short, they played twice as much but learned the same amount. One of the authors of the report, Nina Chien, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at San Diego, acknowledges in an e-mail that this was proof "that kids can play a lot but still make good gains."

More interesting is what the researchers didn't test. Did the children who played more demonstrate higher levels of self-control and better working memory, as other research suggests they would? If so, did they outperform the kids—preschoolers, remember—who spent 15 percent or less of their time playing? Is being smart a race to see who can memorize the most, or is it about developing capacities to deal with a complex world?

While much of the research on play focuses on young children, the implications go well beyond third grade. In junior high, play is more likely to be called "discovery learning." When professors try to get college students to look up from their iPhones, it's probably referred to as "active engagement." But the principles are the same. Stuart Brown, one of the authors of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, has reviewed thousands of life histories and concluded that play is essential for children and adults. He's intent on spreading that gospel through his organization, the National Institute for Play, whose mission is to make human play a "credentialed discipline in the scientific community."

And it's not just people. That nonhuman primates engage in sophisticated play has been thoroughly established, and anyone who has dangled a string in front of a cat has conducted animal research. In his book The Genesis of Animal Play, Gordon Burghardt, a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee, reports playful behavior in lizards, turtles, and birds. Even fish have been known to amuse themselves.

For Hirsh-Pasek, the universality of play is part of the evidence of its value. Why would we do it if it didn't confer an evolutionary advantage? She concedes that some of the play research is more suggestive than slam-dunk, and that cleaner, stronger studies would be welcome. But she also argues that we already know enough to conclude that play matters, and that failing to preserve it in the lives of children could be a disaster.

She's doing her part to stave that off. Hirsh-Pasek says 40 cities have expressed interest in holding their own Ultimate Block Parties. She and her colleagues will soon unveil a Web site to promote play research, and more books are on the way. Their goal, she says, is to restore play to its rightful, respected place in the lives of children. "Even if we don't understand it perfectly, it's silly to take play away from society," she says. "It's like taking love away. It's crazy."

---

The Play Books

The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith (Harvard University Press, 1997)

Sometimes called the godfather of play studies, Brian Sutton-Smith has written or edited dozens of books on play and games. He often writes about play from a Darwinian perspective: "Play begins as a major feature of mammalian evolution and remains as a major method of becoming reconciled with our being within our present universe. In this respect, play resembles both sex and religion, two other forms—however temporary or durable—of human salvation in our earthly box."

Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn, by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Diane Eyer (Rodale Books, 2003)

The culture is giving us the wrong messages about how to educate young children, write Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Golinkoff, and Diane Eyer. Earlier isn't necessarily better. Learning doesn't happen only in a classroom. They contend that the "evidence tells us that less can be more. It tells us that the 'adultification' and acceleration of children is not a positive choice, but one that robs children of their freedom to be. It tells us that to be happy, well-adjusted, and smart, children do not need to attend every class and own each educational toy."

Recess: Its Role in Education and Development, by Anthony D. Pellegrini (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005)

Recess is disappearing at many schools across the country, squeezed out by academics. Yet research by Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, indicates that children are more attentive to their schoolwork after recess than before. He has argued that "recess breaks maximize children's cognitive performance and adjustment to school," and that it may be "one of the few times during the day when children have the opportunity to interact with peers and develop social skills free from adult intervention."

A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, by Vivian Gussin Paley (University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Vivian Gussin Paley argues that the loss of creative free time, particularly storytelling and role-playing, can harm children emotionally and intellectually. Paley, a longtime kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, writes: "The children themselves continually reminded us that play was still their most usable context. It was not the monsters they invented that frightened them in kindergarten; it was being told to sit still and pay attention for long periods of time."—Tom Bartlett

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer for The Chronicle.

Tags: The Case for Play, researchers, save childhood, Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Einstein Never Used Flashcards, books, education, development, play, learning, social sense, psychology, Lev Vygotsky

TEDxBG - Steve Keil - A Play Manifesto

Entrepreneur Steve Keil explains how important play is for humans and highlights the negative effects of seriousness and lack of play, both in human development in general, and in Bulgarian society.

We all need to play more and honor that inner child we have locked in the closets of our psyches.

Tags: TEDx, Bulgaria, Steve Keil, A Play Manifesto, Psychology, play, children, adults, development, seriousness

Peter Gray - Play Makes Us Human

This was the first of six articles (at Psychology Today) by developmental and evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray on the importance of play in the evolution of human beings. These are old articles (from 2009) but I somehow had missed them. I'm posting the first one whole and linking to the next five.

These are important ideas in understanding who we are as human beings. Here are a couple of books on the importance of play in child development:

Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children's Cognitive and Social-Emotiona​l Growth

by Roberta M. Golinkoff

Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

by Stuart Brown

Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory textbook, Psychology. See full bio. His blog at Psychology Today is Freedom to Learn: The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning.

Play Makes Us Human I: Outline of a Ludic Theory of Human Nature

Play is the germ that grew to make us human.

by Peter Gray

Published on June 4, 2009

I've been working lately on a ludic theory of human nature. In case you haven't studied Latin in a while (perhaps not since several lifetimes ago), I hereby inform you that ludic means playful. I'm calling my theory a ludic theory because if I called it a playful theory you wouldn't take it seriously. (I'm trying hard to ignore the fact that the only common English derivative of ludic is ludicrous.)

Heaven take pity on those few of us who try to take play seriously. It's hard to do. Play, by definition, is something that is not serious. I'm sure that's part of the reason why most serious scholars stay far away from the topic.

The great classic scholarly book on human play is entitled Homo Ludens, which means literally Man the Player. It was written by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, in 1938. It's a wonderful book and has inspired me greatly. But my own theory is quite different from Huizinga's.

Huizinga stated clearly that his is a cultural theory of play, not a biological theory. My theory, in contrast, is fundamentally biological, though it is also cultural, because, in matters of human behavior, biology and culture are inextricably entwined. Another big difference is that Huizinga tended to equate play with contest and to focus on agonistic, or competitive aspects of play, while I hold that play is fundamentally noncompetitive. I can understand how someone such as Huizinga, steeped in Western cultural history, might view play primarily as contest. In my theory, contest is a morphing of play with something that is close to the opposite of play--a drive to beat and dominate others. When we combine these two opposites, play becomes more serious (and thereby more acceptable to contemporary adults) and domination becomes more playful--not entirely a bad thing, but not the same as pure play.

In the remaining paragraphs here, I present a sketch of the ludic theory. In subsequent weekly posts I shall elaborate on specific aspects of the theory, presenting evidence along the way. [Some of what I shall present overlaps with ideas I published in a recent article-- Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, in The American Journal of Play, 1 (#4), 2009, pp 476-522.]

The Limited Role of Play in Non-Human Mammals

In most non-human mammals, play occurs almost entirely among the young of the species and seems clearly to serve the function of skill learning and practice. As I have noted in previous posts, young mammals, in play, practice the very skills that they must develop in order to make it into adulthood and to thrive and reproduce. Predators practice predation, as when tiger clubs stalk and pounce on bugs, wind-blown leaves, and each other. Prey animals practice getting away from predators, as when zebra colts dodge and dart in their playful frolicking and endless games of tag. Young males of many species practice fighting, taking turns pinning one another in their species-specific ways and getting out of pinned positions. Young females of at least some species practice nurturance, in playful care of young.

Expansion of Play's Roles in Humans

We humans have inherited the basic youthful play characteristics of our animal ancestors, but in the course of our biological and cultural evolution we have elaborated upon them and created new functions. Playfulness in humans does not end when adulthood begins and it serves many functions beyond the learning of species-specific skills.

• Play as a means of suppressing aggression and promoting cooperation.

Social play in all animals requires that all tendencies toward aggression and dominance be suppressed. This is especially true in playful fighting, which is one of the most common forms of animal play. The fundamental difference between a play fight and a real fight is that the former involves no intention to hurt, drive away, or dominate the other animal. A play fight between two young animals can only occur if both are willing partners. Anything that smacks of true aggression or tendency to dominate would cause the threatened animal to run away, and the play, with all its fun and opportunity for learning, would end. And so, in the course of natural selection, animals developed signals to let each other know that their playful attacks are not real attacks, and they developed, for purposes of play, self-restraints and means of self-handicapping to operate against any tendencies to dominate or hurt one another in play.

We inherited these play-enabling signals and restraints from our primate ancestors, and then--through both culture and biological evolution--we built upon them. We brought playfulness and signals associated with it (such as laughter) into adulthood, and we used them to promote ways of cooperating and sharing with one another that surpass those of other mammals.

I am going to argue, in my next post, that when we bring playfulness to bear in our social interactions we create a spirit of equality and personal freedom that allows us to overcome our equally human drive to dominate one another. Hunter-gatherer societies were especially successful in cultivating playfulness as a means of defeating aggression and dominance. Their way of life required close cooperation and sharing, of the sort that could easily be defeated by aggression and dominance. Their playful approach to social life apparently enabled them to survive, relatively peacefully, for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the invention of agriculture. In our culture today, play and humor are still forces for defeating aggression, dominance, and hierarchy, though we don't use them as effectively as hunter-gatherers did.

• Play as a basis for art, music, literature, theoretical science, religion, and all that we call "higher culture."

Play, in any species, is done primarily for the fun of it, not to fill some felt survival need. A young animal or child playing may be learning, but it is not consciously learning; it is just having fun. I don't know if other animals have a perceptual sense of beauty, but it is easy to imagine how doing something just for the fun of it could, in humans, become doing something just for the beauty of it.

Play is also, by definition, creative. It is not an automatic response to demands from outside, but is creative behavior deriving from within. Moreover, play is representative. A play fight is not a fight, but it represents a fight. Playful predation is not a hunt, but it represents a hunt. In humans, the representative power of play grew immensely. Human children--and adults, too--can represent not just fights and hunts, but truly anything in play. Play thereby provides a foundation for all of imagination.

Fun, beauty, creativity, representation, imagination--these are the essences of art, music, literature, theoretical science, and (I will argue two weeks from now) religion. These activities, which characterize our species everywhere, make us human. They all originated biologically in play. Play is the biological germ, which we inherited from our animal ancestors, which grew in us to make us human.

• Play as a basis for productive work.

In animals, play is quite separate from productive behaviors. Playful predation and real predation are two different things. But in humans playfulness can blend with productivity. When productive work is suffused with the qualities of play--that is, with freedom, creativity, and imagination--we experience that work as play. Hunter-gatherers had a genius for keeping their productive work within the realm of play. In our culture today, those people who have the most freedom of choice and opportunity for creativity within their work are most likely to say they enjoy their work and regard it as play.

• Play as a basis for education.

This final point, drawn out, provides the most direct and clear functional line between animal and human play. But education in humans is far more than learning in other species. We are the cultural being, and education is the passing of culture from generation to generation. In previous posts I have already written about play as a vehicle for children's education, but I will have more to say in a future post about the ways by which animal play was modified, in humans, to become such a powerful force for education.

Here are the remainder of the articles in the series.

June 11, 2009

Play Makes Us Human II: Defeating Dominance and Achieving Equality

We human beings have two fundamentally different ways of governing ourselves in social groups. One is the method of hierarchy, or dominance, or force. The other is the method of play. In this essay I explain how hunter-gatherers employed play and humor to keep order and maintain their highly egalitarian, highly cooperative mode of existence. We have much to learn from them. Read More

June 18, 2009

Play Makes Us Human III: Play Is the Foundation for Religion

Some people would take offense at the idea that religion is play. Religion, they would say, is sacred, and play is trivial. How can the one be lumped with the other? But regular readers of this blog know that I regard play as the highest form of human activity, so I am not demeaning religion when I describe it as play. ... I have two main points to make in this essay. The first is that all of religion has its roots in play. ... The second point is that religion functions best when it does not stray too far from its playful origins. Religion that has lost its playfulness can be dangerous. Read More

June 25, 2009

Play Makes Us Human IV: When Work Is Play

One of the first and most often reinforced lessons that children learn in school is that work and play are opposites. Work is what one has to do; play is what one wants to do. Work is burdensome; play is fun. Work is essential; play is trivial. But when we leave school and go on to the "real world," at least some of us, the lucky ones, discover that work is not the opposite of play. In fact, work can be play, or at least it can be imbued with a high degree of playfulness. . . . When work is play, it is humanizing. Read More

July 2, 2009

Play Makes Us Human V: Why Hunter-Gatherers' Work is Play

My reading about life in many different hunter-gatherer cultures has led me to conclude that their work is play for four main reasons: (1) It is varied and requires much skill and intelligence. (2) There is not too much of it. (3) It is done in a social context, with friends. And (4) (most significantly) it is, for any given person at any given time, optional. Let me expand on these, point by point. Each point is relevant to our lives, today. Read More

July 9, 2009

Play Makes Us Human VI: Hunter-Gatherers’ Playful Parenting

Our society's concepts of raising and training children assume a dominant-subordinate relationship between parent and child. The parent---or teacher or other parent substitute---is in charge and is responsible for the child's actions. The child's primary duty, at least in theory, is to obey. This approach to parenting seems so natural to us that it may be hard to imagine an alternative. Yet, in the context of our long history as a species, it is new. It came with agriculture, which first appeared about 10,000 years ago. Before that, we were all hunter-gatherers. Here I describe the approach of hunter-gatherers to parenting, which is founded on concepts of freedom, equality, and trust. Read More

Here are some additional articles by Gray on the importance of play.

October 7, 2009

Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play: A Modest Proposal

Because neighbors don't know one another as they once did, parents' fears of "strangers" in the neighborhood has helped to cause a sharp decline in children's free outdoor neighborhood play. Here is a proposal for bringing neighbors together and creating safe, neighborhood play-and-learning centers that everyone can enjoy. We may actually do this, as a pilot project, in a neighborhood already selected. Please read on, and supply your ideas for improving the project. Read More

October 27, 2009

Pushing Competition and Damaging Health: Making Play Offensive

If American football were a food additive or a drug, it would be banned by the FDA. Or, if financial interests prevented its banning, its package would at least carry a surgeon general's warning: Football causes brain damage. The evidence that football causes brain damage is now indisputable. But the deleterious effects of our strong focus on winning go beyond football and brain damage. The compulsioin to win, in general, may be bad for our health. Read More

November 4, 2009

The Biological Distinction Between Play and Contest, and Their Merging in Modern Games

In nonhuman animals, play and contests are sharply distinguished. Play is cooperative and egalitarian, and contestests are antagonisitic and aimed at establishing dominance. Hunter-gatherer humans accentuated play and avoided contests in order to maintain the high degree of cooperation and sharing that was essential to their way of life. In our society, with our competitive games, we often confound play and contest. What might be the consequences of this for children's development? Read More

November 11, 2009

Some Lessons Taught by Informal Sports, Not Taught by Formal Sports

Imagine an old-fashioned sandlot game of baseball. A bunch of kids of various ages show up at the vacant lot. They've come on foot or by bicycle. Someone brought a bat and ball (which may or may not be an actual baseball), and several came with fielders' gloves. They decide to play a game. ... The lessons intrinsic to this kind of game are the lessons intrinsic to real life: (1) There is no real difference between your team and the other team. (2) To keep the game going, you have to keep everyone happy, including those on the other team. (3) You and the other players have to make the rules yourselves, and you have to change them as conditions change. (4) Conflicts are settled by argument, negotiation and compromise, not by appeal to a higher authority. (5) Playing well and having fun really ARE more important than winning. Read More

Tags: Peter Gray, Play Makes Us Human, Psychology, childhood, play, evolution, development, Psychology Today, Freedom to Learn, Ludic Theory of Human Nature, Homo Ludens, Fun, beauty, creativity, representation, imagination, equality, religion, work, parenting

Benjamin Schwarz - Play’s the Thing (reviewing Melvin Konner's The Evolution of Childhood)

Cool article from The Atlantic - the study of play in children (especially rough and tumble play in boys) is a rapidly emerging field of study. Schwarz is reviewing The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind by Melvin Konner (check out his blog - there are lots of articles available as well).

Konner seems to be suggesting (and summarizing a ton of research in support of his hypothesis) that play is crucial to brain development in children - and he looks at that development in terms of the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture. I like this integrated approach to development.

Here is the publisher's blurb for the book:

This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain.

All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology.

As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.

And now the review.

Play’s the Thing

A new book argues that play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

By Benjamin Schwarz

Image credit: Steve Bonini/IPN/Aurora Photos

This monumental book—more than 900 pages long, 30 years in the making, at once grand and intricate, breathtakingly inclusive and painstakingly particular—exhaustively explores the biological evolution of human behavior and specifically the behavior of children. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory, weaves a compelling web of theories and studies across a remarkable array of disciplines, from experimental genetics to ethnology. He ranges back to the earliest, egg-laying mammals, discusses topics as seemingly modern as cross-gender identity conflicts, and draws on scientific work examining all manner of species with which humans share distinct characteristics. (In the way we teach our young, for instance, Konner points out that we resemble cats large and small far more than we do our closer genetic relatives, the large primates.) The organization of these disparate puzzle pieces is itself a tour de force. Though the sheer volume of information and the not infrequent appearance of terms like synaptogenesis and N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor can be daunting, Konner’s style is conversational (if sometimes occluded) and his tone is, well, kind. To read this book is to be in the company of a helpful and hopeful teacher who is eager to share what he’s found.

Dividing the book into four often overlapping “levels of observation”—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—Konner assesses the development of the brain from the first vertebrates through the hominins, with their slow-growing, enormous, super-energetic brains. This development depended on a high-quality diet of fruit and then cooked foods, both plant and animal, and particularly aquatic fauna—not to mention the grandmothers and other “helpers at the nest” who ensured that children were fed. In fact, human brains are so large that were they to reach full size in utero, women’s bodies would not be able to deliver them. Much of the brain’s growth occurs after birth: the human brain more than doubles in volume during the first 12 postnatal months, and nearly doubles again over the subsequent 12 months. This means that infants, with their far from fully developed brains, are extraordinarily helpless for a long period after birth. One reason humans evolved into creatures that walked upright may have been so that mothers could carry offspring who could not yet cling to them.

Konner then explores the genetic and neurological foundations of basic temperament and gender identity and of formative behaviors such as infant attachment and the acquisition of language, and he describes the interrelationship between the biology and psychology of puberty. Unlike animals that hurtle from infancy to puberty, the humans who have escaped the risks of infancy but not yet embarked on the risks of adulthood experience a sort of mini-transformation during the “five-to-seven shift,” and emerge with markedly enhanced powers of cognition into a period of slow growth. This prolonged halcyon phase, sandwiched between the confusion of early life and the intensity of adolescence, seems evolutionarily designed to imbue children with the culture that our enormous brains make possible—the culture that our species (almost) alone can claim.

The sine qua non of culture is socialization, a process we share with many other species. For mammals, it begins with an extreme bond between mother and offspring—a bond that has existed since early in the age of the dinosaurs, when even the infants of egg-laying mammals could feed directly from their mothers’ bodies and demand attention by crying. (Mammalian young cried at high pitches that their mothers could hear but reptilian predators could not.) Although the mother-child bond forms the core relationship, we are cooperative breeders. There is “ample evidence,” developed most prominently by the pathbreaking anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, that “human mothers have always gotten help” from fathers, grandmothers, older siblings, and other relatives. Still, some evidence suggests that kinship is not the be-all and end-all it is often believed to be. Research on the !Kung hunter-gatherer society, for example, shows no particular advantage to having a full complement of parents and grandparents, and in cases in which children have few kin, other adults apparently take up the slack, supporting the idea that indeed, it takes a village. Crucially, the many years that human females live after menopause confer a unique advantage on the species, in that grandmothers are almost always involved in child care, allowing their children, particularly their daughters, to produce more and healthier children.

Konner is especially interested in play, which is not unique to humans and, indeed, seems to have been present, like the mother-offspring bond, from the dawn of mammals. The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together. Play, Konner says, “combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” It seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

Finally, Konner argues that even if culture is as subject to the laws of evolution as other aspects of physiology and behavior, it is, in its complex forms, unique to our species. (He does emphasize, however, that humans share with other animals a host of qualities and emotions—love, grief, altruism, heroism, loyalty, shame, dignity, awe, thought—that have wrongly been ascribed to humans alone.) Humans may not be the only ones who teach, but we alone create and build in a cumulative way, and we alone suspend ourselves in “webs of significance we ourselves have spun,” as Konner, borrowing from Clifford Geertz, elegantly puts it.

Ultimately, Konner is attempting to construct a sort of theory that encompasses all of human life. The evolutionary processes he describes are the way in which at every level—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—we, who carry along information accumulated over billions of years, continually interact with the environment, and thereby learn and change in response to it. Children, who are shaping and organizing their very selves, experience this most powerfully. And it should not be surprising, he speculates, if children—in the midst of the most exploratory phase of human life, thanks to “their huge, fast-growing, thoroughly dynamic brains”—have throughout the history of the species often been at the vanguard of cultural innovation.

This book is the flower of an astoundingly productive and innovative period of scholarship on evolutionary behavior; it sums up a generation’s worth of thinking and research. But although a work of singular importance, it’s not flawless. Konner’s efforts sometimes flag: his writing fails to sustain a consistent precision and focus. Relatedly, at times Konner seems overwhelmed by the encyclopedic nature of his project. When he sifts and assesses evidence, he’s always judicious and often brilliantly imaginative. Too often, though, The Evolution of Childhood reads like a compilation of research and findings rather than a work that distills that material to create an elegant synthesis—this book hasn’t been subjected to the rigorous and comprehensive editing that a work of such significance demands. But only a book of such staggering ambition can be faulted for failing to achieve consistent greatness.

Tags: Psychology, children, play, books, Benjamin Schwarz, Play’s the Thing, The Atlantic, The Evolution of Childhood, Relationships, Emotion, Mind, Melvin Konner, development, brain, neuroscience, genome, nervous system, society, culture