Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.460 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.140 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.000 | Today, we are going to talk about the biology,

00:00:17.180 | psychology, and utility of play.

00:00:20.320 | Play is something that normally we associate

00:00:23.380 | with children's games, and indeed with being a child.

00:00:27.700 | Much of our childhood development centers around play,

00:00:30.780 | whether or not it's organized play or spontaneous play.

00:00:34.520 | But as adults, we also need to play.

00:00:37.280 | And today I'm going to talk about what I like to refer to

00:00:39.960 | as the power of play.

00:00:42.240 | The power of play resides in play's ability

00:00:45.560 | to change our nervous system for the better

00:00:48.600 | so that we can perform many activities,

00:00:51.460 | not just play activities, better.

00:00:54.440 | Play can also function as a way to explore new ways of being

00:00:58.840 | in different scenarios, in work, in relationships,

00:01:02.280 | in settings of all kind,

00:01:03.440 | and indeed also in the relationship to oneself.

00:01:06.560 | In fact, we are going to explore

00:01:07.880 | how assuming different identities

00:01:10.160 | during the same game of play or the same forms of play

00:01:14.680 | has been shown to be immensely powerful

00:01:16.920 | for allowing people to engage in more creative thinking

00:01:20.040 | and dynamic thinking and indeed to become better leaders

00:01:22.760 | and more effective workers and students and learners

00:01:25.860 | and happier people.

00:01:27.840 | I'm also going to cover some data that shows

00:01:29.760 | that learning to play properly

00:01:32.240 | can enhance one's ability to focus

00:01:34.160 | and is an active area of research

00:01:36.560 | for treatment of things like ADHD,

00:01:39.440 | attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

00:01:41.620 | Just as a little sneak preview of where that's headed,

00:01:45.080 | children who do not access enough play

00:01:47.920 | during certain stages of childhood

00:01:49.800 | are more prone to develop ADHD.

00:01:52.040 | The good news is all of us,

00:01:53.580 | regardless of whether or not we have a ADHD or not,

00:01:56.040 | whether or not we had ample access to play

00:01:58.800 | during childhood or not,

00:02:00.760 | can engage and grow the neural circuits

00:02:04.240 | that allow for this incredible power of play.

00:02:08.080 | And this can be done again at any stage of life.

00:02:10.040 | Today, we're going to talk about the protocols, the science.

00:02:12.280 | We will review all of that.

00:02:13.300 | And I promise you'll come away with a lot of knowledge,

00:02:16.200 | whether or not you're a parent, whether or not you're a child

00:02:18.760 | whether or not you're a person of any age,

00:02:20.680 | you're going to have tools and knowledge

00:02:22.360 | that will benefit you.

00:02:23.640 | Before we begin, I want to share with you the results

00:02:25.920 | of what I think to be an extremely exciting

00:02:28.360 | and certainly an actionable study that was just published

00:02:31.200 | in the journal Scientific Reports.

00:02:33.280 | This is an excellent journal, Nature Press Journal,

00:02:36.200 | peer reviewed, et cetera.

00:02:37.760 | And the findings center around what sorts of devices

00:02:41.400 | we happen to be reading on and accessing information on

00:02:44.240 | and how that's impacting our physiology

00:02:46.880 | and our capacity to learn.

00:02:48.880 | One of the more frequent questions I get

00:02:50.580 | is what are all these devices, phones, tablets, computers,

00:02:54.720 | video games, et cetera, doing to our brains?

00:02:57.240 | And finally, there's some good peer reviewed data

00:02:59.500 | to look at that and to address it directly.

00:03:02.960 | This study, first author Honma, H-O-N-M-A, Honma et al.,

00:03:07.960 | is entitled Reading on a Smartphone Affects PSI Generation,

00:03:11.960 | that's S-I-G-H, PSI Generation,

00:03:13.760 | Brain Activity and Comprehension.

00:03:15.720 | And to just summarize what they found,

00:03:18.480 | they ran a study on 34 healthy individuals

00:03:23.000 | and had them either read material on a smartphone

00:03:27.380 | or on regular printed paper or a book.

00:03:31.020 | And what they found is that comprehension on devices,

00:03:34.320 | in particular smartphones, is much poorer,

00:03:38.440 | much worse than it is when one reads on actual paper.

00:03:42.620 | Now, some of you may experience this yourselves.

00:03:45.980 | Now, they compared smartphones with paper

00:03:48.560 | and what they found was that

00:03:50.800 | when they looked at people's breathing,

00:03:52.780 | the normal patterns of breathing

00:03:54.260 | that people were engaging in

00:03:55.480 | did not differ between people reading on a smartphone

00:03:58.460 | or reading from paper.

00:04:00.700 | However, one particular feature of breathing did differ.

00:04:05.040 | And that particular feature

00:04:06.200 | is what we call physiological size.

00:04:08.100 | I've talked a lot about physiological size on this podcast

00:04:10.900 | and on social media.

00:04:11.920 | We had a terrific guest, Professor Jack Feldman

00:04:14.580 | from University of California, Los Angeles,

00:04:16.200 | who's a world expert in breathing and respiration

00:04:19.200 | and its impacts on the brain

00:04:20.820 | and how brain controls breathing and respiration.

00:04:23.400 | And what you can learn from that episode,

00:04:25.200 | or I'll just tell you again right now,

00:04:26.360 | is that every five minutes or so,

00:04:28.680 | whether or not we are asleep or awake,

00:04:30.140 | we do what's called a physiological sigh,

00:04:31.860 | which is a big deep inhale, often a double inhale,

00:04:35.080 | followed by a long exhale and go something like this.

00:04:42.400 | Now you might think, oh, I never breathe like that,

00:04:44.820 | but you do.

00:04:45.980 | Unless there's something severely wrong

00:04:47.620 | with your brainstem, every five minutes or so,

00:04:50.000 | you do one of these physiological sighs,

00:04:51.860 | which reopens all the little hundreds of millions of sacks

00:04:54.500 | in your lungs called the avioli that bring in more oxygen

00:04:57.580 | as a consequence of that big, deep double inhale.

00:05:00.500 | And then you are able to exhale carbon dioxide,

00:05:03.220 | offload carbon dioxide through that long exhale.

00:05:06.660 | I've also encouraged people

00:05:07.620 | to use the physiological sigh deliberately,

00:05:09.780 | not just spontaneously,

00:05:11.280 | as a way to reduce their stress quickly.

00:05:13.380 | And indeed my lab works on physiological sighs,

00:05:15.600 | and this has been exploring this,

00:05:17.100 | and they're quite effective in reducing our stress very fast.

00:05:20.980 | Reading on a smartphone

00:05:22.600 | seems to suppress physiological sighing.

00:05:24.940 | People aren't aware that it's happening, but it's happening.

00:05:27.300 | Some people have talked about so-called email apnea,

00:05:30.220 | which is the fact that people hold their breath

00:05:32.180 | while they email or while they text,

00:05:34.080 | and indeed many people do that.

00:05:35.380 | This is distinct from email or texting apnea.

00:05:38.460 | What's happening here is people are reading on the phone,

00:05:40.900 | and for whatever reason,

00:05:42.240 | and I'll talk about what the likely reason is,

00:05:44.600 | but for whatever reason, they're suppressing their sighing.

00:05:47.620 | And as a consequence, the brain is not getting enough oxygen

00:05:50.980 | and is not offloading enough carbon dioxide.

00:05:53.520 | And another finding in this study

00:05:55.780 | was that the prefrontal cortex,

00:05:57.440 | an area of the brain that's involved in focus

00:05:59.340 | and attention and learning,

00:06:00.460 | becomes hyperactive in a kind of desperate attempt to focus.

00:06:04.840 | All of this can be summarized by saying,

00:06:07.180 | if you happen to read on a device,

00:06:09.640 | whether or not it's a tablet,

00:06:10.980 | standard computer screen of any kind,

00:06:12.960 | but in particular on a smartphone,

00:06:14.980 | regardless of how small or large that smartphone screen is,

00:06:18.260 | you want to remind yourself to engage

00:06:20.320 | in these physiological sighs fairly regularly.

00:06:23.360 | And it might even be better to just read the most,

00:06:26.800 | or at least the key issues

00:06:29.000 | and things that you're trying to learn

00:06:30.700 | about the key information from paper,

00:06:32.660 | either books or printed out material of some other sort.

00:06:35.620 | What's the underlying mechanism here?

00:06:37.020 | Well, one of the reasons I like this study so much

00:06:40.020 | is that it brings together two of my laboratories

00:06:42.520 | and my particular interests in neuroscience,

00:06:44.960 | which is how does our visual system and the aperture,

00:06:48.480 | meaning the size of our visual window,

00:06:51.320 | relate to our so-called autonomic function

00:06:53.320 | or our internal state?

00:06:55.020 | And basically what's happening here is,

00:06:56.540 | as any of us bring our visual window in more narrowly,

00:07:00.820 | as we contract our visual window,

00:07:02.320 | which is exactly what happens

00:07:03.580 | when we're looking at a little smartphone in front of us,

00:07:06.380 | it seems to suppress the breathing apparatus

00:07:09.100 | because we know that physiological sighs

00:07:10.980 | are controlled by a specific set of neurons

00:07:12.900 | in the brainstem called the parafacial nucleus

00:07:14.700 | discovered by Dr. Jack Feldman.

00:07:16.380 | And so there must be a mechanism whereby

00:07:18.660 | when we tighten our visual window,

00:07:20.480 | we somehow, and we don't know yet how this happens,

00:07:23.660 | but somehow suppress the activity of these neurons

00:07:26.380 | in the parafacial nucleus

00:07:27.340 | that generate this physiological sighs.

00:07:28.980 | So again, you have two choices,

00:07:30.940 | or I suppose you have many choices,

00:07:32.420 | but two main choices to contend with this new information.

00:07:35.180 | One is that you remind yourself to engage in deep breathing

00:07:39.240 | and in particular physiological sighs

00:07:40.760 | every five minutes or so

00:07:41.940 | while reading anything or texting on your smartphone.

00:07:45.060 | The other would be, again,

00:07:46.620 | if there's material that you really need to learn

00:07:49.240 | for sake of regurgitation later

00:07:51.300 | or for something particularly important,

00:07:53.540 | try and read that from either a larger screen

00:07:56.060 | or even better would be from printed materials or books.

00:07:58.940 | Another reason I bring all that up

00:08:00.380 | is that it relates to a larger theme,

00:08:01.860 | which is that I get many, many questions about ADHD

00:08:05.300 | and about people's challenges with focus.

00:08:07.580 | And much of what we're told these days

00:08:09.340 | is that we are challenged with focus

00:08:11.300 | because of the hundreds of videos

00:08:13.300 | that we can see streaming by us in any moment on our phone,

00:08:15.900 | which probably is true.

00:08:17.540 | The fact that the information that we're reading

00:08:19.740 | on the internet and on our phones

00:08:21.540 | is emotionally disturbing or distressing in some way.

00:08:24.700 | And that probably is true as well in many cases.

00:08:27.600 | This study really points to the fact that

00:08:30.100 | independent of the information that we are looking at

00:08:33.200 | or consuming, independent whether or not it's movies

00:08:35.660 | or texts or anything of that sort,

00:08:37.740 | the mere size of the window, the aperture,

00:08:41.160 | the screen that we're looking at

00:08:42.980 | is also strongly impacting our ability

00:08:45.460 | to learn and remember information.

00:08:47.620 | So broaden that visual window, print things out,

00:08:51.000 | look at a book.

00:08:52.020 | I didn't design the system.

00:08:54.460 | I always say, you know, however our visual system

00:08:56.600 | and respiratory system happened to evolve,

00:08:59.040 | I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

00:09:00.620 | This is just simply how your brain circuits work.

00:09:03.200 | So if you want to learn things, widen that visual window

00:09:05.840 | and even better print things out,

00:09:07.940 | pick up a book or read on a tablet even,

00:09:10.380 | but try and make that tablet larger

00:09:12.580 | than a smartphone screen size.

00:09:14.460 | Before we begin our discussion about the power of play,

00:09:17.540 | I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate

00:09:19.780 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:09:22.140 | It is however, part of my desire and effort

00:09:24.240 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:09:26.900 | and science related tools to the general public.

00:09:29.660 | In keeping with that theme,

00:09:30.740 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:13:57.880 | Let's talk about play.

00:13:59.940 | Now, in researching this episode,

00:14:01.500 | I thought that I was going to come across a bunch of papers

00:14:04.280 | that say this brain area connects to that brain area,

00:14:07.740 | which controls play in animals,

00:14:09.660 | and there's similar areas in babies and in adults,

00:14:12.580 | and indeed, that's true,

00:14:13.540 | and we will talk about brain circuitry.

00:14:16.080 | But I think more importantly is to understand

00:14:18.540 | what is the utility of play?

00:14:20.580 | You know, why do we play when we're younger?

00:14:22.140 | Why do we tend to play less as we get older?

00:14:24.580 | And what in the world is play for?

00:14:27.440 | Some of us would be categorized as more playful.

00:14:30.520 | I'm sure that you know people like this.

00:14:32.260 | Maybe you are like this, people that can walk into a room,

00:14:35.080 | a social setting of any kind,

00:14:36.480 | and they seem to already kind of have a playful,

00:14:39.160 | maybe even a mischievous quality about them.

00:14:41.020 | We'll talk about mischief a little bit later.

00:14:42.820 | But they sort of look at an environment or a social setting

00:14:45.980 | as an opportunity for different kinds of novel interactions.

00:14:49.220 | Other people, and I'd probably put myself

00:14:51.020 | into this category, if I walk into a novel environment,

00:14:53.840 | I tend to be more in the mode of just assessing

00:14:56.660 | what that environment is like.

00:14:58.260 | I'm not a particularly spontaneously playful person,

00:15:01.040 | although around certain individuals,

00:15:02.380 | I might be more spontaneously playful.

00:15:04.900 | We are all on a continuum of this kind of seriousness

00:15:07.940 | to playful nature.

00:15:10.140 | It turns out that all young animals, including humans,

00:15:13.660 | have more playfulness and tend to engage

00:15:15.900 | in more spontaneous play in their earlier years

00:15:18.380 | than in their later years.

00:15:20.700 | And therein lies a very interesting portal

00:15:22.940 | to understanding what the utility,

00:15:25.540 | what the purpose of play is.

00:15:27.580 | First of all, I want to lay down a couple of key facts

00:15:30.420 | about play that point to the fact

00:15:33.060 | that play is not just about games.

00:15:35.640 | Play is about much, much more.

00:15:38.100 | And play, and in particular, how we played as a child,

00:15:42.220 | and still how we can play as adults,

00:15:44.540 | is really how we test and expand our potential roles

00:15:48.060 | in all kinds of interactions.

00:15:50.680 | One of the most important, interesting,

00:15:52.540 | and surprising features of play

00:15:54.660 | that I'd like everyone to know about

00:15:56.660 | is that it is homeostatically regulated.

00:15:59.580 | Some of you are familiar with the term homeostasis.

00:16:01.620 | Homeostasis is just this aspect of biological systems

00:16:05.220 | to try and remain in balance.

00:16:08.020 | If you stay awake for a long period of time,

00:16:09.620 | you tend to want to sleep for a long period of time.

00:16:12.620 | If you slept for a long period of time

00:16:14.220 | and you're very rested,

00:16:15.060 | then you tend to be very energetic the next day.

00:16:16.780 | And of course, I know people out there will immediately say,

00:16:18.740 | "Oh, well, if I sleep too long,

00:16:20.120 | then I'm groggy the next day."

00:16:21.220 | Of course, there are exceptions.

00:16:22.580 | But in general, sleep and wakefulness

00:16:25.540 | are in homeostatic balance.

00:16:27.860 | Thirst and water consumption are in homeostatic balance.

00:16:31.020 | If you don't drink any fluids for a while,

00:16:32.760 | you tend to get more thirsty.

00:16:34.140 | You drink fluids and your thirst tends to diminish.

00:16:37.420 | Likewise with food, likewise with most

00:16:39.820 | all motivated behaviors.

00:16:41.540 | Well, one of the most important discoveries

00:16:43.320 | of the last century was largely the work

00:16:45.740 | of a guy named Jak Pengsep.

00:16:47.660 | No, it's not Jack, it's Jak Pengsep,

00:16:50.120 | who really pioneered this understanding

00:16:52.280 | of the biology of play and relating that

00:16:54.660 | to the psychology of play in animals and humans.

00:16:57.220 | He's considered a kind of luminary in the field of play.

00:17:01.500 | And what a great title to have, right?

00:17:02.820 | If you could have a title and be a scientific luminary,

00:17:04.700 | you might as well be the play guy.

00:17:06.960 | In fact, he was known,

00:17:08.460 | and I'll get into this later as to why,

00:17:09.920 | but he was known as the rat tickler

00:17:12.140 | because he tickled rats.

00:17:13.320 | And he actually found that rodents and animals of many kind

00:17:16.420 | generate laughter in response to tickling.

00:17:19.240 | And in fact, they don't have the capacity

00:17:21.780 | to tickle themselves.

00:17:22.640 | Something we'll also talk about why that is.

00:17:24.680 | And he was called the rat tickler,

00:17:26.620 | but then he discovered that many species of animals

00:17:29.580 | engage in laughter in response to tickling

00:17:31.440 | and they tickle each other.

00:17:32.700 | And the reason you don't hear them laughing,

00:17:34.700 | no, you can't hear your dog laughing.

00:17:36.300 | That isn't laughing, it's something else,

00:17:38.080 | is that most animals besides humans

00:17:40.860 | laugh at kind of ultrasonic levels of auditory output,

00:17:45.460 | meaning the frequencies of sound

00:17:47.120 | are just too high for you to hear.

00:17:48.240 | But with the appropriate devices,

00:17:50.140 | he was able with his colleagues

00:17:51.660 | to isolate the so-called the rat laughter.

00:17:54.740 | And then it turns out there's kitten laughter

00:17:56.400 | and there's puppy laughter.

00:17:57.520 | And of course there's human laughter.

00:17:59.300 | So Jak Pengsup was a very interesting

00:18:01.060 | and pioneering person in this field.

00:18:03.260 | And he also discovered that play is homeostatically

00:18:06.900 | regulated, meaning if animals, including children,

00:18:09.860 | are restricted from playing for a certain amount of time,

00:18:12.700 | they will play more when given the opportunity.

00:18:15.180 | In the same way that if I food restrict you

00:18:16.900 | for a long period of time,

00:18:17.900 | you will eat more when you are finally allowed to eat.

00:18:21.100 | And this is important because it moves this thing

00:18:24.620 | that we call play from the dimension

00:18:26.740 | of higher order functions or things that evolved recently,

00:18:31.620 | that are really kind of at the front edge

00:18:34.420 | of human evolution,

00:18:36.060 | deeper into the circuitry of the brain,

00:18:39.180 | whereby we say the brainstem,

00:18:41.900 | the kind of ancient parts of the brain

00:18:43.860 | are going to be involved.

00:18:44.780 | And in fact, that's the case.

00:18:46.180 | As we're going to learn later in the podcast,

00:18:48.680 | play is generated through the connectivity

00:18:51.620 | of many brain areas.

00:18:53.180 | But one of the key brain areas is an area called PAG,

00:18:57.820 | periaqueductal gray.

00:18:59.100 | The periaqueductal gray is a brainstem area.

00:19:02.540 | So it's pretty far back as the brain kind of transitions

00:19:05.460 | into the spinal cord.

00:19:06.620 | And it's rich with neurons that make endogenous opioids.

00:19:10.940 | So these are not the kinds of opioids

00:19:12.500 | that are causing the opioid crisis.

00:19:14.860 | These are neurons that you and I all have

00:19:17.780 | that release endogenous,

00:19:19.180 | meaning self-made or biologically made opioids.

00:19:22.580 | They go by names like enkephalin and things of that sort.

00:19:26.900 | Play evokes small amounts of opioid release into the system.

00:19:31.580 | They kind of dope you up a little bit,

00:19:33.380 | not so much as one would see

00:19:36.180 | if one were to take exogenous opioids.

00:19:38.260 | In fact, exogenous opioids, as we now know,

00:19:41.160 | are potentially very hazardous,

00:19:43.860 | highly high addiction potential, high overdose potential.

00:19:46.780 | They cause all sorts of problems.

00:19:48.160 | Yes, there are clinical uses for them,

00:19:49.740 | but they're causing a lot of problems nowadays.

00:19:51.460 | But these endogenous opioids

00:19:53.140 | are released in children and adults

00:19:54.620 | anytime we engage in play.

00:19:57.500 | And that turns out to be a very important chemical state

00:20:00.540 | because there's something about having an abundance

00:20:02.860 | of these endogenous opioids released into the brain

00:20:06.060 | that allows other areas of the brain,

00:20:07.680 | like the prefrontal cortex,

00:20:09.060 | the area of the front that's responsible

00:20:10.600 | for what we call executive function.

00:20:12.080 | Executive function is the ability to make predictions,

00:20:14.820 | to assess contingencies.

00:20:16.880 | Like if I do this, then that happens.

00:20:18.900 | If I do that, then that happens.

00:20:20.580 | Well, prefrontal cortex is often seen

00:20:22.520 | as a kind of rigid executive of the whole brain.

00:20:25.820 | That's one way to view it,

00:20:27.140 | but probably a better way to view it

00:20:28.580 | is that the prefrontal cortex works in concert

00:20:31.340 | with these other more primitive circuitries.

00:20:34.020 | And when the periaqueductal gray

00:20:36.320 | releases these endogenous opioids during play,

00:20:40.160 | the prefrontal cortex doesn't get stupid.

00:20:42.720 | It actually gets smarter.

00:20:44.220 | It develops the ability to take on different roles

00:20:47.780 | and explore different contingencies.

00:20:49.840 | And we're going to talk about role play later

00:20:51.940 | in different contexts.

00:20:52.980 | And what we will find is that so much of play

00:20:56.140 | is really about exploring things in a way

00:20:59.600 | that feels safe enough to explore, right?

00:21:02.780 | This is not what happens when we drive down the street

00:21:04.940 | or when we bike down the street.

00:21:06.440 | When we are headed to work commuting on our bicycle

00:21:08.780 | or walking or driving, we tend to be very linear

00:21:11.160 | and we tend to be very goal-directed.

00:21:12.820 | We're not going to just take a new street just because.

00:21:15.220 | We're not going to be spontaneously

00:21:17.140 | riding in the middle of the road

00:21:18.260 | and then on the sidewalk and then back and forth.

00:21:20.120 | Although I can remember as a kid,

00:21:21.180 | I was doing some of that.

00:21:22.020 | I like to jump off curb cuts when I was a kid.

00:21:23.620 | And then eventually I graduated, sorry to the cyclist,

00:21:26.380 | but I graduated to skateboarding.

00:21:27.800 | And then I look on skateboarding,

00:21:29.340 | you're always kind of exploring terrain.

00:21:31.100 | But you know, as I got older,

00:21:31.940 | actually I find myself becoming much more linear.

00:21:33.860 | I just don't play with my commute very much.

00:21:36.380 | It's really just about getting to work and then working.

00:21:39.580 | When endogenous opioids are in our system,

00:21:41.860 | when we were in this mode of play,

00:21:43.680 | the prefrontal cortex starts seeing and exploring

00:21:48.140 | many more possibilities of how we interact

00:21:50.700 | with our environment, with others,

00:21:52.740 | and the roles that we can assume for ourselves.

00:21:55.740 | And so we're going to dissect one by one

00:21:58.340 | the different aspects of play, role play, social play,

00:22:01.540 | individual play, imaginary play, competitive play.

00:22:04.620 | There are enormous number of dimensions of play.

00:22:06.620 | And by the end of this episode,

00:22:08.660 | we're going to arrive at a very key feature.

00:22:11.140 | The key feature is one that's called

00:22:13.760 | your personal play identity.

00:22:16.100 | All of us have what we call a personal play identity.

00:22:19.800 | This personal play identity was laid down during development

00:22:23.180 | and it is the identity that you assume in playful scenarios.

00:22:27.560 | And it is the identity that you adopt

00:22:29.880 | in non-playful scenarios.

00:22:32.040 | The great news is that your personal play identity

00:22:34.780 | is plastic throughout your entire lifespan.

00:22:37.100 | You can adjust your personal play identity

00:22:38.940 | in ways that will benefit you in work and relationships

00:22:41.800 | and your overall level of happiness.

00:22:43.400 | We will discuss protocols and ways to do that.

00:22:45.960 | But I do want to give a nod to the late Jock, Jock, excuse me,

00:22:50.580 | Jock Pengsep, the rat tickler.

00:22:53.220 | And I also want to just give a nod to play generally.

00:22:56.520 | As we move forward in the discussion,

00:22:57.900 | what I'd love for everyone to do

00:22:59.360 | is to stop thinking about play as just a child activity,

00:23:03.140 | not just a sport related activity,

00:23:07.060 | but really as an exploration in contingencies.

00:23:10.600 | Again, it's an exploration of if I do A, what happens?

00:23:15.260 | If I do B, what happens?

00:23:16.860 | If someone else takes on behavior or attitude C,

00:23:21.340 | what am I going to do?

00:23:22.700 | And play is really where we can expand our catalog

00:23:26.180 | of potential outcomes and it can be enormously enriching.

00:23:29.720 | And indeed, as we'll talk about the tinkerers of the world,

00:23:33.680 | the true creatives,

00:23:35.400 | the people that build incredible technologies and art,

00:23:38.660 | and also they just have incredibly rich emotional

00:23:41.400 | and intellectual and social lives

00:23:43.360 | all have a strong element of play.

00:23:46.080 | And so today I hope to convince you of some protocols

00:23:48.520 | that will allow you to expand your various roles in life

00:23:51.520 | through the portal of play.

00:23:53.260 | So we established that play is homeostatic,

00:23:55.760 | meaning we all need to do it.

00:23:57.560 | Many of us, including myself,

00:24:00.000 | haven't played that much as adults.

00:24:01.920 | We're all pretty busy.

00:24:03.280 | Number of us are stressed.

00:24:04.320 | We got a lot to do in life.

00:24:05.900 | But as children, most all of us engage in a lot of play.

00:24:10.760 | And in looking at the way that very young children

00:24:13.880 | and especially toddlers play,

00:24:16.080 | we can learn a lot because it reveals the fundamental rules

00:24:19.920 | by which the toddler brain interacts with the world.

00:24:23.400 | Now, one of the key things about the baby brain

00:24:27.000 | is that the baby brain somehow knows

00:24:29.760 | that it can't do everything in the world, right?

00:24:32.560 | If a baby needs something,

00:24:35.080 | it generally will cry or make some sort of vocalization

00:24:38.840 | or some sort of facial expression or combination of those.

00:24:41.600 | And the caretaker, whoever that may be, will provide it.

00:24:44.160 | This is an ancient hardwired mechanism

00:24:46.340 | whereby the so-called autonomic nervous system

00:24:48.240 | that generates stress will create this kind of whining

00:24:51.000 | and discomfort, maybe arriving,

00:24:52.880 | maybe the baby gets kind of red in the face,

00:24:55.120 | and the caretaker delivers something based on a good guess

00:25:00.120 | of what that baby needs.

00:25:02.400 | So maybe it's breast milk, maybe it's bottled milk,

00:25:05.200 | maybe it's a diaper change,

00:25:06.720 | maybe it's to be warmed up if the baby is cold,

00:25:09.160 | maybe it's to be cooled down if the baby's too warm,

00:25:11.460 | maybe if the baby's in this little onesie thing,

00:25:13.560 | it's feeling restricted and just wants to move

00:25:15.440 | and they'll get taken out of their crib or their stroller,

00:25:18.760 | whatever it is, and allowed to stretch out on the floor.

00:25:21.240 | Remember, the baby doesn't know exactly what it needs,

00:25:23.440 | it only knows the state of discomfort.

00:25:25.920 | And of course, we don't know exactly

00:25:27.480 | what babies and toddlers are thinking

00:25:29.400 | because they can't express themselves with language yet.

00:25:32.320 | But what's key to understand is the rule or the contingency

00:25:35.440 | that is set up in that scenario.

00:25:37.240 | In that scenario, the child feels some discomfort,

00:25:42.240 | expresses that discomfort verbally

00:25:44.240 | or through a facial expression or both,

00:25:46.120 | and then some force,

00:25:48.320 | some person from the outside world resolves it.

00:25:51.960 | And so the very young baby, and indeed many children

00:25:55.720 | up to certain ages, and let's confess,

00:25:58.320 | many adults are not able to meet

00:26:00.840 | or adjust their internal states of stress,

00:26:02.960 | and so they look to things outside of them.

00:26:04.680 | That's the first rule, the fundamental rule

00:26:07.180 | that we all learn when we come into life,

00:26:09.160 | that when in a state of discomfort,

00:26:11.440 | to look outside our immediate biology

00:26:14.880 | beyond the confines of our skin and find a solution,

00:26:17.960 | a sip of water.

00:26:18.800 | For adults, it might be a sip of alcohol, right?

00:26:21.520 | Probably not the best tool to relieve stress,

00:26:23.520 | but that's one that many people do in fact engage in.

00:26:26.000 | For the baby that's hungry,

00:26:27.080 | the bottle milk comes from the outside.

00:26:28.780 | As we gain more proficiency in moving through life

00:26:31.160 | and we can get things for ourselves,

00:26:32.960 | we still often bring things from the external world in

00:26:35.760 | to resolve this, what I'm calling autonomic discomfort

00:26:40.040 | or autonomic dysregulation.

00:26:42.780 | That's not a game, but that's a rule.

00:26:47.120 | As we advance from infant to toddler,

00:26:50.320 | we start to think more in terms of where we are

00:26:53.960 | and what we own relative to what's out there in the world.

00:26:58.000 | And now in the world of child psychology,

00:27:00.700 | there's a somewhat famous poem that was written

00:27:03.200 | by a research child psychologist.

00:27:05.760 | His name was Burton White.

00:27:07.200 | And he wrote a poem called the toddler's creed.

00:27:09.900 | The toddler's creed defines well what the rules

00:27:12.540 | and contingencies of play are in very young children.

00:27:16.720 | And it reveals to us just how narrow

00:27:19.540 | and limited their worldview is

00:27:22.080 | and how self-centered their world is.

00:27:24.880 | So the toddler's creed read quickly,

00:27:26.800 | 'cause I don't want to take up too much time with this,

00:27:28.240 | is if I want it, it's mine.

00:27:30.700 | If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's mine.

00:27:33.860 | For anyone that's played with a toddler,

00:27:35.180 | you can imagine this in your mind.

00:27:36.760 | If I can take it away from you, it's mine.

00:27:39.440 | If I had a little while ago, it's mine.

00:27:42.420 | If we are building something together,

00:27:44.340 | all the pieces are mine.

00:27:46.060 | If it looks just like mine, it's mine.

00:27:48.700 | If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else,

00:27:51.100 | no matter what.

00:27:52.900 | And of course, as we hear this,

00:27:55.400 | it sounds quite awful, right?

00:27:56.700 | And yet this is actually a reflection

00:27:58.740 | of what a healthy toddler would think about the world,

00:28:01.860 | that the objects and things,

00:28:03.260 | and even the people in the world are theirs,

00:28:06.160 | that they are actually possessions that belong to them.

00:28:08.520 | And of course, some people never actually transitioned

00:28:10.900 | beyond this stage of moral and social development.

00:28:14.300 | And there are indeed some adults

00:28:16.680 | that fit the toddler's creed.

00:28:18.100 | And you're welcome to share this with them

00:28:20.460 | if ever you think that it might be of benefit

00:28:22.280 | to their self-reflection.

00:28:24.160 | But in all seriousness, Burton White's toddler's creed

00:28:28.660 | is really grounded in this transition

00:28:31.400 | from when we are infants

00:28:32.480 | and we have to have things delivered to us,

00:28:34.720 | to the point where we are toddlers

00:28:36.400 | and we can access things in the world,

00:28:38.480 | but we tend to assume that they are all ours.

00:28:40.800 | And then the next stage is the really key stage

00:28:43.920 | as it relates to play.

00:28:44.840 | Because in the next stage of development

00:28:47.440 | is where young children start to interact

00:28:49.740 | with other children, and there's an exchange

00:28:52.000 | and a possession and then a letting go of certain things.

00:28:55.760 | Learning that not everything is yours

00:28:58.080 | and that the entire world is not about you

00:29:00.160 | is one of the key contingencies

00:29:01.960 | that is established during play.

00:29:04.640 | It's one of the key ways in which children go

00:29:07.160 | from being very self-centered

00:29:08.960 | and basically unable to engage with other kids for very long

00:29:12.120 | without some sort of eruption of crying

00:29:14.040 | and some sort of battle of kind of push-pull over an object

00:29:18.280 | to things like sharing and things like cooperative play.

00:29:21.520 | So as we transition from forms of play

00:29:23.680 | that are all about the self,

00:29:25.100 | that are all me, me, me, me, me, the toddler's creed,

00:29:27.800 | to forms of play that involve some discomfort

00:29:31.200 | in assuming roles that maybe we don't want

00:29:33.240 | and not getting what we want,

00:29:35.420 | it's really an opportunity for the brain

00:29:37.940 | to start to explore different roles that people take,

00:29:41.320 | how they work as individuals and as pairs

00:29:43.620 | and in larger groups,

00:29:45.200 | and to do that in a low stakes environment.

00:29:49.280 | You wouldn't want this to be worked out on the battlefield

00:29:52.360 | or when searching for food

00:29:53.860 | or in some high stakes environment

00:29:55.840 | where the survival of the species was important.

00:29:59.120 | It appears that these circuitries for play evolved

00:30:01.880 | so that rules and contingencies around who's most important,

00:30:06.420 | whether or not the group is important,

00:30:07.800 | whether or not individuals are going to be leaders

00:30:09.840 | or followers, et cetera,

00:30:11.200 | that can be explored in a low stakes environment.

00:30:13.720 | Now, there are hundreds of different types of play

00:30:15.800 | and hundreds of different types of contingency testing,

00:30:18.560 | but the key theme here is that play allows children

00:30:23.380 | and adults for that matter to explore different outcomes

00:30:26.780 | in a kind of low stakes environment.

00:30:28.520 | If you're playing a board game or a card game,

00:30:30.680 | you might get really into that game,

00:30:32.320 | but unless there's a lot of money on the table, so to speak,

00:30:34.520 | or you're really playing for something important,

00:30:36.600 | or unless your ego is swollen

00:30:38.080 | way out of proportion to reality,

00:30:40.160 | if you lose, you might not feel good about it,

00:30:42.440 | but it's truly not the end of the world.

00:30:44.040 | And if you win, you might feel really good about it,

00:30:46.420 | but you're not really incredible.

00:30:48.200 | You were just incredible in that particular situation

00:30:51.040 | for that particular moment.

00:30:52.200 | It doesn't really transform the rest of your life

00:30:54.840 | unless that game is of a particular type,

00:30:56.880 | for sport, for instance, and we'll talk about sport later.

00:31:00.520 | So the key theme here is that play is contingency testing.

00:31:04.700 | Play is contingency testing under conditions

00:31:07.540 | where the stakes are sufficiently low

00:31:10.420 | that individuals should feel comfortable

00:31:12.500 | assuming different roles,

00:31:13.620 | even roles that they're not entirely comfortable with

00:31:16.800 | in their outside life.

00:31:18.540 | And that all relates again to the release

00:31:20.860 | of these endogenous opioids in this brain center,

00:31:23.240 | periaqueductal gray,

00:31:24.440 | and the way that it allows the prefrontal cortex

00:31:26.940 | in a very direct way.

00:31:27.780 | I mean, truly, it allows it in a biological way

00:31:30.700 | to expand the number of operations that it can run

00:31:34.600 | and start thinking about, oh, well, okay,

00:31:37.500 | normally I'm kind of a loner and I like to read and work

00:31:40.900 | and hang out alone, maybe even play alone,

00:31:43.100 | but, oh, okay, I'll play a board game or a game of tennis

00:31:46.200 | where I have a partner

00:31:47.040 | and we're going to play as partners against two other people.

00:31:49.040 | Okay, that's a little uncomfortable, but I'll do it.

00:31:51.780 | And in doing that, you discover certain ways

00:31:53.960 | in which you are proficient

00:31:55.220 | and certain ways in which you are less proficient.

00:31:57.540 | You discover that the other person

00:31:59.060 | actually tends to cheat a little bit

00:32:01.980 | or the other person is extremely rigid about the rules,

00:32:05.100 | or maybe it is extremely rigid

00:32:06.580 | about the way they organize their pieces on the board,

00:32:09.100 | or you're crossing the line

00:32:10.240 | into your side of the tennis court.

00:32:11.720 | There are all sorts of things that we learn

00:32:13.500 | in these rather low stakes scenarios.

00:32:15.660 | That's the key theme here.

00:32:17.300 | So before I continue,

00:32:18.480 | I just want to point to a tool that anyone can use,

00:32:21.620 | but in particular, the less playful of the group.

00:32:24.840 | And I would put myself into this category.

00:32:27.360 | Again, I'm not somebody who really engages

00:32:29.000 | in spontaneous play.

00:32:30.460 | I enjoy sports, I enjoy exercise,

00:32:33.580 | but that is distinct from play

00:32:34.960 | because the sports and exercise that I engage in,

00:32:37.020 | I take pretty seriously.

00:32:38.100 | They're not low stakes for me.

00:32:40.260 | Actually, I put a lot of importance on them.

00:32:41.940 | Actually, as I'm saying all this,

00:32:42.780 | I probably should put a little less importance on them

00:32:44.500 | and have a little more fun with those.

00:32:46.220 | And yet, what I'm about to tell you is that anyone

00:32:50.820 | and everyone can benefit from engaging

00:32:53.340 | in a bit more of this playful mindset.

00:32:56.500 | The playful mindset is not necessarily about smiling

00:32:59.300 | and jumping around or being silly.

00:33:01.900 | That's not it at all.

00:33:02.740 | It's not the Tigger character from Winnie the Pooh.

00:33:05.380 | Necessarily, it could be,

00:33:07.340 | but it's really about allowing yourself

00:33:10.880 | to expand the number of outcomes

00:33:14.060 | that you're willing to entertain

00:33:15.420 | and to think about how you relate

00:33:16.540 | to those different outcomes.

00:33:17.900 | So what this means is putting yourself into scenarios

00:33:20.660 | where you might not be the top performer, right?

00:33:23.980 | Playing a game that you're not really that good at.

00:33:26.100 | I had this experience recently.

00:33:27.960 | Friends that like to play cards,

00:33:29.160 | they like to do some low stakes gambling.

00:33:30.940 | This is not an illegal gambling ring.

00:33:32.380 | They play for trivial things.

00:33:34.180 | And I generally don't buy into the game.

00:33:38.180 | I generally don't play.

00:33:39.580 | Mostly because they end up winning

00:33:41.200 | and taking whatever it is that I have.

00:33:43.660 | But in the mode of assuming a more playful spirit,

00:33:47.180 | the idea would be, well, if the stakes are low enough,

00:33:50.480 | then to play simply for the sake of playing,

00:33:52.780 | because there's something to learn there

00:33:54.260 | about the other people in the group and about oneself

00:33:57.260 | and how one reacts to things

00:33:59.620 | like someone who's clearly trying to take everybody's money

00:34:03.420 | or somebody who is clearly trying to cheat

00:34:07.840 | or somebody who's clearly very, very rigid

00:34:10.460 | about every last detail,

00:34:11.700 | including how the cards are dealt and shuffled, right?

00:34:14.520 | There is learning in this exploration.

00:34:16.820 | And that is at a biological level,

00:34:19.640 | the prefrontal cortex starting

00:34:21.300 | to entertain different possibilities,

00:34:23.380 | starting to entertain different outcomes

00:34:25.020 | in this low stakes way.

00:34:26.260 | And if you think about it,

00:34:27.660 | that's not something that we allow ourselves

00:34:29.840 | to do very often.

00:34:31.720 | Even if we listen to new forms of music

00:34:33.660 | or we go see new art or new movies,

00:34:36.300 | those are new experiences,

00:34:37.500 | but that's not us making new predictions

00:34:39.820 | about what's going to happen next.

00:34:41.220 | It's not the brain working to figure out new possibilities.

00:34:45.020 | And so you can immediately see how just a small increase

00:34:49.100 | in your willingness to put yourself into conditions

00:34:51.580 | where you don't understand all the rules, perhaps,

00:34:53.460 | or you're not super proficient at something,

00:34:56.300 | but you enter it because it is low stakes.

00:34:59.340 | And because there is information

00:35:00.740 | to learn about yourself and others

00:35:02.260 | could start to open up these prefrontal cortex circuits.

00:35:05.260 | And when I say open up,

00:35:06.500 | I don't mean that literally there's an opening in your skull.

00:35:08.780 | What I mean is that your prefrontal cortex

00:35:11.980 | can work in very rigid ways.

00:35:13.520 | Meaning if A, then B, if I go down this street,

00:35:16.180 | turn left and go that way to work, it is fast.

00:35:18.620 | If I go down the other street, it's slow.

00:35:20.100 | If there's a traffic jam there, I'm going to go there,

00:35:22.320 | but it's starting to explore different possibilities.

00:35:24.600 | And there are very, very few opportunities in life

00:35:28.300 | to explore contingencies in this low stakes way,

00:35:31.280 | such that it engages neuroplasticity

00:35:33.260 | of the prefrontal cortex.

00:35:34.740 | So play is powerful at making your prefrontal cortex

00:35:38.900 | more plastic, more able to change in response to experience,

00:35:42.240 | but not just during the period of play,

00:35:45.020 | but in all scenarios, because you get one prefrontal cortex.

00:35:47.860 | You don't get a prefrontal cortex just for play.

00:35:50.100 | You get a prefrontal cortex that engages in everything.

00:35:53.300 | So going forward,

00:35:54.140 | I will layer on some more concrete aspects of tools.

00:35:58.180 | But for now, if you're somebody

00:35:59.440 | that doesn't consider yourself particularly playful,

00:36:01.760 | consider and maybe even engage

00:36:03.420 | in just a little bit of play in some way

00:36:06.940 | that is of discomfort to you with the understanding

00:36:09.860 | that is increasing your prefrontal cortical plasticity.

00:36:13.520 | Another really interesting and important aspect of play

00:36:16.960 | is so-called play postures.

00:36:19.200 | These are seen in animals and these are seen in humans.

00:36:22.380 | And for those of you that are watching this podcast

00:36:24.440 | on YouTube, I'll do my best to adopt them here.

00:36:27.400 | For those of you that are listening,

00:36:28.380 | you'll just have to imagine them in your mind's eye.

00:36:31.120 | But Jak Pengsepp and indeed Darwin himself

00:36:35.000 | studied these play postures that all animals engage in.

00:36:38.380 | Perhaps the most familiar one is seen in dogs and in wolves

00:36:44.320 | where they will lower their head to the ground

00:36:46.360 | and they'll put their paws out in front of them

00:36:47.960 | and they will make eye contact

00:36:49.780 | with another typically dog or wolf

00:36:53.040 | to so-called call the play.

00:36:55.320 | Now, when they do this posture,

00:36:57.320 | it's obvious that they're lowering themselves.

00:36:59.040 | They're not in an aggressive stance

00:37:01.640 | because they're lowering their head.

00:37:03.220 | And this is universally known among canines as play posture.

00:37:07.160 | There's some famous videos online.

00:37:08.400 | You can look these up of dogs actually doing this

00:37:11.240 | with bears that they're confronted with.

00:37:13.300 | And the bears, at least in these videos,

00:37:16.520 | in exchange also lowering their head

00:37:18.680 | and there you see bear dog playful interactions.

00:37:22.840 | Now, you always have to be cautious with bears in general.

00:37:25.760 | I would say you have to be cautious with bears.

00:37:27.760 | But this speaks to the universality of this bowing,

00:37:31.960 | this sort of what some people call the puppy bow

00:37:34.140 | or the play bow that dogs do.

00:37:36.120 | It turns out that humans do this as well,

00:37:37.880 | although in a different form,

00:37:39.160 | I'm sure there are some that go into

00:37:40.400 | the down dog play posture,

00:37:42.100 | but more typically when humans want to play,

00:37:45.200 | they will do a subtle or not so subtle head tilt.

00:37:48.920 | The head tilt with eyes open is considered

00:37:51.480 | the universal head and facial expression posture

00:37:54.640 | of play in humans.

00:37:55.960 | So when two people see one another,

00:37:57.680 | if they are aggressive towards one another,

00:38:00.380 | they will assume certain facial expressions and postures.

00:38:03.000 | But if they're feeling playful towards one another,

00:38:04.860 | oftentimes they'll tip their head to the side

00:38:06.460 | just a little bit and they'll open their eyes.

00:38:08.200 | They might even raise their eyebrows briefly.

00:38:10.480 | This has been seen again and again and again.

00:38:12.680 | Another hardwired feature of so-called play postures

00:38:16.600 | is what's called soft eyes.

00:38:18.680 | When animals are aggressive or when they're sad,

00:38:22.060 | they tend to reduce the size of their eye openings

00:38:24.880 | by basically making their eyelids closer together somewhat,

00:38:28.700 | but keeping their eyes together

00:38:29.640 | in particular for aggression,

00:38:30.760 | they'll bring their eyes towards

00:38:31.920 | what we call a vergence eye movement,

00:38:33.320 | bringing it towards the center

00:38:34.440 | that actually narrows the aperture of the visual field.

00:38:37.240 | When people or animals want to engage in play,

00:38:41.280 | they tend to open their eyelids somewhat

00:38:43.620 | and they tend to purse their lips just a little bit.

00:38:45.840 | So it's not like throwing your lips like this,

00:38:48.040 | it's pursing their lips,

00:38:49.220 | they'll open their eyes a little bit

00:38:50.260 | and they'll often do the head tilt as well,

00:38:51.860 | sometimes with a little bit of a smile.

00:38:53.660 | These are reflexive, these are not trained up.

00:38:56.160 | Children do this, adults do this, dogs, wolves do this,

00:39:00.440 | even certain birds will do this.

00:39:02.420 | Most birds have eyes on the side of their heads,

00:39:04.080 | but they do a sort of form of this soft eyes approach.

00:39:06.660 | And certainly in raptors, you see a softening of the eyes

00:39:09.160 | and indeed raptors like hawks and eagles,

00:39:11.620 | they actually do have a certain form of play,

00:39:13.600 | but only early in life.

00:39:15.020 | The other thing that we see during play

00:39:17.800 | are what are called partial postures.

00:39:19.700 | Partial postures are a kind of play enactment

00:39:23.460 | of postures that would otherwise be threatening.

00:39:26.140 | So a partial posture that we see during play

00:39:29.780 | in animals and humans that relates to aggressive play,

00:39:32.900 | so things like wrestling or things like rough

00:39:35.220 | and tumble play, which is very common in animals and kids

00:39:37.780 | and some adults, is that because there's going

00:39:41.420 | to be a physical interaction in animals,

00:39:44.140 | what will happen is they will march toward one another,

00:39:47.500 | often very slowly, but rather than having their hair up,

00:39:51.300 | which we call pyloerection,

00:39:53.100 | which is when the hair goes up,

00:39:54.180 | animals do this to make themselves look bigger.

00:39:55.800 | Think about the cat that's trying to look bigger

00:39:58.140 | or an animal that's being aggressive,

00:39:59.340 | trying to look bigger in the presence of a foe,

00:40:04.340 | a different animal that they're either going to try

00:40:06.460 | and kill or fight in some way,

00:40:08.060 | even if it's to defend themselves.

00:40:10.060 | Partial postures occur when animals will approach

00:40:12.920 | one another, but they'll keep their fur down.

00:40:15.500 | Humans will do this too.

00:40:16.960 | They were approached during play,

00:40:19.060 | but unless it's highly competitive play,

00:40:21.100 | like a football game or a boxing match,

00:40:23.840 | they will actually shrink their body size somewhat.

00:40:26.340 | We have hair on our bodies, some of us more than others,

00:40:30.140 | and that hair is capable of pyloerection.

00:40:33.240 | It can stand up.

00:40:34.080 | That's the hair standing up on end phenomenon,

00:40:36.920 | but most of us don't have enough hair on our bodies

00:40:39.600 | that we can actually use that to make ourselves larger.

00:40:42.700 | So what you see with people who are about to engage in play

00:40:46.040 | is they tend to make their body a little bit smaller

00:40:48.660 | unless they are highly competitive

00:40:50.580 | and highly competitive play is its own distinct form of play

00:40:53.440 | that we'll talk about later,

00:40:54.420 | such as during sport when the stakes are high.

00:40:56.940 | A Super Bowl football game,

00:40:59.840 | I'm revealing my ignorance about sports here.

00:41:01.940 | The Super Bowl as it's typically called

00:41:04.700 | is a very high stakes game, right?

00:41:07.020 | Salaries depend on it.

00:41:08.180 | Sponsorships depend on it.

00:41:09.500 | It's on television.

00:41:11.180 | Reputations depend on it.

00:41:13.340 | So that's not really playing a game.

00:41:15.580 | That's playing a very high stakes game

00:41:17.540 | and there you're not going to see these partial postures.

00:41:20.180 | You're not going to see soft eyes and tilting of the head,

00:41:23.060 | at least not between the opposing players on the team.

00:41:25.300 | You're going to see quite the opposite.

00:41:26.840 | Grunting, screaming, shouldering, people not blinking,

00:41:30.340 | lowering their eyes or rather shrinking their eyes down

00:41:33.940 | to appear more aggressive, these kinds of things,

00:41:36.340 | staring right through the other person,

00:41:38.260 | verbal threats, et cetera.

00:41:39.460 | So that's not really play,

00:41:41.080 | even though we say they're playing a game of football,

00:41:43.260 | it's very high stakes play.

00:41:45.640 | What I'm referring to here is when it's fairly low stakes

00:41:48.780 | and we see this again in animals and in humans.

00:41:50.620 | So there are many, many of these partial postures.

00:41:52.460 | Again, they happen spontaneously.

00:41:54.660 | So if someone ever looks at you

00:41:56.060 | and they tilt their head a little bit

00:41:57.300 | and they raise their eyebrows

00:41:58.540 | and they maybe smile a little bit,

00:41:59.900 | they're looking at you playfully.

00:42:01.600 | That's the universal human exchange of I want to play.

00:42:05.820 | Do you want to play?

00:42:07.020 | There's another play expression

00:42:08.780 | that is considered the most extreme of the,

00:42:11.340 | come on, let's play expressions and postures.

00:42:13.980 | And this is one that's seen in a lot of primates

00:42:15.860 | and indeed in some humans as well.

00:42:17.740 | And that's the eyes wide open

00:42:19.860 | and believe it or not, tongue out.

00:42:21.700 | It's that kind of silly thing.

00:42:24.940 | I don't think that I've ever done that before.

00:42:26.860 | Just that kind of thing

00:42:28.780 | is basically what primate species of all kinds,

00:42:32.700 | and indeed we are old world primates as well,

00:42:35.700 | do when they want to say, I'm definitely here to play

00:42:39.420 | and that's why I'm here.

00:42:41.380 | It has this kind of silly look or connotation,

00:42:43.880 | but if you watch chimpanzees

00:42:45.840 | or you look at bonobos

00:42:47.760 | or even in the so-called new world monkeys,

00:42:49.880 | which tend to be the smaller monkeys,

00:42:51.840 | old world monkeys tend to be the ones

00:42:53.440 | that in general see the world as we do.

00:42:56.680 | They have what we call trichromacy.

00:42:58.720 | They're the ones that often can look very human-like.

00:43:00.820 | The new world monkeys tend to be the little ones.

00:43:02.840 | In general, I'll give you a little trick here,

00:43:04.640 | a little tool based on primatology.

00:43:07.000 | If you see a monkey and it's making very slow movements

00:43:09.980 | or you see an ape of any kinds making very slow movements,

00:43:12.120 | very likely to be an old world primate.

00:43:14.760 | If you see a monkey and it's making very quick movements,

00:43:19.480 | like it's doing this kind of thing,

00:43:20.680 | like it could be a squirrel monkey,

00:43:23.280 | could be a marmoset, likely to be a new world monkey.

00:43:26.000 | And they don't see the world the same way we do.

00:43:27.920 | They see the world more like a dog.

00:43:29.220 | They don't really see reds.

00:43:30.280 | They see reds as orange, et cetera.

00:43:32.620 | Okay, that's not a hard and fast rule

00:43:34.040 | and I'm sure the primatologists are going to come after me

00:43:36.760 | with whatever primatologist come after you

00:43:38.640 | with monkey biscuits or something like that.

00:43:40.200 | But in general, it's a good rule if you're at the zoo

00:43:42.280 | and you see a slow moving monkey with slow deliberate

00:43:45.640 | gestures kind of moves its eyes,

00:43:47.120 | makes eye contact every once in a while,

00:43:48.720 | those tend to be the old world primates.

00:43:50.060 | Those kind of jittery ones that look like they're really

00:43:52.000 | nervous, wrapping their tail and kind of hiding there

00:43:54.040 | in a little bundle, those tend to be the new world monkeys.

00:43:56.920 | Okay, again, not a black and white type division,

00:44:00.520 | but that'll get you most of the way.

00:44:02.520 | So the whole purpose of these partial postures

00:44:06.320 | or the tongue out thing is to limit power in deliberate ways

00:44:11.380 | to really take bodily expressions that could be portrayed

00:44:16.020 | or could be interpreted as aggressive or as threatening

00:44:21.020 | or as wanting to mate or as wanting to do anything

00:44:25.020 | for that matter and to limit the power

00:44:28.040 | with which they are expressed in very deliberate ways.

00:44:30.360 | So that's the putting the hair down

00:44:32.380 | despite getting into a fighting stance.

00:44:34.460 | That's saying let's fight,

00:44:35.520 | but I'm not really here to fight fight.

00:44:37.160 | It's low stakes fighting.

00:44:38.540 | Like if I pin you, then I'll let you go.

00:44:40.680 | Or if you pin me, then you ought to let me go.

00:44:42.940 | And so immediately you can start to see how play

00:44:46.220 | starts to call into action, social dynamics

00:44:51.000 | in which both parties have to make some sort of agreement

00:44:53.980 | about how high the stakes are.

00:44:56.300 | Now, the failures to do this are also very informative

00:44:59.680 | in how we develop in social groups.

00:45:01.760 | And this also can inform why some people really play well

00:45:04.940 | with others and other people don't.

00:45:06.320 | And some people seem to get along well with groups

00:45:08.200 | and can handle other people.

00:45:09.200 | And some people are very rigid.

00:45:10.800 | In fact, I have an anecdote about this.

00:45:13.120 | When I was a kid, we used to play this game.

00:45:15.200 | It's not a game I suggest,

00:45:16.180 | but we used to do what were called dirt clod wars.

00:45:18.720 | So a friend of mine, his parents were generally not home

00:45:21.680 | in the afternoon.

00:45:22.640 | So we must've been somewhere around 10 or 11 years old.

00:45:25.520 | And we would set up these two big dirt mounds.

00:45:27.700 | We would shovel them to big dirt mounds

00:45:29.100 | on two sides of the yard.

00:45:30.400 | And then we would just take dirt clods

00:45:32.620 | and we throw them at one another

00:45:33.960 | and just have dirt clod wars.

00:45:35.180 | Again, not suggesting this.

00:45:37.240 | I'm not responsible for what happens if you do,

00:45:39.660 | but there were rules.

00:45:40.920 | And the rules were, for instance,

00:45:43.560 | you couldn't pack rocks into the dirt clods

00:45:45.720 | and you could run across to the other side

00:45:49.120 | and you could jump on the other person's mountain.

00:45:50.480 | You could throw dirt clods in there.

00:45:51.680 | I guess this is the stuff that we thought was entertaining.

00:45:54.800 | But if someone got hit in the head,

00:45:57.440 | generally there was an unspoken rule

00:45:59.720 | that you kind of stop and see whether or not

00:46:01.600 | they were damaged or not before you'd continue.

00:46:03.480 | You couldn't continue pelting them.

00:46:04.880 | And of course people broke this rule.

00:46:06.240 | In fact, I remember one kid, I'm not going to name him

00:46:08.800 | because actually he's grown into a very prominent

00:46:11.840 | and functional adult, but he got hit once in the head.

00:46:15.100 | And then I think someone had thrown a dirt clod

00:46:17.040 | shortly thereafter.

00:46:18.400 | And all of a sudden he just went into a rage,

00:46:21.020 | picking up rocks and sticks and attacking another kid.

00:46:23.920 | And so clearly that was a case in which the rules

00:46:27.080 | of the game were now being violated,

00:46:29.000 | but it served a very important purpose.

00:46:30.660 | There was the typical thing that there were some tears,

00:46:33.980 | I think, as I recall from one kid or the other,

00:46:35.960 | there was like snot coming out of the nose

00:46:37.440 | and turning bright red.

00:46:38.640 | A kid went home, it was a mess.

00:46:40.280 | The parents had to say something,

00:46:41.880 | or maybe there was a phone call.

00:46:43.080 | I don't quite recall how it got resolved.

00:46:45.080 | But the idea is that there's an agreed upon set of rules

00:46:48.880 | about how high the stakes are

00:46:50.360 | and what we're all going to do.

00:46:51.640 | And this is separate from sport

00:46:52.760 | where there are clearly defined rules

00:46:54.520 | about what's out of bounds, what's in bounds,

00:46:57.080 | what sorts of behaviors will get you a yellow card

00:46:58.880 | or a red card, for instance, on the soccer field.

00:47:01.260 | All animals, including humans,

00:47:03.000 | are doing this low stakes contingency testing

00:47:05.880 | and all animals, including humans, you will find,

00:47:08.360 | start to up the stakes.

00:47:10.340 | And inevitably in group play,

00:47:12.660 | one member of the group will kind of break rules.

00:47:15.320 | You see this also in puppies.

00:47:17.320 | So for instance, puppies will bite one another

00:47:19.680 | with those sharp little needle-like puppy teeth.

00:47:21.680 | I remember when Costello had those teeth,

00:47:23.000 | those things were so darn sharp.

00:47:24.920 | And puppies will yelp

00:47:26.720 | when one of their litter mates bites them.

00:47:28.960 | That yelp actually serves

00:47:30.440 | a very important inhibitory function,

00:47:32.800 | this is well-defined, to tell the other one,

00:47:34.800 | that's too tough.

00:47:35.620 | And this is how animals learn soft bite, okay?

00:47:38.440 | If they don't get that feedback from other litter mates,

00:47:41.320 | they never actually learn what's too hard and what's soft.

00:47:44.560 | And so humans do this as well.

00:47:46.620 | Now you can look at your adult counterparts,

00:47:48.960 | and indeed we should probably look at ourselves and ask,

00:47:51.520 | did we learn proper play contingency when we were younger?

00:47:54.220 | Do we tend to take things too seriously?

00:47:55.840 | Do we tend to overreact aggressively

00:47:59.080 | when other people are clearly engaging in playful jabbing

00:48:03.440 | or sarcasm or things of that sort?

00:48:05.240 | So each of you will have a different experience of this,

00:48:07.000 | but the point is that play serves many functions.

00:48:11.220 | It's not just about the self,

00:48:12.420 | it's also about interactions between multiple people.

00:48:14.740 | It's about rule testing and low stakes contingency.

00:48:17.140 | Rule breaking also serves an important role,

00:48:19.300 | as is with the example of the dirt-clawed war,

00:48:22.100 | puppies biting other puppies, et cetera.

00:48:24.460 | And last but not least,

00:48:26.160 | there are different forms of play

00:48:28.420 | that help us establish who we will become as adults.

00:48:31.940 | One of the more powerful of these is role play.

00:48:34.940 | When children and sometimes adults

00:48:38.500 | will take on different roles

00:48:40.400 | that are distinct from their natural world roles

00:48:43.540 | in order to, for instance, establish hierarchies.

00:48:46.620 | So someone's going to be the leader

00:48:47.880 | and someone's going to be the follower.

00:48:49.120 | Someone will be dominant and someone will be submissive.

00:48:51.500 | Someone will work alone, other people will work in a group.

00:48:55.640 | These kinds of role-playing are, again,

00:48:58.340 | ways in which the prefrontal cortex

00:49:00.140 | has to expand the number of operations.

00:49:03.180 | In neuroscience, we call these algorithms

00:49:04.680 | that it has to run in order to make predictions.

00:49:06.480 | You have to take in a lot of information

00:49:08.060 | about your environment all the time and make predictions.

00:49:11.520 | But if you are suddenly cast into a new role,

00:49:14.440 | well, then you definitely have to make even more predictions

00:49:17.880 | from a different standpoint.

00:49:19.180 | So these are very powerful

00:49:20.160 | for teaching the brain how to function.

00:49:22.560 | I had a sister growing up,

00:49:23.540 | I still have a sister, fortunately,

00:49:25.220 | and she and her friends largely played

00:49:28.100 | with dolls and doll houses in the room next door,

00:49:30.600 | and they would take on different roles.

00:49:32.620 | In fact, some kids, if they play alone,

00:49:35.060 | will start to take on the role of leader

00:49:37.520 | by taking on an imaginary or creating an imaginary friend.

00:49:40.920 | And my apologies to my sibling, but for a long time,

00:49:44.320 | she had an imaginary friend.

00:49:46.240 | Eventually, that imaginary friend disappeared.

00:49:48.960 | I don't know the science around imaginary friends

00:49:51.120 | and what makes them disappear or not

00:49:53.000 | at what stage of development,

00:49:54.560 | but imaginary friends are pretty common.

00:49:56.320 | And that's just another way of being able

00:49:57.880 | to boss somebody around, if that's your thing,

00:50:01.200 | or to engage in cooperative play.

00:50:03.940 | So we can look at this stage of development

00:50:06.240 | we call childhood, and we can look at each stage of it,

00:50:08.720 | and we can say, wow,

00:50:09.880 | there are all these different dimensions of play

00:50:11.780 | that really are about testing out

00:50:14.020 | how we feel, comfortable or uncomfortable,

00:50:16.400 | how we react, good or bad,

00:50:19.300 | how we react with stress or with glee

00:50:22.800 | when others behave in certain ways.

00:50:24.920 | And so what I'm hoping is coming through

00:50:27.160 | is that play is not just about having fun.

00:50:30.040 | Play is about testing.

00:50:32.240 | It's about experimenting,

00:50:33.480 | and it's about expanding your brain's capacity.

00:50:36.040 | And that's true early in development,

00:50:37.400 | and it's true throughout the lifespan.

00:50:39.120 | So at this point in the discussion,

00:50:40.560 | I want to take a step back,

00:50:42.240 | look at the biology and neurochemistry of play

00:50:44.780 | just a little bit, and in doing that,

00:50:47.160 | really define what is effective play.

00:50:49.720 | If the goal of play is to explore different contingencies

00:50:52.860 | in low stakes environments,

00:50:54.680 | and to expand the function of our prefrontal cortex

00:50:57.840 | so that we can see new possibilities

00:50:59.660 | and new ways of being become more flexible,

00:51:02.080 | more creative, more effective outside of the games of play,

00:51:06.520 | or the arenas of play, I should say,

00:51:08.840 | well, then we should be asking,

00:51:11.340 | how do I know if I'm playing?

00:51:12.600 | How do I know if I'm playing correctly?

00:51:14.600 | Turns out there's an answer to that.

00:51:17.340 | Earlier, I referred to this brain area,

00:51:19.420 | the periaqueductal gray,

00:51:21.520 | that releases opioids, endogenous opioids,

00:51:24.100 | into our brain and body,

00:51:26.040 | and tends to relax us a bit.

00:51:29.380 | It actually is what leads to these things

00:51:31.500 | like soft eyes and head tilts and puppies making,

00:51:34.920 | you know, puppy postures and things of that sort,

00:51:37.440 | and how that opens up the number of different functions

00:51:41.240 | or algorithms that the prefrontal cortex can run.

00:51:44.400 | But there's another piece of the puzzle,

00:51:45.880 | which is for something to genuinely be play and playful,

00:51:50.260 | and for it to have this effect of expanding our brain

00:51:54.600 | and engaging neuroplasticity,

00:51:56.360 | of really changing our brain so that we can see

00:51:58.360 | and engage in more possible behaviors

00:52:00.560 | and thoughts, et cetera.

00:52:02.120 | We also have to have low amounts of adrenaline,

00:52:06.560 | so-called epinephrine, in our brain and body.

00:52:09.360 | Now, the background science for this is quite extensive,

00:52:12.700 | but for those of you that are interested

00:52:14.260 | in papers and manuscripts,

00:52:16.120 | perhaps the best one is a review published

00:52:18.460 | in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

00:52:20.820 | by the very Jak Pengsep,

00:52:22.460 | although he has a co-author,

00:52:23.760 | which is Steven Siviy, S-I-V-I-Y.

00:52:27.560 | I'll provide a link to this in the caption show notes.

00:52:30.440 | And the title of this paper is

00:52:32.080 | In Search of the Neurobiological Substrates

00:52:34.100 | for Social Playfulness in Mammalian Brains.

00:52:37.160 | And it's a quite extensive review,

00:52:39.040 | but it basically boils down to some key findings

00:52:42.460 | whereby any sorts of drugs or behaviors or scenarios

00:52:47.460 | that increase levels of adrenaline too much

00:52:51.640 | will tend to inhibit play.

00:52:53.840 | And drugs and scenarios, and I'm not suggesting recreational

00:52:57.680 | drugs here, but these were experiments that were done

00:52:59.960 | in the laboratory setting,

00:53:01.640 | that increase the endogenous opioid output

00:53:05.120 | will tend to increase playfulness.

00:53:07.160 | And so really the state of mind that one needs to adopt

00:53:11.360 | when playing is, first of all,

00:53:13.960 | you have to engage in the play, whatever it happens to be,

00:53:17.960 | with some degree of focus and seriousness.

00:53:20.600 | And focus and seriousness in the neurobiological context

00:53:23.320 | generally means epinephrine, being able to focus

00:53:26.600 | is largely reliant on things like adrenaline, epinephrine,

00:53:30.160 | but also the presence of dopamine,

00:53:32.080 | which is a molecule that generates motivation and focus

00:53:34.840 | in concert with epinephrine,

00:53:36.780 | but also that these endogenous opioids be liberated.

00:53:40.220 | And it's really the low stakes feature of play

00:53:42.800 | that allows those endogenous opioids to be liberated.

00:53:45.680 | What do I mean by that?

00:53:46.520 | Well, if you are very, very concerned about the outcome,

00:53:49.240 | like you've put a lot of money on the table

00:53:51.260 | in a given game, or you're a football player

00:53:55.120 | in the Super Bowl, or you're playing a game

00:53:57.160 | for which defeating the other person

00:54:00.160 | or your team winning is absolutely crucial to you,

00:54:03.260 | well, then that's not really going to engage

00:54:05.520 | the play circuitry.

00:54:06.640 | On the contrary, if you're engaging in those same behaviors

00:54:11.560 | or any other behavior in a way

00:54:12.840 | that you're simply there to explore,

00:54:15.100 | but you don't have high levels of adrenaline in your system,

00:54:17.280 | you're not stressed about the potential outcome,

00:54:19.700 | well, then that constitutes play.

00:54:22.240 | Now that's somewhat obvious on the one hand,

00:54:24.520 | that you take seriously what you take seriously,

00:54:26.280 | and you can be more playful about things

00:54:27.540 | that you don't take so seriously.

00:54:29.220 | But what is absolutely not obvious

00:54:32.600 | is that the state of playfulness

00:54:35.740 | is actually what allows you to perform best,

00:54:39.240 | because the state of playfulness offers you the opportunity

00:54:42.500 | to engage in novel types of behaviors and interactions

00:54:45.560 | that you would not otherwise be able to access

00:54:48.280 | if you are so focused on the outcome, okay?

00:54:51.320 | So a state of playfulness is absolutely critical,

00:54:53.920 | not just during play,

00:54:55.520 | but during competitive scenarios of any kind.

00:54:58.260 | I actually started to cultivate a practice

00:55:01.240 | related to this when I was in college.

00:55:03.200 | I had this general practice

00:55:06.000 | of when I wanted to learn something,

00:55:08.280 | I would tell myself

00:55:10.080 | that it was the most important information in the world

00:55:12.400 | and that I was very, very interested in it.

00:55:14.560 | I would kind of lie to myself and say,

00:55:16.240 | oh, I'm super interested in, I won't name the topics,

00:55:18.640 | but super interested in this or super interested in that.

00:55:20.960 | And I could sort of delude myself

00:55:22.720 | into being hyper-focused on whatever it is

00:55:25.500 | that I was learning in ways that surprised me.

00:55:29.040 | However, when we are hyper-focused on something

00:55:33.240 | and we are rigidly attached to the outcome,

00:55:35.940 | we can't engage in flexible thinking.

00:55:38.420 | So it's a great tool to be hyper-focused on something

00:55:41.340 | and take it very, very seriously

00:55:43.340 | when we're simply trying to learn things

00:55:45.920 | by kind of rote memory, learn things and regurgitate,

00:55:48.180 | learn and regurgitate of the sort that,

00:55:50.480 | frankly, a lot of schooling involves.

00:55:52.800 | But if we are trying to get better at something,

00:55:55.400 | we sort of hit a wall in athletic performance

00:55:57.480 | or in cognitive performance where we're not creative enough

00:56:00.240 | or we're finding, let's just use a sports example

00:56:02.720 | that we only have a certain number of moves

00:56:05.620 | that we can deploy or a certain number of swings

00:56:07.800 | of the racket that we can deploy.

00:56:09.560 | The way to actually expand your practice

00:56:12.280 | is to engage in this kind of low stakes thinking,

00:56:15.180 | the idea that, well, I'm just going to kind of play

00:56:17.240 | and tinker, I'm going to explore in a way

00:56:19.700 | that it doesn't really matter

00:56:20.660 | if the ball goes back over the net.

00:56:22.140 | It doesn't really matter if the ball goes in the hole.

00:56:23.840 | And it's counterintuitive because you think,

00:56:25.900 | no, the thing that we need to do

00:56:27.400 | is drill and drill and drill and drill.

00:56:28.840 | And indeed there's a place for that.

00:56:30.520 | But this mode of play with modest levels

00:56:34.740 | of endogenous opioids being released in our system,

00:56:37.200 | plus low levels of adrenaline, epinephrine,

00:56:40.320 | low levels of epinephrine and adrenaline

00:56:42.640 | are possible only when the stakes are low enough

00:56:45.480 | that we're not stressed.

00:56:47.180 | Well, that combination really allows the prefrontal cortex

00:56:50.180 | to explore different possibilities in ways

00:56:52.500 | that can truly expand our capabilities over time.

00:56:55.940 | Now, this has been seen again and again,

00:56:57.440 | also in the business sector,

00:56:59.620 | some of the more challenging

00:57:02.280 | or I should say competitive companies to get jobs at

00:57:04.820 | are very interested in hiring people

00:57:06.580 | that as children were so-called tinkerers.

00:57:08.980 | And actually NASA was first famous for this,

00:57:12.040 | that many of the people that achieved great success

00:57:15.160 | in engineering at NASA,

00:57:16.740 | when they looked back into their childhood histories,

00:57:19.960 | those people tended to be tinkerers.

00:57:21.540 | They were people that would kind of play with things

00:57:23.340 | in a way that wasn't about rigidly following a recipe

00:57:26.820 | or an instruction manual.

00:57:28.100 | Great cooks discover new forms of food,

00:57:31.580 | indeed created entire genres of food

00:57:33.740 | by way of being tinkerers, okay?

00:57:36.820 | Musicians do this.

00:57:38.820 | I grew up playing various sports,

00:57:40.820 | but skateboarding was one that

00:57:42.200 | I was particularly involved in for a long time.

00:57:44.240 | One of the greatest skateboarders of all time is,

00:57:46.820 | some of you may recognize his name

00:57:48.080 | is the great Rodney Mullen.

00:57:49.640 | And Rodney was kind of famous for evolving the sport

00:57:54.140 | and continuing to evolve the sport

00:57:55.220 | in ways that no one could predict,

00:57:56.560 | using skateboards and all sorts of ways

00:57:58.520 | that no one had thought of previously.

00:58:00.260 | And of course there are other skateboarders

00:58:01.460 | that did that as well,

00:58:02.600 | but he's particularly well known for that.

00:58:04.660 | And his process is his own, I can't speak to it too much,

00:58:08.540 | but he was also known as a kind of a tinkerer

00:58:10.700 | as somebody who would spend a lot of time

00:58:12.540 | just kind of flipping the board

00:58:13.940 | and just flipping it in the air

00:58:15.620 | and watching the ways in which it flipped

00:58:17.200 | and kind of studying the physics of it really

00:58:19.860 | and expanding on his existing understanding

00:58:22.820 | of what could happen on a skateboard

00:58:24.760 | by way of just playing.

00:58:26.180 | Now he took it very seriously,

00:58:27.940 | but it's this kind of razor's edge

00:58:30.060 | between taking something very seriously,

00:58:31.740 | but also tinkering and playing and exploring

00:58:34.180 | and just seeing what happens and kind of like,

00:58:35.940 | well, let's just see what happens if we did this.

00:58:37.980 | That mindset is extremely powerful to export

00:58:41.720 | from this thing that we call play

00:58:43.340 | into what we could call more serious endeavors

00:58:45.720 | of one's occupation or sport,

00:58:47.800 | whether or not it's behind a desk

00:58:49.100 | or whether or not it's running around on a field

00:58:51.620 | or engineering, any endeavor.

00:58:53.700 | And so the whole purpose of this episode on play is yes,

00:58:58.700 | on the one hand to illustrate

00:59:00.180 | the incredible evolutionary utility of play

00:59:03.500 | for setting up the self and relation of the self to others,

00:59:06.840 | indeed for setting up cultures entirely

00:59:08.780 | 'cause cultures will watch sport together

00:59:10.840 | or they'll celebrate their team winning.

00:59:12.580 | I mean, World Cup, I've never been a big soccer fan,

00:59:14.920 | even though my dad is Argentine, but it's incredible.

00:59:18.100 | I mean, the entire world kind of lights up

00:59:20.460 | and gets engaged around whether or not their team,

00:59:22.620 | their country is going to win.

00:59:23.700 | The Olympics also being another example.

00:59:25.780 | But play and sport are not quite the same

00:59:28.660 | as I've pointed out before.

00:59:29.980 | And for all of us who are thinking about tools

00:59:32.000 | and things that we can extract from science

00:59:33.600 | to enrich our lives, I would say,

00:59:36.060 | for those of you that are already playing on a regular basis

00:59:38.960 | in one form or another, terrific.

00:59:40.680 | Start to expand other forms of play,

00:59:43.000 | in particular forms of play

00:59:44.200 | that involve new groups of individuals.

00:59:47.060 | So if you're somebody that typically plays one-on-one

00:59:49.520 | with somebody, try to expand into playing as teams.

00:59:52.020 | If you're somebody who only plays alone,

00:59:55.000 | then try to expand into playing in perhaps one-on-one first

00:59:58.620 | and in groups.

00:59:59.460 | This is the way that your brain learns and evolves

01:00:01.600 | and changes and gets better.

01:00:03.280 | And I raise this because another one of the top 10 questions

01:00:06.120 | I get is how can I keep my brain young?

01:00:08.420 | How can I continue to learn?

01:00:09.960 | How can I get better in school, in sport, in life,

01:00:13.420 | in relationships, et cetera, emotionally, cognitively,

01:00:17.040 | and on and on and on.

01:00:18.320 | And yes, there are supplements

01:00:20.340 | that can support neuroplasticity.

01:00:21.980 | Yes, there are brain games and apps

01:00:23.980 | that can support neuroplasticity.

01:00:25.780 | But if you really want to engage in neuroplasticity

01:00:28.480 | at any age, what you need to do is return

01:00:31.120 | to the same sorts of practices and tools

01:00:33.580 | that your nervous system naturally used

01:00:36.360 | throughout development.

01:00:37.300 | And that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years

01:00:39.860 | to trigger this thing that we call neuroplasticity.

01:00:42.480 | And the reason this is so important is because it starts

01:00:44.580 | to move us away from what some people called hacks.

01:00:46.800 | I define hacks as using one thing for a different purpose

01:00:49.680 | to kind of get a shortcut.

01:00:51.620 | I don't really like the term frankly,

01:00:53.580 | and I don't like it because it's not grounded

01:00:57.180 | in any biological mechanism.

01:00:59.040 | But when we look at play, we can say play

01:01:01.300 | is the portal to plasticity.

01:01:03.220 | Play at every stage of life is the way

01:01:05.320 | in which we learned the rules for that stage of life.

01:01:08.340 | And play is the way in which we were able

01:01:10.440 | to test how we might function in the real world context.

01:01:14.740 | So play is powerful.

01:01:17.560 | And we could even say that play is the most powerful portal

01:01:20.540 | to plasticity.

01:01:21.460 | The reason for that is that yes, this high opioid,

01:01:27.020 | low epinephrine or adrenaline state is what opens up play.

01:01:31.220 | But then inside of the arena of play,

01:01:33.900 | when the prefrontal cortex is running

01:01:35.380 | all these different possibilities in this low stakes way,

01:01:38.960 | but with some degree of focus,

01:01:41.320 | there are a number of other chemicals that are deployed.

01:01:43.960 | Things like brain derived and trophic factor

01:01:46.080 | and other growth factors that actually trigger

01:01:48.480 | the rewiring of brain circuits that allow for it to expand.

01:01:52.720 | And indeed that's what is neuroplasticity.

01:01:55.520 | If you're interested in those chemicals

01:01:57.980 | and the kind of arena of things that happen

01:02:01.100 | when one engages in neuroplasticity,

01:02:03.080 | there's a vast literature out there.

01:02:05.020 | But one of the more popular books

01:02:07.180 | that I think is quite good is from my friend

01:02:09.220 | and colleague, John Rady,

01:02:10.300 | who's a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

01:02:12.260 | That's R-A-T-E-Y.

01:02:13.860 | He wrote the book "Spark" a few years back.

01:02:17.020 | And I think it's still very relevant.

01:02:18.500 | And John talks about the important role

01:02:21.940 | that play exerts in the neuroplasticity process

01:02:25.680 | and points to a number of different protocols

01:02:27.340 | that one can engage in.

01:02:28.600 | He also points to the importance

01:02:29.800 | of navigating new environments

01:02:31.800 | to not just go on the same hike every week

01:02:33.700 | or take the same walk,

01:02:34.640 | but actually get into new novel environments.

01:02:36.820 | So you're starting to sense a theme here.

01:02:38.120 | There's novelty, exploring contingencies,

01:02:40.980 | keeping the stakes relatively low, et cetera, et cetera.

01:02:44.140 | But these really are the gates to this holy grail

01:02:46.700 | that we call neuroplasticity.

01:02:48.560 | Neuroplasticity, as I've talked about in the podcast before,

01:02:51.360 | is a two-step process.

01:02:52.640 | It involves focusing very intensely

01:02:55.360 | or at least focusing somewhat

01:02:57.100 | on whatever it is that one is trying to learn,

01:02:59.000 | and then engaging in deep rest, ideally deep sleep,

01:03:02.920 | in the following nights.

01:03:03.960 | And I've also talked about the benefits

01:03:05.560 | of things like naps and yoga nidra,

01:03:07.300 | so-called NSDR, non-sleep deep rest,

01:03:09.840 | for enhancing or accelerating plasticity.

01:03:12.540 | You can check out the episodes on focus at hubermanlab.com

01:03:16.900 | or the episodes on how to learn faster,

01:03:19.240 | the detail, all of those.

01:03:20.180 | We had a newsletter that lists out all the tools

01:03:24.180 | for neuroplasticity, enhancing neuroplasticity.

01:03:26.160 | All that is available, zero cost to you

01:03:28.260 | at hubermanlab.com, et cetera.

01:03:30.660 | You can just download that information.

01:03:33.120 | But John's book, that newsletter, those episodes,

01:03:36.520 | they really point to this two-step process

01:03:38.220 | where it's focus and then rest, focus and then rest.

01:03:41.440 | And play is its own unique form of focused and then rest,

01:03:46.200 | focus and rest.

01:03:47.040 | It's not the same as learning something for sake of school

01:03:50.000 | or critically trying to learn a motor behavior

01:03:52.640 | for sake of sport.

01:03:53.880 | It's really about expanding the number of things

01:03:56.520 | that you could learn down the line, okay?

01:03:59.900 | So said once again,

01:04:01.300 | so I just want to make sure it's abundantly clear,

01:04:03.880 | play is about establishing a broader framework

01:04:07.000 | within which you can learn new things.

01:04:08.960 | It's not about learning some specific thing.

01:04:11.320 | It's not about the game you happen to be playing.

01:04:13.920 | It's not about the dollhouse that the kids are playing with

01:04:16.600 | so that they can become amazing dollhouse players

01:04:18.920 | when they grow up, right?

01:04:20.160 | The dirt-clawed war that I referred to earlier,

01:04:22.600 | for better or for worse,

01:04:24.000 | was not about becoming the best dirt-clawed thrower

01:04:27.080 | or winning the trophy for dirt-clods in the neighborhood,

01:04:29.240 | although we actually had a trophy

01:04:30.560 | for the best dirt-clawed team.

01:04:32.720 | Alas, it was not my team that year.

01:04:34.960 | But the point is that you're learning rules

01:04:37.680 | and establishing a broader foundation of practices

01:04:41.080 | that then you can learn more things within that context.

01:04:44.800 | Thus far, I've tried to convince you

01:04:46.300 | through a combination of data and anecdote

01:04:48.460 | and explanation that adopting a stance of playfulness

01:04:52.720 | and indeed engaging in play on a somewhat regular basis

01:04:56.040 | could be beneficial to you

01:04:57.140 | regardless of circumstances or goals.

01:04:59.540 | If I haven't done that already,

01:05:02.160 | what I'm about to tell you hopefully

01:05:03.840 | will push you over the line.

01:05:05.360 | It turns out that when you look across

01:05:09.000 | the kingdom of all animals,

01:05:11.240 | what you find is that animals that engage

01:05:15.120 | in playful behaviors for the longest period of time

01:05:19.000 | are also the animals that have the greatest degree

01:05:22.000 | of neuroplasticity, the brain and nervous system's ability

01:05:25.800 | to change in response to experience.

01:05:27.800 | Put differently, animals that only play

01:05:30.920 | for a very small fraction of their entire life

01:05:34.340 | have very rigid brains that don't learn new things,

01:05:37.820 | whereas animals that play for a long period

01:05:41.240 | throughout their life have very plastic brains.

01:05:44.880 | And there's even some evidence

01:05:46.960 | that's at this point largely anecdotal,

01:05:48.920 | but there's some data starting to emerge

01:05:51.160 | that adults that maintain a playful stance,

01:05:54.500 | that engage in things, again, that are low stakes,

01:05:59.500 | contingency exploring, important enough that people focus

01:06:04.600 | and that people pay attention to what they're doing,

01:06:06.760 | but that they are not filled with adrenaline,

01:06:09.880 | freaked out about the outcome being A or B.

01:06:12.680 | They're not super, super competitive,

01:06:14.280 | maybe just a little bit competitive

01:06:15.640 | or not competitive at all.

01:06:17.420 | That allows for more ongoing plasticity.

01:06:20.800 | And one of the people that comes to mind

01:06:23.240 | in thinking about this is, of course, the physicist,

01:06:25.820 | and I should say the great physicist, Richard Feynman,

01:06:28.800 | Nobel Prize winner, professor at Caltech,

01:06:31.720 | was involved in the Manhattan Project,

01:06:33.400 | but was also known for being a lifelong tinkerer, right?

01:06:38.120 | He also was a mischievous tinkerer.

01:06:40.840 | If you read any of the books about Feynman or by Feynman,

01:06:43.920 | surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman,

01:06:45.400 | or what do you care what other people think?

01:06:47.080 | These are wonderful short stories,

01:06:48.280 | mostly about Feynman doing things like picking all the locks

01:06:52.600 | at the Los Alamos laboratory

01:06:54.900 | and putting all the top secret documents

01:06:56.520 | out on the floor of the office

01:06:57.880 | so that when people came in in the morning,

01:06:59.200 | they were all out there.

01:07:00.560 | Obviously, they weren't released to the general public.

01:07:03.140 | He didn't want to threaten national security,

01:07:05.080 | but playing pranks like that.

01:07:06.920 | And actually Caltech, I don't know if this is still the case,

01:07:09.800 | but Caltech, where he was employed,

01:07:11.160 | was always known for doing very technologically

01:07:14.860 | challenging pranks.

01:07:16.800 | They're not known for their athletic prowess at Caltech,

01:07:19.280 | sorry, Caltech, but they were known, for example,

01:07:23.480 | disrupting the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena,

01:07:26.720 | for instance, and things of that sort

01:07:28.400 | through technological feats that at least at the time

01:07:31.200 | required a lot of playfulness and technological prowess.

01:07:35.220 | So if you look in science or you look in art

01:07:37.840 | or you look in medicine or you look in any domain,

01:07:40.260 | what you find is the people that continue

01:07:42.400 | to evolve new practices tend to be people

01:07:45.400 | that were tinkerers, people that are very creative,

01:07:48.660 | tend to be people that are unafraid of exploring things

01:07:52.640 | in this low stakes way.

01:07:54.080 | They're not so rigidly attached to the outcome

01:07:56.320 | that they have to do everything perfectly all the time.

01:07:58.480 | Now, they might cloak these playful behaviors

01:08:01.120 | so that their final works always look perfect

01:08:03.720 | or always look incredible,

01:08:05.060 | but they have this kind of playful nature about them.

01:08:06.960 | I would venture even to say that the street artist Banksy,

01:08:10.120 | for instance, obviously an incredible artist

01:08:12.080 | puts a ton of thought and preparation into their work,

01:08:15.480 | but there's a kind of playfulness to the whole thing too

01:08:19.880 | of using two-dimensional paintings in concert

01:08:22.860 | with three-dimensional city dwellings in ways that,

01:08:25.040 | you know, I think that most people hadn't previously.

01:08:26.920 | There were other people like Christo

01:08:28.220 | and artists of that sort that did that.

01:08:30.380 | But I think Banksy is kind of recognized

01:08:32.820 | as the modern rendition of that kind of playfulness

01:08:36.920 | using cities in ways that most people don't use cities,

01:08:39.160 | using art in ways that most people don't use art,

01:08:42.480 | for instance.

01:08:43.720 | So to go back to the example of Feynman,

01:08:46.000 | Feynman was somebody who learned to paint

01:08:48.840 | and draw quite well into his 60s.

01:08:51.160 | He was somewhat famous or infamous, I should say,

01:08:53.720 | for bongo drumming on the roof of Caltech.

01:08:56.260 | I say infamous because he was known also

01:08:59.260 | for doing that naked,

01:09:00.460 | something that is certainly not in concert

01:09:02.540 | with the ethical standards and behaviors

01:09:04.700 | of universities today.

01:09:05.960 | But Feynman had this playful spirit as a child,

01:09:10.200 | he had that playful spirit as a teenager,

01:09:11.860 | and he had that playful spirit as an adult.

01:09:14.400 | And that's one of the hallmarks of Feynman

01:09:16.800 | was that he wasn't just a rigid physicist

01:09:20.000 | who could explain things clearly to the general public.

01:09:22.240 | He always carried through this playful spirit.

01:09:25.880 | And in some of his writings,

01:09:27.240 | he pointed to the fact that that playful spirit

01:09:29.160 | was something that he worked very hard

01:09:31.080 | to continue to cultivate in himself

01:09:34.320 | because it was the way in which he could see

01:09:36.320 | the world differently and to indeed make great discoveries

01:09:39.880 | in the field of physics,

01:09:40.920 | but also to kind of evolve his relationship

01:09:43.240 | to life more generally.

01:09:44.200 | And so he comes to mind as a prominent example

01:09:46.840 | of somebody who did this.

01:09:48.660 | And if I could achieve anything with this episode,

01:09:51.140 | besides teaching you something about the biology of play

01:09:53.800 | would be to teach you about the utility of play.

01:09:56.520 | Again, I don't consider myself

01:09:58.140 | a particularly playful person by nature,

01:10:00.880 | but I've tried over the years to adopt this stance

01:10:03.660 | of exploring things that are very focused

01:10:07.240 | on contingencies of different kinds,

01:10:09.240 | but keep the stakes low enough

01:10:10.720 | that I can have some fun doing them.

01:10:12.360 | And I like to think that it's benefited me somewhat.

01:10:14.960 | Now I'd like to drill a little bit further

01:10:16.400 | into this thing that we call neuroplasticity.

01:10:19.000 | Again, neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous systems

01:10:21.960 | ability to change in response to experience.

01:10:24.360 | And I should just say that throughout the entire lifespan,

01:10:27.400 | the nervous system can change very quickly

01:10:29.440 | in response to negative experiences.

01:10:31.900 | We can almost all engage in what's called

01:10:33.920 | one trial learning where if something really terrible

01:10:36.280 | or traumatic happens to us,

01:10:37.860 | our nervous system will rewire almost immediately,

01:10:40.880 | at least within a few days,

01:10:42.440 | such that we tend to want to avoid the experience

01:10:45.160 | that led to that trauma.

01:10:47.560 | Now the whole business of why people return to things

01:10:50.420 | that are traumatic to them is a whole other issue.

01:10:52.480 | There are books about things like trauma bonding.

01:10:55.600 | There's the so-called repetition compulsion

01:10:58.380 | from psychoanalysis that people go back into trauma

01:11:00.840 | to retest and gain new opportunities

01:11:02.900 | to overcome the trauma, et cetera, et cetera.

01:11:04.920 | But in general, what I'm referring to here is,

01:11:06.960 | you know, you have a bad experience at the swimming pool

01:11:09.140 | when you're a kid where someone holds your head

01:11:10.520 | under water too long,

01:11:11.360 | and then you just don't want to get back in the water.

01:11:13.020 | That's one trial learning of sorts.

01:11:15.660 | That of course can be overcome

01:11:17.460 | through proper exposure therapy

01:11:19.520 | or someone that you trust taking you there,

01:11:21.640 | or any number of behaviors that allow you to overcome

01:11:24.960 | that particular scenario and experience something new

01:11:27.860 | in that same context.

01:11:29.900 | But across the lifespan, the learning of new things,

01:11:33.580 | new contingencies, new possibilities occurs very differently

01:11:37.920 | from about age zero when we're born

01:11:40.440 | until about age 25 and thereafter.

01:11:42.980 | So from about, I want to emphasize approximately age 25

01:11:47.080 | onward, neuroplasticity occurs through the process

01:11:50.680 | that is exactly as I described before.

01:11:53.080 | Focus, rest, focus, rest.

01:11:55.440 | We focus very intensely.

01:11:56.760 | We can't do the thing.

01:11:57.800 | We can't do the new movement.

01:11:58.960 | We can't do the golf swing.

01:12:00.180 | We can't learn the math.

01:12:02.160 | We try, we try, we try, we try.

01:12:03.620 | We sleep a few nights,

01:12:04.720 | and then all of a sudden we can do it, right?

01:12:06.020 | Because the rewiring actually occurs during deep rest

01:12:08.560 | or naps, but mostly during deep sleep.

01:12:10.880 | From birth till about age 25, however,

01:12:15.300 | we can learn things, new things and new contingencies,

01:12:19.760 | not just negative things and traumatic things

01:12:22.940 | through somewhat passive exposure to those things, right?

01:12:25.480 | I will never forget the first time

01:12:27.460 | that we went on a family trip to Washington, DC,

01:12:30.900 | and we went to the Smithsonian.

01:12:32.120 | I got to see the old fighter planes.

01:12:34.020 | And I think, I think the Kitty Hawk

01:12:36.460 | or the first one of the first planes was there.

01:12:38.400 | Anyway, obviously my recollection isn't terrific.

01:12:40.700 | My hippocampus is flailing on that one,

01:12:43.500 | but I'll never forget the trip

01:12:44.780 | and I'll never forget who went.

01:12:45.940 | And I think it was probably eight or nine years old.

01:12:48.660 | It's embedded somewhere in my memory.

01:12:50.540 | And so just through passive experience

01:12:53.020 | and my focusing on the things that excited me

01:12:55.420 | about that trip, I have a recollection of that experience.

01:12:58.220 | I didn't have to deliberately focus.

01:13:00.380 | I wasn't telling myself, focus,

01:13:01.940 | you're going to need to remember this trip someday

01:13:03.560 | and you're going to be podcasting about this

01:13:05.340 | in 39 years or whenever.

01:13:07.900 | Again, I forget exactly how old I was.

01:13:09.560 | But the key feature here is that the developing brain

01:13:13.840 | is able to learn through passive experience

01:13:17.780 | because the neurons, the nerve cells in the developing brain

01:13:21.840 | are much more over-connected

01:13:25.740 | than they will be later in life.

01:13:27.740 | The way to think about this is sort of,

01:13:28.980 | if you use Google Maps as I do too often, I think,

01:13:32.500 | when I drive, there are a number of roads and pathways

01:13:36.500 | that would get you from point A to point B.

01:13:38.400 | We could imagine those as neural circuits,

01:13:41.500 | or we can imagine neural circuits as those roads.

01:13:45.240 | Early in development,

01:13:46.880 | the nerve connections are much more extensive.

01:13:50.020 | It's like having a Google Maps

01:13:52.320 | where everything is connected to everything

01:13:53.960 | through tiny little cross streets

01:13:55.240 | and the whole thing is just a complete mess.

01:13:57.540 | But then by taking particular routes of behavior,

01:14:00.440 | of thought, of emotion,

01:14:02.940 | certain routes become well-established

01:14:06.220 | and the other routes that are not taken simply disappear.

01:14:10.260 | Now, in the biological context, in the brain,

01:14:12.680 | we call that process pruning.

01:14:14.760 | And the simple way to envision this is early in development,

01:14:17.360 | you have many, many more neurons than you will have

01:14:20.380 | as an adult.

01:14:21.420 | Those neurons are extensively interconnected

01:14:24.100 | and approximately 40% of those interconnections

01:14:27.460 | will disappear by time you're 25 years old.

01:14:30.000 | They are gone.

01:14:31.200 | They are actively removed through processes

01:14:33.860 | that involve things like glial cells that come in

01:14:36.520 | and literally sneak their little processes

01:14:39.080 | in between neurons at the synapse,

01:14:41.280 | which are the points of contact

01:14:42.440 | and communication between neurons,

01:14:43.600 | and push those apart, even eat neurons, right?

01:14:47.280 | There's some incredible work from, for instance,

01:14:49.320 | Beth Stevens' lab at Harvard Medical School

01:14:52.400 | showing that glial cells go in and eat synapses

01:14:56.680 | that are not functional for that particular circuit.

01:15:00.340 | Now, what this tells us is that much of our learning

01:15:03.800 | during development is the removal of incorrect connections,

01:15:07.160 | but it also involves the strengthening of connections

01:15:09.840 | that are going to serve certain emotions, certain functions,

01:15:13.640 | motor functions, cognitive functions, et cetera.

01:15:16.940 | The process of play is largely a process

01:15:21.940 | of engaging pruning of neural connections

01:15:25.100 | and strengthening of the remaining connections.

01:15:27.980 | I'm sure that many of you have heard the term

01:15:29.500 | fire together, wire together.

01:15:31.720 | That phrase is often incorrectly attributed

01:15:35.420 | to the great Donald Hebb, who indeed was great,

01:15:37.740 | did incredible work, a psychologist from Canada

01:15:40.060 | who established a lot of the basic cellular learning rules

01:15:42.780 | for learning and memory,

01:15:44.340 | but it was the also great Dr. Carla Schatz,

01:15:48.180 | who is now at Stanford and was at Berkeley

01:15:51.380 | and Harvard as well, but who is at Stanford Medical School

01:15:54.860 | who coined this term fire together, wire together.

01:15:57.160 | Indeed, that's what happens.

01:15:58.980 | When children play, when adolescents play,

01:16:02.740 | and when young adults play,

01:16:04.620 | whether or not it's social play or play with an object,

01:16:07.900 | whether or not it's a sport or a play of any kind,

01:16:10.780 | imaginary play, imaginary friend play,

01:16:14.080 | there is a strengthening of certain neural connections

01:16:16.440 | and a pruning away of up to 40%, perhaps even more,

01:16:20.400 | of connections that are not necessary

01:16:23.460 | for certain types of behaviors, emotions, and thoughts.

01:16:28.160 | What this means is that it is through the process of play

01:16:32.320 | that we become who we are as adults.

01:16:34.740 | And as I mentioned earlier,

01:16:35.820 | it is through the process of play

01:16:37.740 | that we are able to adjust who we are as adults.

01:16:41.600 | Now, there are bounds on this process.

01:16:44.340 | As far as I know,

01:16:45.220 | there's never been a reported case of an individual

01:16:48.500 | who had a hyperplastic, or I should say a brain

01:16:52.700 | that was as plastic in adulthood as it was in childhood.

01:16:57.500 | But what this tells us is that what we do

01:17:01.340 | in the process of play as children

01:17:03.540 | is really how we set up the rules

01:17:05.000 | for how we behave as adults in almost all domains,

01:17:08.120 | which is really incredible.

01:17:09.480 | And of course, the reassuring thing is that

01:17:11.220 | playing as an adult will allow you to expand

01:17:14.160 | on those neural circuits.

01:17:15.060 | You can literally grow new connections.

01:17:16.960 | Some of you may be saying, does it create new neurons?

01:17:19.660 | For better or for worse,

01:17:21.720 | it does not seem that many new neurons

01:17:24.420 | are added to your brain in adulthood.

01:17:26.300 | There are some papers that report a few neurons

01:17:28.920 | in certain brain areas, isolated brain areas,

01:17:31.540 | but by and large,

01:17:32.380 | most of the rewiring of neural connections

01:17:34.060 | is the removal of certain connections,

01:17:35.980 | this process we're calling pruning,

01:17:37.640 | and the strengthening of the remaining connections

01:17:40.460 | that make those kind of Google maps roads

01:17:42.300 | in the analogy I laid out before,

01:17:43.820 | thicker and more robust.

01:17:45.100 | Think of that as taking little trails

01:17:47.140 | and turning them into roads,

01:17:49.220 | then paving those roads,

01:17:50.380 | then turning those roads into highways,

01:17:51.960 | then putting up more lanes on those highways

01:17:54.700 | and eliminating all the small little back country roads

01:17:57.300 | that one could take.

01:17:58.660 | And again, this is an analogy for what is happening

01:18:01.140 | at the level of neural circuitry.

01:18:02.980 | Now, one of the key findings

01:18:05.540 | that has emerged from the literature

01:18:08.180 | is that children that have been subjected to trauma

01:18:13.180 | or immense amounts of stress of any kind

01:18:15.980 | have a harder time, both engaging in play,

01:18:19.660 | but also a harder time accessing neuroplasticity

01:18:22.260 | later in life.

01:18:23.700 | The good news is this is not a permanent effect.

01:18:26.220 | And we'll talk about some of the ways

01:18:27.300 | to overcome that in a moment,

01:18:29.540 | but this should make sense to you

01:18:32.060 | because earlier we talked about

01:18:34.180 | how a high level of adrenaline epinephrine

01:18:37.780 | in the brain and body actually inhibits,

01:18:40.460 | blocks the circuits in the brain and body

01:18:43.180 | that generate play behavior.

01:18:45.380 | And when I say that, I mean that in a very concrete way,

01:18:47.900 | that epinephrine and adrenaline

01:18:49.940 | can actually suppress the sorts of circuitry

01:18:52.640 | that can lead to things like soft eyes or tongue out

01:18:56.340 | or the head tilt or what we called partial postures

01:19:00.460 | of being able to engage in a rough and tumble play,

01:19:04.460 | but not take that to the point of outright aggression

01:19:06.840 | in damaging the other person or them damaging you.

01:19:10.200 | So when I say that trauma and stress

01:19:13.120 | can inhibit neuroplasticity by way of inhibiting play

01:19:17.640 | at a deeper neurobiological level,

01:19:19.540 | what I'm really saying is that the high levels of adrenaline

01:19:22.520 | that are generated from trauma and stress

01:19:24.420 | actually shut down the circuits

01:19:26.640 | that allow a child or a young adult

01:19:29.600 | to enter the game of play or engage in the game of play

01:19:32.580 | in the same way that a child or young adult

01:19:35.380 | who didn't have high levels of adrenaline in their system

01:19:39.140 | could possibly engage in.

01:19:41.000 | Now, the good news is

01:19:42.560 | that many of the existing trauma therapies

01:19:44.740 | that are out there now,

01:19:45.580 | including things like EMDR, exposure therapy,

01:19:48.260 | cognitive behavioral therapy, and on and on,

01:19:50.580 | including some of the therapies that are more neurochemical,

01:19:55.180 | things like ketamine or are more engineering-based,

01:19:59.160 | things like transcranial magnetic stimulation, for instance,

01:20:02.100 | many of those are paired with forms of talk therapy

01:20:05.540 | that are really about the same thing that play is about,

01:20:08.380 | which is exploring different contingencies.

01:20:10.580 | It's about exploring different types

01:20:13.500 | of emotional experiences as they relate

01:20:16.260 | to the same sort of scenario that created the trauma.

01:20:19.380 | And we did an entire episode on fear and trauma,

01:20:21.900 | and I recommend you check out that episode.

01:20:23.740 | It's easy to find, again, at hubermanlab.com.

01:20:25.860 | It's on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera.

01:20:28.060 | Very easy to find.

01:20:28.940 | And there, I talk all about trauma treatments

01:20:31.360 | and the various kinds of trauma treatments

01:20:33.260 | that are out there, their efficacy in different scenarios

01:20:36.140 | and traumas and so on.

01:20:37.960 | But the point I'd like to make now is that the reason

01:20:40.660 | why children who experience a lot of trauma and stress

01:20:43.380 | have limited plasticity later on

01:20:46.180 | is because of the neurochemical substrates

01:20:48.920 | that are created from trauma and stress,

01:20:51.400 | because after all, stress is epinephrine

01:20:53.660 | and epinephrine is stress.

01:20:54.880 | Those are inseparable.

01:20:56.640 | And the way in which it more or less shuts down

01:20:59.380 | or at least inhibits, suppresses those play circuits.

01:21:02.100 | And again, the reassuring thing is that by engaging in play

01:21:06.360 | as adults, we can reactivate some of those circuits

01:21:09.420 | and reopen the plasticity.

01:21:11.140 | In fact, one very prominent trauma treatment now,

01:21:14.680 | especially for people that have been subjected

01:21:17.220 | to very severe traumas in the ongoing sense,

01:21:20.360 | meaning traumas that went on for many, many years,

01:21:23.200 | is to get them to engage in play, in things like dance,

01:21:27.540 | in basically getting them to engage their bodily movements

01:21:30.820 | in ways that they would otherwise

01:21:32.620 | not feel comfortable to engage in.

01:21:34.460 | And I find this area so interesting

01:21:36.640 | because on the face of it, you could say,

01:21:38.500 | oh, that's kind of, is that really biomedical treatment?

01:21:41.100 | You're taking people who are traumatized

01:21:42.260 | and having them dance.

01:21:43.420 | I mean, it seems kind of silly on the one hand,

01:21:45.460 | depending on your particular orientation.

01:21:50.460 | But on the other hand, it's actually quite profound

01:21:54.520 | and quite grounded in the mechanisms

01:21:57.560 | by which the brain circuits change.

01:21:59.420 | So again, back to this original principle,

01:22:02.340 | which is that play isn't just one portal to plasticity,

01:22:05.660 | play is the fundamental portal to plasticity.

01:22:08.820 | And that play and dance and exploration of novel movements,

01:22:11.820 | exploration of novel athletic movements are the route

01:22:16.400 | by which we access new ways of thinking, new contingencies.

01:22:20.900 | And I find it wonderful that the trauma release

01:22:24.160 | and the psychiatric and psychology community

01:22:27.080 | are exploring things like play and dance

01:22:30.940 | and other forms of reopening these circuits

01:22:34.260 | because indeed we would all love for there to be

01:22:37.820 | a magic pill by which trauma could be erased

01:22:40.300 | and new memories could be laid down

01:22:41.860 | or a device that could do that.

01:22:43.520 | But frankly, if you ask me or a number of my colleagues

01:22:46.740 | whether or not that's likely to happen anytime soon

01:22:48.740 | in an effective way,

01:22:49.900 | I think the short answer is going to be no,

01:22:51.860 | that there are going to be chemicals

01:22:53.340 | and things that can augment and support that process,

01:22:57.200 | but that there's not going to be just a magic pill

01:22:59.980 | that will suddenly reverse trauma altogether,

01:23:02.040 | that it's always going to be a case

01:23:03.880 | whereby shifts in neurochemical states

01:23:06.520 | are going to have to be combined

01:23:07.760 | with new ways of thinking and new behaviors.

01:23:09.820 | And I find it wonderful and reassuring

01:23:11.860 | that people are looking at play and play behavior

01:23:14.540 | as a not just one tiny shard of possibility there,

01:23:18.620 | but that it might actually be the main driver

01:23:21.000 | and a highly productive lever by which

01:23:23.960 | to rewire the traumatized brain.

01:23:25.960 | So if you're like me, you might be thinking,

01:23:28.420 | okay, I'm willing to be more playful.

01:23:31.200 | I'm willing to explore play as a portal to plasticity.

01:23:34.940 | And that all makes good sense, but what should I play?

01:23:39.240 | What should I do?

01:23:40.520 | Well, we've already established

01:23:42.980 | that you want to keep your adrenaline low.

01:23:44.620 | You have to keep the stakes low enough

01:23:46.640 | that you're not going to get totally consumed

01:23:48.560 | by the outcome.

01:23:50.060 | Now, for some people who are highly competitive,

01:23:52.340 | that's going to be challenging.

01:23:53.640 | And yet I don't want to make it seem

01:23:55.360 | as if you can't be competitive during play.

01:23:57.680 | There are many forms of competitive play

01:23:59.940 | that because you are a competitive person,

01:24:03.360 | allow you to derive great joy from that competitive play.

01:24:07.180 | I have a friend who's particularly good at horseshoes.

01:24:10.060 | I'm not particularly good at horseshoes,

01:24:11.500 | but whenever we play horseshoes,

01:24:12.940 | I can tell he's out there to crush me on horseshoes.

01:24:17.540 | And it's just one of these things where I can tell

01:24:19.940 | he derives great pleasure from crushing me

01:24:22.400 | at a game of horseshoes.

01:24:23.980 | I can't say because I haven't actually done the micro-dialysis

01:24:27.140 | which is a way of extracting chemistry

01:24:29.380 | from the brain in real time,

01:24:31.100 | nor have I recorded from his brain or imaged it in a scanner

01:24:34.380 | whether or not he has high levels of epinephrine

01:24:36.660 | or low levels of epinephrine during those games of horseshoes

01:24:39.020 | I suspect is low levels of epinephrine

01:24:40.980 | and high levels of dopamine, especially when he wins.

01:24:43.700 | And yes, he wins every time.

01:24:45.700 | But the point is that you can be competitive during play

01:24:49.300 | provided that you were enjoying yourself, okay?

01:24:52.260 | You can be competitive

01:24:53.380 | provided that you were enjoying yourself.

01:24:56.020 | There are particular forms of play

01:24:58.500 | that lend themselves best to neuroplasticity.

01:25:01.860 | And those particular forms of play, again,

01:25:04.600 | are not designed to necessarily just engage the plasticity

01:25:07.820 | that allows you to perform that behavior,

01:25:09.980 | but rather to expand the number of possibilities

01:25:13.220 | for your brain to change in general throughout life.

01:25:16.540 | And the two major forms of those

01:25:19.020 | for which there's good peer-reviewed research

01:25:21.260 | is to engage in novel forms of movement

01:25:24.660 | including different speeds of movement.

01:25:27.140 | So let's say for instance, you're somebody who runs.

01:25:29.900 | I happen to like running.

01:25:30.860 | I try and run three times a week.

01:25:33.120 | And generally when I run, I run forward.

01:25:35.440 | I don't run backward although recently

01:25:37.040 | because I've become very excited

01:25:38.540 | about the work of so-called knees over toes guy.

01:25:41.300 | His name is Ben Parker,

01:25:42.980 | but he goes by knees over toes guy on Instagram.

01:25:45.700 | I've never met him,

01:25:46.540 | but we've exchanged a few messages back and forth.

01:25:49.140 | And some of his practices involve walking backwards

01:25:53.180 | or doing sled pulls backwards.

01:25:55.540 | I found these to be very beneficial for my back

01:25:57.800 | and for my anterior tibialis

01:26:00.260 | and some things that have really helped

01:26:01.740 | with my posture and so forth.

01:26:03.960 | But in general, when I run, I run forward.

01:26:05.580 | I don't tend to run backward that much.

01:26:07.340 | And I might do that for a few minutes at the end,

01:26:09.140 | but not so much throughout the entire run.

01:26:12.620 | Running doesn't lend itself to a lot of novel forms

01:26:15.580 | of movement, lateral movements.

01:26:17.180 | So for you nerds out there,

01:26:18.780 | the movement in the sagittal plane or angled movements,

01:26:22.540 | but it does appear that things like dance or sports,

01:26:25.740 | where you end up generating a lot of dynamic movements,

01:26:29.140 | where there's jumping,

01:26:30.100 | where there's movement at different angles,

01:26:32.060 | where there's ducking, where there's leaping,

01:26:34.340 | that basically involve a lot of dynamic movement

01:26:36.920 | and aren't just strictly linear.

01:26:39.100 | Those seem to open the portals for plasticity.

01:26:42.640 | And that's because they mimic a lot of the brain circuitry

01:26:46.400 | that is associated with play.

01:26:48.520 | And the reason for that is the way

01:26:49.940 | in which those dynamic movements

01:26:51.480 | and movements of different speeds

01:26:53.360 | engage the vestibular system, the balance system.

01:26:55.960 | The vestibular system is in the inner ear,

01:26:57.960 | relates to the cerebellum, which translate to mini brain.

01:27:00.740 | You got a little mini brain in the back of your brain.

01:27:02.560 | It brings together visual information in a very direct way.

01:27:06.240 | I talked a lot about this in the episode

01:27:08.160 | on how to learn faster.

01:27:09.580 | So if you want to go in depth on how vestibular

01:27:12.080 | and different types of motor movements can open plasticity,

01:27:14.400 | I talk a little bit more, I should say a lot more there,

01:27:17.240 | but suffice to say that engaging in play

01:27:20.980 | that has a lot of dynamic movement

01:27:22.340 | or movements of different speeds, things like dance,

01:27:24.500 | things like sports, like soccer,

01:27:25.800 | where you're moving in different dimensions,

01:27:27.960 | that tends to be very conducive

01:27:29.980 | to what we would call play-related circuitry,

01:27:32.320 | provided you don't take it too seriously.

01:27:34.560 | You don't get those high levels of epinephrine.

01:27:36.920 | Now, for those of you that are also interested

01:27:39.500 | in non-physical or non-athletic forms of play

01:27:43.580 | that can really expand plasticity,

01:27:46.060 | there's some very interesting research

01:27:47.500 | about the game of chess.

01:27:49.260 | I don't play the game of chess.

01:27:50.800 | I've played a few times.

01:27:51.900 | I confess I don't know how to move all the pieces,

01:27:53.900 | so I'm not going to try and describe that here,

01:27:55.740 | but I've always wanted to learn chess.

01:27:56.980 | And I think after reading some of the peer reviewed research

01:27:59.340 | about chess and play in neuroplasticity,

01:28:01.400 | now I understand why.

01:28:02.880 | There's a really nice paper that was published

01:28:05.500 | in the International Journal of Research

01:28:07.140 | and Education and Science in 2017.

01:28:09.860 | And the title of this paper is,

01:28:12.100 | is chess just a game or is it a mirror

01:28:14.980 | that reflects a child's inner world?

01:28:17.280 | That's a very intense title for a biologist like me.

01:28:21.620 | But this paper is so interesting

01:28:24.780 | because what it really points to is the fact

01:28:26.480 | that in a single game chess,

01:28:29.540 | you have, at least as I understand, two players,

01:28:32.460 | and those two players are moving pieces on the chess board

01:28:37.120 | for which each piece can do different things, right?

01:28:40.400 | Can move in different ways under different scenarios,

01:28:42.520 | but there are different rules for different pieces.

01:28:44.260 | And so each player actually has to assume

01:28:46.580 | multiple identities during the same game.

01:28:49.700 | And each of those identities has different rules

01:28:52.140 | and ways of interacting.

01:28:53.520 | So in a way we can think of chess as one game,

01:28:56.340 | but actually chess is a kind of a substrate

01:29:00.460 | for exploring multiple roles for different characters.

01:29:03.780 | And this is quite a bit different than, for instance,

01:29:06.020 | video games where somebody has their favorite

01:29:08.420 | video game player, or they have an avatar,

01:29:10.860 | and they're always in the same role.

01:29:12.300 | It's also quite a bit different

01:29:13.620 | for when you engage in any kind of play

01:29:15.460 | where you are yourself, you're just being you in that game.

01:29:18.620 | And so now I'm highly incentivized to explore chess.

01:29:22.760 | You see quotes out there, for instance,

01:29:25.500 | things like chess is life or jujitsu is life.

01:29:29.060 | I always assumed that that meant

01:29:31.500 | that someone's entire life was chess

01:29:33.500 | or their entire life was jujitsu, for instance.

01:29:37.020 | But in reading over the research about chess in particular,

01:29:40.900 | but also certain forms of martial arts,

01:29:42.740 | also certain forms of dance,

01:29:44.240 | what one finds is that indeed those games are life

01:29:48.500 | in the sense that they involve adopting multiple roles

01:29:52.900 | and exploring contingencies in a number of different ways.

01:29:55.660 | So there are some games that allow you to explore

01:29:58.500 | a much vaster landscape of movements or of mental roles

01:30:02.540 | or of ways of engaging in strategic movement

01:30:05.580 | as is the case with chess.

01:30:07.300 | And so when you hear that activity blank is life,

01:30:11.460 | it often reflects the passion for that activity,

01:30:14.020 | but I think looked at differently,

01:30:15.500 | it also reflects the fact that that activity

01:30:18.620 | is a portal through which you can explore life

01:30:21.460 | through many, many different lenses.

01:30:24.140 | And I think that that's especially powerful

01:30:26.820 | in terms of thinking about how play

01:30:28.300 | can be leveraged for plasticity.

01:30:29.940 | So for those of you that are interested

01:30:32.060 | in leveraging play for neuroplasticity

01:30:34.040 | and expanding your mind, if you will,

01:30:37.680 | I highly recommend picking an activity

01:30:40.180 | that will allow you to adopt different roles

01:30:42.800 | within that activity, where it's not rigidly linear.

01:30:45.640 | This is actually a way in which I start to depart

01:30:49.080 | from this modern and important, but somewhat narrow idea

01:30:53.820 | that exercise is the only route to plasticity.

01:30:57.420 | Yes, it's true.

01:30:58.380 | I have Nobel prize winning colleagues

01:31:00.660 | that swim for two miles a day

01:31:02.660 | and have done that for a long time.

01:31:04.040 | And they will tell you,

01:31:04.900 | I always think more clearly after my swimming.

01:31:07.060 | And I certainly, in my experience,

01:31:09.660 | after a good run or a good workout,

01:31:11.240 | my mind seems to work best,

01:31:13.620 | unless of course that workout was very, very intense.

01:31:15.780 | I've talked about this before.

01:31:16.820 | If you do work out very, very hard

01:31:19.140 | in whether or not it's aerobic or resistance training

01:31:22.300 | or sport of any kind,

01:31:23.320 | your brain won't function as well afterwards,

01:31:25.380 | mostly because of the diversion of oxygen

01:31:27.540 | to tissues away from your brain.

01:31:29.860 | You actually are getting less oxygen to your brain.

01:31:31.840 | But in general, most of us feel

01:31:32.980 | that if we exercise regularly, our brain functions better.

01:31:36.100 | But there are activities that extend beyond linear exercise,

01:31:39.900 | beyond just generating the same sets of movements

01:31:43.020 | over and over again, whether or not it's exercise or not.

01:31:45.380 | And that's really what play is.

01:31:47.340 | Play is about dynamically exploring

01:31:50.220 | different kinds of movements,

01:31:52.200 | dynamically exploring different kinds of thoughts,

01:31:54.560 | dynamically exploring different kinds of roles

01:31:57.760 | that one could adopt.

01:31:59.400 | And that is the way that the brain learns new things.

01:32:02.560 | So I encourage you to explore chess.

01:32:04.580 | I intend to learn chess this year.

01:32:05.940 | I'm very excited to do that.

01:32:07.320 | Now, if you already play chess

01:32:09.160 | and you are an expert chess player,

01:32:11.040 | you actually will derive less benefit

01:32:13.820 | in terms of this play-induced neuroplasticity

01:32:16.940 | than you would, for instance,

01:32:18.160 | if you went out and, I don't know,

01:32:20.100 | played a game of soccer or did something

01:32:21.520 | that was very novel for your nervous system,

01:32:23.600 | because in that novelty and in that exploration

01:32:26.860 | of new behaviors and new ways of thinking,

01:32:29.740 | you are opening the portal to plasticity.

01:32:31.980 | Whereas in doing what you already know how to do

01:32:34.140 | and trying just to perform better and better at it,

01:32:37.100 | you will get better at chess.

01:32:38.740 | But again, that's just chess.

01:32:40.760 | You are not expanding the realms

01:32:42.780 | in which you can become more plastic,

01:32:45.960 | that you are able to learn new things in relationship,

01:32:49.420 | in life, in finance, in friendship, et cetera.

01:32:52.000 | In researching this episode,

01:32:53.500 | one of the most interesting areas I discovered

01:32:56.240 | was this notion of personal play identity.

01:32:59.440 | Personal play identity is a term that,

01:33:02.020 | at least to my knowledge,

01:33:02.980 | was coined by a Turkish researcher by the name,

01:33:06.920 | and forgive me, I'm going to mispronounce this,

01:33:09.020 | is Gokhan Gunes, G-O-K-H-A-N,

01:33:14.020 | last name, G-U-N-E-S.

01:33:16.500 | And forgive me, Gokhan,

01:33:18.000 | and if we have any Turkish-speaking members of the audience,

01:33:21.380 | please put the correction in the comment section on YouTube

01:33:26.220 | and make it phonetic so I can understand what it is.

01:33:28.980 | Please, I'd love to correct it,

01:33:30.320 | and apologies, or who knows?

01:33:32.460 | If I got it right, then it was pure luck.

01:33:35.700 | Gokhan Gunes has coined this term personal play identity,

01:33:39.660 | and the key role that personal play identity establishes

01:33:44.660 | in who we see ourselves as being,

01:33:48.380 | and not just in the context of play.

01:33:50.540 | Personal play identity has four well-defined dimensions.

01:33:54.460 | And I should say that if you're interested

01:33:55.780 | in learning more about this,

01:33:56.840 | the paper that I found particularly informative

01:34:01.540 | is published in Current Psychology,

01:34:04.180 | and the title is Personal Play Identity

01:34:06.100 | and the Fundamental Elements in its Developmental Process.

01:34:09.260 | And the author, of course, is Gokhan Gunes,

01:34:11.060 | G-U-N-E-S, last name.

01:34:12.740 | This is from 2021, so recent review.

01:34:15.080 | There are four components to personal play identity.

01:34:19.100 | How you play, your personality,

01:34:24.780 | socioculture and environment,

01:34:27.680 | so that's the third one that's together,

01:34:29.220 | socioculture and environment,

01:34:30.600 | and economics and technology.

01:34:32.840 | Now, that sounds somewhat complex,

01:34:34.460 | and this paper is somewhat complex,

01:34:35.920 | but basically what it says is that

01:34:37.980 | we bring together certain aspects of ourselves

01:34:42.380 | and how we react to different play scenarios

01:34:45.180 | when we're younger,

01:34:46.020 | and we bring that forward into the world

01:34:48.380 | in all contexts as adults.

01:34:50.680 | To illustrate this, I'm going to ask you a question.

01:34:53.720 | When you were a child, let's say 10 years old,

01:34:57.000 | would you have considered yourself competitive?

01:35:01.320 | Would you have considered yourself

01:35:02.800 | somebody who's cooperative and realize, of course,

01:35:05.020 | that those are not mutually exclusive?

01:35:06.960 | You could be competitive and cooperative.

01:35:08.980 | Would you consider yourself somebody

01:35:10.600 | that preferred to play alone

01:35:12.580 | or preferred to play with one or two close friends?

01:35:15.640 | Or were you somebody that really enjoyed

01:35:17.860 | playing in large groups?

01:35:19.360 | Here's a key one.

01:35:21.560 | Were you somebody that enjoyed

01:35:24.080 | playing the leader in one moment

01:35:26.060 | and was equally okay with being a follower

01:35:29.540 | at a later moment?

01:35:30.980 | Were you okay with having your role switched

01:35:33.340 | midway through a game?

01:35:35.180 | Would you get upset or be delighted

01:35:38.540 | or not care at all about having to switch teams

01:35:41.180 | during the middle of a game

01:35:42.020 | because your team was winning to even things out?

01:35:45.580 | You can imagine how that would play out internally.

01:35:48.700 | You would immediately register

01:35:50.020 | that you must be a valuable player

01:35:51.380 | because you're being moved off the winning team

01:35:53.080 | toward the losing team.

01:35:55.280 | But then again, you're now being forced

01:35:56.960 | to join the losing team.

01:35:59.160 | How did you feel about that?

01:36:01.240 | Were you somebody that was comfortable

01:36:02.960 | with other people breaking rules

01:36:04.420 | or perhaps even yourself breaking rules or bending rules?

01:36:09.100 | Kind of be able to find term.

01:36:10.640 | Or were you somebody that really needed

01:36:13.080 | to know all the rules

01:36:14.040 | and if everyone didn't rigidly adhere to those rules

01:36:17.400 | was quite disturbed by that?

01:36:21.020 | The number of questions goes on and on and on.

01:36:22.740 | And I will provide a link to a paper

01:36:24.340 | that asks a number of questions

01:36:26.580 | that helps you arrive at a sort of score of sorts

01:36:29.900 | or an index of what Gunes and others

01:36:33.060 | have referred to as personal play identity.

01:36:35.620 | The point is that if we look back to our early adolescence,

01:36:39.500 | somewhere between 10 and 14 years old,

01:36:42.500 | a peak time for social development,

01:36:45.180 | a peak time for play of various kinds,

01:36:48.180 | a peak time for motor development,

01:36:50.660 | a peak time of psychosocial development,

01:36:54.060 | where we learn where we fit into hierarchies

01:36:56.320 | as we relate to members of the same sex,

01:36:58.760 | of the opposite sex, et cetera,

01:37:00.360 | we can start to get a portal into how and why we show up

01:37:05.100 | to various activities in work and relationship,

01:37:07.860 | et cetera, as adults.

01:37:09.920 | In fact, I'll venture to say

01:37:12.220 | that if we go into that process for ourselves

01:37:14.620 | for five or 10 minutes,

01:37:15.860 | you start to see some remarkable parallels

01:37:18.060 | between the way you were at that stage

01:37:20.380 | and your tendencies and your preferences as adults.

01:37:24.080 | We tend to look at our early childhood experiences

01:37:26.820 | and our families, and to some degree, our friends,

01:37:29.420 | in terms of how we become who we become.

01:37:32.840 | I've talked about the incredible work of Alan Shore

01:37:36.820 | on previous episodes of the podcast.

01:37:38.760 | Alan Shore is a psychiatrist and has done extensive work

01:37:43.100 | on how parent-child interactions,

01:37:45.460 | in particular baby and mother, but also baby and father,

01:37:49.440 | shape the brain and the brain and emotional system's ability

01:37:53.400 | to go from states of elation and excitement,

01:37:56.160 | the so-called dopamine epinephrine type circuitry,

01:37:59.720 | to the more warm, soothing types of calm interactions

01:38:04.000 | that in broad terms could be described as more serotonin,

01:38:07.280 | oxytocin, and things of that sort.

01:38:09.180 | That work really points to the key roles

01:38:12.640 | that the caregiver and the child, you,

01:38:16.460 | engaged in in early life.

01:38:18.300 | And that is incredible work.

01:38:19.880 | I do hope to host Dr. Shore on the podcast

01:38:23.140 | at some point in the not too distant future.

01:38:25.980 | But equally important, of course,

01:38:28.120 | are the interactions that we export

01:38:30.360 | from that early laying down of biological circuitry

01:38:33.940 | and psychological circuitry to the way we play by ourselves

01:38:38.320 | and the way we play with others,

01:38:40.020 | in small numbers or in great numbers.

01:38:43.240 | And of course it would be the case

01:38:45.680 | that how we played as a 10 or 12-year-old

01:38:48.560 | would impact how we behave as a 16-year-old

01:38:51.040 | and as a 20-year-old and as a 30-year-old

01:38:53.240 | and so on and so on.

01:38:55.440 | One of my favorite things about developmental biology

01:38:58.220 | and developmental psychology is that it is grounded

01:39:00.940 | in the fact that we don't just have a childhood

01:39:03.040 | and an adulthood.

01:39:04.380 | There isn't just our child self and our adult self.

01:39:07.080 | And even though there are transitions around the mechanisms

01:39:09.820 | that underlie neuroplasticity at approximately age 25,

01:39:14.720 | it is simply the case that development

01:39:17.420 | is our entire lifespan,

01:39:19.000 | that our lifespan is one long developmental arc.

01:39:22.540 | How long depends on our genetics, our lifestyle,

01:39:25.860 | accidents, injury, and disease, of course,

01:39:28.680 | but it is one long developmental arc.

01:39:31.560 | And so it shouldn't surprise us at all

01:39:33.280 | that how we learn to play as a 10-year-old or 12-year-old

01:39:36.100 | would impact how we play and interact with people

01:39:39.040 | as a teenager and a young adult and on and on and on.

01:39:43.880 | And that play is the place in which we explore

01:39:46.680 | and which we learn.

01:39:48.060 | Play is the substrate by which our nervous system

01:39:50.860 | changes us from this hyper-connected batch of neurons

01:39:55.540 | where everything is connected to everything, more or less,

01:39:58.900 | to a brain and nervous system whereby certain circuits

01:40:03.400 | work with immense proficiency

01:40:05.400 | and others are less accessible to us.

01:40:07.800 | But again, the wonderful thing about the human nervous system

01:40:11.120 | is that because it is plastic for the entire lifespan,

01:40:16.120 | and because these two elements of focus and rest

01:40:19.300 | can be deployed again and again and again,

01:40:21.960 | just because neural circuits didn't form

01:40:23.960 | does not mean that they can't form later in life.

01:40:26.960 | And today we've been focusing on how play itself,

01:40:31.000 | the same substrate that we use during development

01:40:33.340 | to become who we are,

01:40:34.940 | is the portal by which we can change who we are

01:40:37.500 | for the better.

01:40:38.520 | So I hope I've convinced you that play is an extremely

01:40:41.440 | important fundamental homeostatically regulated aspect

01:40:45.200 | of our nervous system,

01:40:46.360 | which is just a mouthful of nerd speak to say,

01:40:50.060 | play can change your brain for the better.

01:40:52.560 | And that is true for every stage of life.

01:40:55.240 | The recommendation that I make,

01:40:57.060 | and certainly the one that I'm going to direct it myself

01:40:59.720 | as well, is to try and engage in at least one hour

01:41:04.300 | of pure play per week.

01:41:06.600 | Now I came to that recommendation because of the literature

01:41:09.960 | that says, well,

01:41:11.680 | you need to engage in something pretty repetitively.

01:41:14.360 | It should be novel.

01:41:15.560 | So this wouldn't be something that you are exceptionally

01:41:17.700 | good at already.

01:41:19.400 | If you insist on doing something that you're already

01:41:21.900 | exceptionally good at,

01:41:23.080 | then you want to really do some free form,

01:41:25.860 | low stakes tinkering.

01:41:27.560 | So make it safe, but make it free form.

01:41:30.760 | So really explore things with that.

01:41:32.760 | Some people call this beginner's mind.

01:41:34.480 | Although I find that a little abstract.

01:41:36.060 | I like the notion of beginner's mind,

01:41:37.420 | but it's sort of like,

01:41:38.260 | how do you know if you're in beginner's mind?

01:41:39.660 | I think beginner's mind is sort of the expectation

01:41:41.960 | that you're not going to do it well yet,

01:41:44.240 | but play extends beyond beginner's mind.

01:41:47.120 | Play is really about not even worrying

01:41:49.240 | if you're going to get good at it or really proficient at it.

01:41:52.120 | It's really about exploring contingencies

01:41:54.720 | with truly low stakes.

01:41:56.240 | That's what will allow you to access

01:41:57.960 | these neurochemical combinations

01:42:00.000 | of elevated endogenous opioids, low epinephrine, et cetera,

01:42:03.160 | that will open up neuroplasticity.

01:42:05.560 | For those of you that need a little more guidance

01:42:07.360 | on how to play, there's a book out there.

01:42:10.080 | I actually learned about this from Tim Ferriss' blog.

01:42:12.560 | It's called "Play It Away, A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety."

01:42:15.780 | So that's more focused on anxiety.

01:42:17.140 | The author is Charlie Hone, last name H-O-E-H-N.

01:42:22.140 | We'll provide a link for it in the show notes and caption.

01:42:24.280 | "Play It Away, A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety."

01:42:27.620 | But books and other resources aside,

01:42:30.920 | I think one hour of play per week

01:42:32.820 | is a reasonable amount of time

01:42:34.960 | to engage in dedicated play behavior

01:42:37.760 | for the purpose of opening up

01:42:39.860 | these neural circuits for plasticity.

01:42:42.440 | The key feature, of course,

01:42:43.540 | is to not have immense proficiency in that given activity,

01:42:47.200 | or at least not the way you perform it.

01:42:49.040 | And if you do gain proficiency in that activity,

01:42:52.280 | well, then it becomes something else.

01:42:53.600 | It's no longer about play, it's about performance.

01:42:56.600 | So in that case,

01:42:57.520 | you would then want to adopt a new play behavior.

01:43:00.700 | You'll notice that I largely avoided

01:43:02.320 | using the word fun throughout this episode.

01:43:05.040 | Fun is a somewhat abstract term,

01:43:06.880 | and like many emotions

01:43:09.120 | and many verbal descriptions of experience,

01:43:12.440 | it falls short in the context

01:43:14.760 | of a neurobiological discussion about play.

01:43:17.880 | If you have fun, terrific.

01:43:19.640 | Some people might find, however,

01:43:21.260 | that engaging in play is kind of uncomfortable.

01:43:23.740 | Well, there your goal then

01:43:24.800 | should be to lower your level of discomfort

01:43:26.920 | by focusing less on the outcomes

01:43:28.960 | and just simply engaging in the behavior

01:43:31.020 | because, well, I'm telling you that it's good for you,

01:43:34.040 | but hopefully you will tell yourself

01:43:35.500 | that it's good for you

01:43:36.340 | and that you will experience that it's good for you.

01:43:39.620 | The literature certainly points to that,

01:43:41.700 | and the literature certainly points to the fact

01:43:44.360 | that play is the way that we are built.

01:43:46.760 | We are built to play.

01:43:48.620 | We have brain circuits from back to front

01:43:51.780 | and within our body that are there for play,

01:43:54.160 | and they don't disappear.

01:43:55.280 | They do not get pruned away

01:43:57.180 | as we go from development to adulthood.

01:43:59.200 | So if ever you needed a neurobiological explanation

01:44:02.040 | for why play is important throughout the lifespan, it's that.

01:44:05.880 | It's that biology does not waste resources.

01:44:08.700 | It's extremely efficient.

01:44:10.280 | And were the circuits for play

01:44:13.060 | not to be important in adulthood,

01:44:14.800 | they would have been pruned away,

01:44:16.080 | but I guarantee you they are there

01:44:17.660 | in your brain and nervous system now.

01:44:19.720 | They will be there tomorrow,

01:44:20.720 | and they will be there going forward.

01:44:22.320 | So my suggestion is that you use them one hour per week.

01:44:25.940 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

01:44:28.480 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

01:44:30.420 | That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us.

01:44:33.160 | In addition, please subscribe to the podcast

01:44:35.500 | on Spotify and/or Apple.

01:44:37.520 | And on Apple, you have the opportunity

01:44:39.200 | to leave us up to a five-star review.

01:44:41.640 | Please leave us comments and suggestions and feedback,

01:44:44.760 | including suggestions for future podcast guests

01:44:47.900 | in the comment section on YouTube.

01:44:49.560 | We do read all those comments.

01:44:52.040 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

01:44:53.920 | at the beginning of the episode.

01:44:55.120 | That's the best way to support this podcast.

01:44:57.660 | We also have a Patreon.

01:44:59.100 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman,

01:45:02.200 | and there you can support the podcast

01:45:03.820 | at any level that you like.

01:45:05.820 | If you're not already following us on Twitter and Instagram,

01:45:08.460 | we are @hubermanlab on Twitter

01:45:09.880 | and also @hubermanlab on Instagram.

01:45:12.680 | On Instagram, I do short posts

01:45:15.360 | that are related to topics covered on the podcast,

01:45:17.940 | but also some additional topics.

01:45:19.600 | So these would include science-based tools

01:45:21.840 | for things like focus, for sleep, for learning,

01:45:23.960 | and many other topics as well.

01:45:25.840 | In previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

01:45:28.520 | we often refer to supplements.

01:45:30.380 | Now, supplements aren't necessary or correct for everybody,

01:45:33.520 | but many people derive tremendous benefit from them

01:45:36.100 | for things like sleep and focus and so on.

01:45:39.040 | We've partnered with Thorne, that's T-H-O-R-I-N-E,

01:45:42.100 | because Thorne supplements are of the very highest quality

01:45:44.900 | in terms of the ingredients they use

01:45:46.580 | and the specificity of the amounts of the ingredients

01:45:49.740 | that are listed on the bottle

01:45:51.020 | are actually what is in those bottles,

01:45:53.380 | which is not the case for many supplement brands out there.

01:45:56.240 | If you're interested in seeing the supplements that I take,

01:45:58.220 | you can go to thorne.com/u/huberman.

01:46:02.000 | So that's T-H-O-R-N-E.com/u/huberman.

01:46:07.000 | And those supplements you can purchase at 20% off.

01:46:10.680 | And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site

01:46:13.060 | through that URL portal,

01:46:14.920 | you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements

01:46:17.600 | that Thorne makes.

01:46:18.600 | Thank you once again for joining me for this discussion

01:46:21.120 | about the incredible biology and psychology

01:46:23.700 | and power of this thing that we call play.

01:46:26.620 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:46:28.860 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:46:30.620 | [upbeat music]

01:46:33.200 | (upbeat music)

Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain | Huberman Lab Podcast #58

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