Playing Fields of the Mind

Excerpted from
Exuberance; The Passion for Life
By Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.

For most mammals, including ourselves, early exploration of the world is enhanced, indeed often made possible, through the exuberant play of youth. Such play, it has been said, is the business of childhood, but play is more than that: it is a deadly serious business. Much learning must get done in not much time, for youth is, indeed, a stuff which will not endure. The time is short when a young animal, still protected and provided for by its parents and not yet bound to the wailing demands of hunting, mating, and procuring shelter, can run flat out, gambol, and improvise with impunity. "In the sun that is young once only," wrote Dylan Thomas, "Time let me play and be/ Golden in the mercy of his means."

We play because we have an exuberance of spirits and energy, but we are also exuberant because we play. We seek to play not only because it is a part of our evolutionary history, but because we know that more often than not it will bring pleasure. That pleasure, in turn, makes us more likely to act in ways that increase our chances of survival and sway. Long before our species adapted to the seasons and terrains dealt us by nature, other animals had learned how best to capture food and reach water, how to outflank predators, to be aware of their own and wary of strangers. They had evolved ways to fashion strong bonds with kin and learned the particulars of their home territories through exploration and risks taken. A coupling of instinct with learning, of pleasurable play with group bonding, of joy with curiosity and invention meant that animals with such capacities were more likely to respond with facility to changes in their environment. The varieties and combinations of behaviors tried out in play were among those that increased the odds of behavioral flexibility. Play exists, in significant measure, to promote plasticity and to teach an animal to take advantage of opportunity.

Play is a viral facilitator, shaper, and motivator: it allows the pleasurable practice of improbable twists and turns in instinctive behaviors which, in turn, creates for the animal a wider range of possibilities for future actions. It shapes the developing brain in potentially lifesaving ways. "Natural selection," wrote the philosopher Karl Groos in 1898, "will favour individuals in whom instinct appears only in an imperfect form, manifesting itself in early youth in activity purely for exercise and practice-that is to say, in animals which play." It is not unlikely, Groos went on to say, that "the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play."

By its nature, play is rather diffusely defined; the origins of the word remain surprisingly obscure. Plen, meaning, in Middle Dutch, "to dance about, jump for joy," is thought to be a linguistic ancestor of the English word play so, too, is the Old German word Spilan, denoting a "light, floating movement." "Play" takes up seventeen long columns and accounts for more than one hundred individual definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. To these, modern science has added its own numbingly precise ones. Most definitions center on a feeling of free or unimpeded movement; activities involving fun and amusement and characterized by swift, exuberant, irregular, or capricious motions; and a springing, flying, or darting to and fro, a joyous gamboling and frolicking about.

Play, as Stephen Miller of Harvard has put it, is a "soup of behavior," something we recognize when we see it, but find hard to pin down in language. Miller studied zoo-goers watching animals at play and found that they were quire consistent in what they labeled as play, noting, for example, that "it didn't look like it was for real" or that the animals "looked like they were enjoying themselves." Scientists, however, found it far more difficult to label the diverse behaviors of play. Miller believes that the zoo-goers were almost certainly responding to a wide variety of cues which, because of their very subtlety (and, one would also guess, their effects on ancient, preverbal portions of the brain), scientists felt unable to measure objectively.