Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science based tools

for everyday life.

[Upbeat music]

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, we are going to talk about the biology,

psychology and utility of play.

Play is something that normally we associate

with children's games

and indeed with being a child,

much of our childhood development centers around play,

whether or not it's organized play

or spontaneous play,

but as adults, we also need to play.

And today I'm going to talk about

what I like to refer to as The Power of Play.

The Power of Play, resides in plays ability

to change our nervous system

for the better,

so that we can perform many activities,

not just play activities, better.

Play can also function

as a way to explore new ways of being

in different scenarios in work,

in relationships, in settings of all kind,

and indeed also in the relationship to oneself.

In fact,

we are going to explore how assuming different identities

during the same game of play

or the same forms of play

has been shown to be immensely powerful

for allowing people

to engage in more creative thinking

and dynamic thinking and indeed to better leaders

and more effective workers

and students and learners and happier people.

I'm also going to cover some data that shows

that learning to play properly

can enhance one's ability to focus

and is an active area of research

for treatment of things like ADHD,

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,

just as a little sneak preview of where that's headed,

children who do not access enough play

during certain stages of childhood

are more prone to develop ADHD.

The good news,

is all of us regardless of whether or not we have ADHD

or not,

whether or not we had ample access to play

during childhood or not,

can engage and grow the neural circuits

that allow for this incredible power of play.

And this can be done again at any stage of life today.

We're going to talk about the protocols,

the science, we will review all of that.

And I promise you'll come away

with a lot of knowledge,

whether or not you're a parent,

whether or not you're a child,

whether or not you're a person of any age,

you're going to have tools

and knowledge that will benefit you.

Before we begin,

I want to share with you

the results of what I think to be an extremely exciting

and certainly an actionable study

that was just published in the journal Scientific Reports.

This is an excellent journal Nature Press journal,

Peer Reviewed, et cetera,

and the finding center around

what sorts of devices we happen to be reading on

and accessing information on

and how that's impacting our physiology

and our capacity to learn.

One of the more frequent questions I get

is what are all these devices, phones, tablets,

computers, video games et cetera,

doing to our brains.

And finally,

there's some good Peer reviewed data

to look at that and to address it directly.

This study, first author Honma

H O N M A

Honma et al,

is entitled

"Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation.

That's SIGH sigh generation

brain activity and comprehension."

And to just summarize what they found,

they ran a study on 34 healthy individuals

and had them either read material on a smartphone

or on regular printed paper or a book.

And what they found is that

comprehension on devices in particular smartphones

is much poorer much worse than it is

when one reads on actual paper.

Now some of you may experience this yourselves.

Now they compared smartphones with paper.

And what they found was

that when they looked at people's breathing,

the normal patterns of breathing

that people were engaging in

did not differ between people reading on a smartphone

or reading from paper.

However, one particular feature of breathing did differ.

And that particular feature is what we call

physiological sighs.

I've talked a lot about physiological sighs on this podcast,

and on social media,

we had a terrific guest,

Professor, Jack Feldman from

University of California Los Angeles.

Who's a world expert in breathing and respiration

and its impacts on the brain

and how brain controls breathing and respiration

and what you can learn from that episode.

Or I'll just tell you again right now,

is that every five minutes or so,

whether or not we are asleep or awake,

we do what's called a physiological sigh,

which is a big, deep inhale,

often a double inhale followed by a long exhale.

It goes something like this.

[Inhaling]

[Sighs]

Now you might think, oh, I never breathe like that,

but you do,

unless there's something severely wrong with your brain stem

every five minutes or so

you do one of these physiological sighs,

which reopens all the little hundreds of millions of sacks

in your lungs called alveoli

that bring in more oxygen as a consequence of that

big deep, double inhale.

And then you are able to exhale carbon dioxide,

offload carbon dioxide

through that long exhale.

I've also encouraged people to use the physiological sigh

deliberately,

not just spontaneously

as a way to reduce their stress quickly.

And indeed my lab works on physiological sighs

and it's been exploring this

and they're quite effective in reducing

our stress very fast.

Reading on our smartphone,

seems to suppress physiological sigh.

People aren't aware that it's happening,

but it's happening.

Some people have talked about so-called email apnea,

which is the fact that people hold their breath

while they email or while they text.

And indeed many people do that.

This is distinct from email or texting apnea.

What's happening here is people are reading on the phone

and for whatever reason,

and I'll talk about what the likely reason is,

but for whatever reason,

they're suppressing their sighing

And as a consequence,

the brain is not getting enough oxygen

and is not offloading enough carbon dioxide.

And another finding in this study,

was that the prefrontal cortex,

an area of the brain that's involved in focus and attention

and learning

becomes hyperactive in a kind of desperate attempt to focus.

All of this can be summarized by saying,

if you happen to read on a device,

whether or not it's a tablet,

a standard computer screen of any kind,

but in particular on a smart phone,

regardless of how small or large that smartphone screen is,

you want to remind yourself

to engage in these physiological sighs fairly regularly.

And it might even be better to just

read the most or at least the key issues

and things that you're trying to learn

about the key information from paper,

either books or printed out material

of some other sort.

What's the underlying mechanism here?

Well,

one of the reasons I like this study so much,

is that it brings together two of my laboratories

and my particular interests in neuroscience,

which is how does our visual system

and the aperture meaning the size of our visual window

relate to our so-called autonomic function

or our internal state.

And basically what's happening here is

as any of us bring our visual window in more narrowly

as we contract our visual window,

which is exactly what happens

when we're looking at a little smartphone in front of us.

It seems to suppress the breathing apparatus

because we know that physiological sighs

are controlled by a specific set of neurons

in the brain stem called the parafacial nucleus

discovered by Dr. Jack Feldman.

And so there must be a mechanism whereby

when we tighten our visual window,

we somehow, and we don't know yet how this happens,

but somehow suppress the activity of these neurons

in the parafacial nucleus

that generate this physiological sighs.

So again,

you have two choices or I suppose you have many choices,

but two main choices

to contend with this new information.

One is that you remind yourself

to engage in deep breathing

and in particular, physiological sighs

every five minutes or so,

while reading anything or texting on your smartphone,

the other would be,

again, if there's material that you really need to learn

for sake of regurgitation later,

or for something particularly important,

try and read that from either a larger screen

or even better would be from printed materials or books.

Another reason I bring all that up

is that it relates to a larger theme,

which is that I get many, many questions about ADHD

and about people's challenges with focus

and much of what we're told these days is that

we are challenged with focus

because of the hundreds of videos

that we can see streaming by us in any moment on our phone,

which probably is true.

The fact that the information that we're reading

on the internet and on our phones

is emotionally disturbing or distressing in some way.

And that probably is true as well in many cases.

This study really points to the fact that independent

of the information that we are looking at

or consuming

independent whether or not it's movies or texts

or anything of that sort,

the mere size of the window, the aperture,

the screen that we are looking at

is also strongly impacting our ability to learn

and remember information.

So broaden that visual window

print things out,

look at a book.

I didn't design the system.

I always say, you know,

however our visual system and respiratory system

happened to evolve.

I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

This is just simply how your brain circuits work.

So if you want to learn things,

widen that visual window and even better print things out,

pick up a book or read on a tablet even,

but try and make that tablet larger

than a smartphone screen size.

Before we begin our discussion about The Power of Play,

I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however,

part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer

information about science and science related tools

to the general public

in keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Let's talk about play.

Now in researching this episode,

I thought that I was going to come across a bunch of papers

that say this brain area

connects to that brain area,

which controls play in animals.

And there's similar areas in babies and in adults.

And indeed, that's true.

And we will talk about brain circuitry,

but I think more importantly is to understand

what is the utility of play?

You know, why do we play when we're younger?

Why do we tend to play less as we get older?

And what in the world is play for?

Some of us would be categorized as more playful.

I'm sure that you know, people like this,

maybe you are like this

people that can walk into a room,

a social setting of any kind,

and they seem to already kind of have a playful,

maybe even a mischievous quality about them.

We'll talk about mischief a little bit later,

but they sort of look at an environment

or a social setting as an opportunity

for different kinds of novel interactions.

Other people and I'd probably put myself into this category.

If I walk into a novel environment,

I tend to be more in the mode of just assessing

what that environment is like.

I'm not a particularly spontaneously playful person,

although around certain individuals,

I might be more spontaneously playful.

We are all on a continuum of this kind of seriousness

to playful nature.

Turns out that all young animals,

including humans

have more playfulness and tend to engage

in more spontaneous play

in their earlier years

than in their later years.

And therein lies a very interesting portal

to understanding what the utility,

what the purpose of play is.

First of all,

I want to lay down a couple of key facts about play

that point to the fact that play is not just about games.

Play is about much, much more

and play and in particular,

how we played as a child

and still how we can play as adults

is really how we test

and expand our potential roles in all kinds of interactions.

One of the most important,

interesting and surprising features of play

that I'd like everyone to know about

is that it is homeostatically regulated.

Some of you are familiar with the term homeostasis.

Homeostasis is just this aspect of biological systems

to try and remain in balance.

You know, if you stay awake for a long period of time,

you tend to want to sleep for a long period of time.

If you slept for a long period of time

and you're very rested,

then you tend to be very energetic the next day.

And of course, I know people out there will immediately say,

oh, well, if I sleep too long,

then I'm groggy the next day.

Of course there are exceptions,

but in general,

sleep and wakefulness are in homeostatic balance.

Thirst and water consumption are in homeostatic balance.

If you don't drink any fluids for a while,

you tend to get more thirsty,

you drink fluids

and your thirst tends to diminish

likewise with food.

Likewise, with most all motivated behaviors.

Well,

one of the most important discoveries

of the last century,

was largely the work of a guy named Jaak Panksepp.

No, it's not Jack it's Jaak Panksepp

who really pioneered this understanding

of the biology of play

and relating that to the psychology of play

in animals and humans.

He's considered kind of luminary in the field of play,

and what a great title to have, right?

If you could have a title and be a scientific luminary,

you might as well be the, the play guy.

In fact he was known and I'll get into this later as to why,

but he was known as the "Rat Tickler"

because he tickled rats.

And he actually found that rodents and animals of many kind

generate laughter in response to tickling.

And in fact,

they don't have the capacity to tickle themselves

something we'll also talk about why that is.

And he was called the "Rat tickler,"

but then he discovered that many species of animals

engage in laughter in response to tickling

and they tickle each other.

And the reason you don't hear them laughing,

no you can't hear your dog laughing

that isn't laughing it's something else

is that most animals besides humans laugh

at kind of ultrasonic levels of auditory output.

Meaning the frequencies of sound are just too high

for you to hear,

but with the appropriate devices,

he was able with his colleagues

to isolate this so-called the "Rat Laughter"

and then turns out there's kitten laughter

and there's puppy laughter.

And of course there's human laughter.

So Jaak Panksepp was a very interesting

and pioneering person in this field.

And he also discovered that play

is homeostatically regulated.

Meaning if animals including children

are restricted from playing for a certain amount of time,

they will play more when given the opportunity

in the same way that if I food restrict you

for a long period of time,

you'll eat more when you are finally allowed to eat.

Now this is important

because it moves this thing that we call

play from the dimension of higher order functions

or things evolved recently,

you know, that are really kind of at the front edge

of human evolution,

deeper into the circuitry of the brain,

whereby we say the brain stem,

the kind of ancient parts of the brain

are going to be involved.

And in fact, that's the case

as we're going to learn later in the podcast,

play is generated through the connectivity

of many brain areas.

But one of the key brain areas

is an area called PAG Periaqueductal Gray.

The Periaqueductal Gray is a brain stem area.

So it's pretty far back

as the brain kind of transitions into the spinal cord.

And it's rich with neurons that make endogenous opioids.

So these are not the kinds of opioids

that are causing the opioid crisis.

These are neurons that you and I all have

that release endogenous, meaning self-made

or biologically made opioids.

They go by names like enkephalin

and things of that sort.

Play evokes small amounts of opioid release into the system.

They kind of dope you up a little bit,

not so much as one would see if

one were to take exogenous opioids.

And in fact exogenous opioids as we now know,

are potentially very hazardous,

highly high addiction potential

high overdose potential.

They cause all sorts of problems.

Yes there are clinical uses for them,

but they're causing a lot of problems nowadays,

but these endogenous opioids

are released in children and adults

anytime we engage in play.

And that turns out to be a very important chemical state

because there's something about

having an abundance of these endogenous opioids

released into the brain

that allows other areas of the brain,

like the prefrontal cortex,

the area of the front that's responsible

for what we call executive function.

Executive function is the ability to make predictions,

to assess contingencies.

Like if I do this,

then that happens.

If I do that, then that happens.

Well prefrontal cortex is often seen

as a kind of rigid executive of the whole brain.

That's one way to view it,

but probably a better way to view it

is that the prefrontal cortex works

in concert with these other are more primitive circuitries.

And when the periaqueductal gray releases

these endogenous opioids during play,

the prefrontal cortex, doesn't get stupid.

It actually gets smarter.

It develops the ability to take on different roles

and explore different contingencies.

And we're going to talk about role play

later in different contexts.

And what we will find is that so much of play

is really about exploring things in a way

that feels safe enough to explore, right?

This is not what happens when we drive down the street

or when we bike down the street,

when we are headed to work,

commuting on our bicycle or walking or driving,

we tend to be very linear

and we tend to be very goal directed.

We're not going to just take a new street just because

we're not going to be spontaneously riding in the middle

of the road

and then on the sidewalk and then back and forth.

Although I can remember as a kid,

I was doing some of that.

I like to jump off curb cuts when I was a kid.

And then eventually I graduated, sorry to the cyclist,

but I graduated to skateboarding.

And then I look on skateboarding.

You're always kind of exploring terrain,

but you know, as I got older,

actually I find myself becoming much more linear.

I just don't play with my commute very much.

It's really just about getting to work and then working.

When endogenous opioids are in our system,

when we're in this mode of play,

the prefrontal cortex starts seeing

and exploring many more possibilities of how we interact

with our environment,

with others and the roles that we can assume for ourselves.

And so we're going to dissect one by one,

the different aspects of play,

role play, social play,

individual play, imaginary play, competitive play

they are enormous number of dimensions of play.

And by the end of this episode,

we are going to arrive at a very key feature.

The key feature is one that's called

your personal play identity.

All of us have what we call a personal play identity.

This personal play identity

was laid down during development.

And it is the identity that you assume in playful scenarios.

And it is identity that you adopt in non playful scenarios.

Now the great news is that your personal play identity

is plastic throughout your entire lifespan.

You can adjust your personal play identity

in ways that will benefit you in work in relationships

and your overall level of happiness.

We will discuss protocols and ways to do that.

But I do want to give a nod to the late jack,

Jaak excuse me,

Jaak Panksepp, "The rat tickler."

And I also want to just give a nod to play generally,

as we move forward in the discussion.

What I'd love for everyone to do

is to stop thinking about play as just a child activity,

not just a sport related activity,

but really as an exploration in contingencies.

Again, it's an exploration of,

if I do A, what happens?

If I do B, what happens?

If someone else takes on behavior or attitude C

what am I going to do?

And play is really where we can expand our catalog

of potential outcomes,

and it can be enormously enriching.

And indeed as we'll talk about the tinkerers of the world,

the true creatives,

the people that building incredible technologies and art,

and also that just have incredibly rich,

emotional and intellectual and social lives

all have a strong element of play.

And so today I hope to convince you

of some protocols that will allow you to expand

your various roles in life,

through the portal of play.

So we establish that play is homeostatic,

meaning we all need to do it.

Many of us, including myself,

haven't played that much as adults.

We're all pretty busy.

Number of us are stressed.

We got a lot to do in life,

but as children,

most all of us engage in a lot of play.

And in looking at the way that very young children

and especially toddlers play,

we can learn a lot

because it reveals the fundamental rules

by which the toddler brain interacts with the world.

Now,

one of the key things

about the baby brain

is that the baby brain somehow

knows that it can't do everything in the world, right?

If a baby needs something,

it generally will cry or make some sort of vocalization

or some sort of facial expression or combination of those.

And the caretaker, whoever that may be will provide it.

This is an ancient hard wired mechanism

whereby the so-called autonomic nervous system

that generates stress

will create this kind of whining and discomfort,

maybe arriving,

maybe the baby gets kind of red in the face

and the caretaker delivers some thing

based on a good guess of what that baby needs.

So maybe it's breast milk,

maybe it's bottle milk.

Maybe it's a diaper change.

Maybe it's to be warmed up if the baby is cold,

maybe it's to be cooled down if the baby's too warm,

maybe if the baby's in its a little onesie thing,

it's feeling restricted and it just wants to move

and they'll get taken out of their,

their crib or their stroller,

whatever it is and allowed to stretch out on the floor.

Remember the baby doesn't know exactly what it needs.

It only knows the state of discomfort.

And of course we don't know exactly what babies and toddlers

are thinking

because they can't express themselves with language yet.

But what's key to understand

is the rule or the contingency that is set up

in that scenario.

In that scenario,

the child feels some discomfort

expresses that discomfort verbally

or through a facial expression or both

and then some force some person from the outside world

resolves it.

And so the very young baby

and indeed many children up to certain ages

and let's confess many adults

are not able to meet or adjust their internal states

of stress.

And so they look to things outside of them.

That's the first rule,

the fundamental rule

that we all learn when we come into life,

that when in a state of discomfort

to look outside our immediate biology,

beyond the confines of our skin and find a solution,

a sip of water for adults, it might be sip of alcohol,

right?

Probably not the best tool to relieve stress,

but that's one that many people do.

In fact engaging for the baby that's hungry.

The bottle milk comes from the outside.

As we gain more proficiency in moving through life

and we can get things for ourselves.

We still often bring things from the external world in

to resolve this what I'm calling

autonomic discomfort or autonomic dysregulation.

That's not a game, but that's a rule.

As we advance from infant to toddler,

we start to think more in terms of where we are

and what we own relative to what's out there in the world.

And now in the world of child psychology,

there's a somewhat famous poem

that was written by a research child psychologist.

His name was Burton White,

and he wrote a poem called "The Toddlers Creed"

"The Toddlers Creed" defines well,

what the rules and contingencies of play are

in very young children.

And it reveals to us just how narrow

and limited their world view is

and how self entered their world is.

So "The Toddlers Creed" read quickly,

cuz' I don't want to take up too much time with this is.

"If I want it.

It's mine.

If I give it to you and change my mind later,

it's mine."

For anyone that's played with a toddler,

you can imagine this in your mind.

"If I can take it away from you, it's mine.

If I had a little while ago, it's mine.

If we are building something together,

all the pieces are mine.

If it looks just like mine,

it's mine.

If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else,

no matter what."

And of course, as we hear this

sounds quite awful, right?

And yet this is actually a reflection of what

a healthy toddler would think about the world.

That the objects and things,

and even the people in the world are theirs,

that they are actually possessions that belong to them.

Now of course,

some people never actually transition beyond this stage

of moral and social development.

And there are indeed some adults

that fit "The Toddlers Creed."

And you're welcome to share this with them.

If ever you think that it might be of benefit

to their self-reflection.

But in all seriousness Burton White's

"Toddlers Creed" is really grounded

in this transition from when we are infants.

And we have to have things delivered to us,

to the point where we are toddlers

and we can access things in the world,

but we tend to assume that they are all ours.

And then the next stage

is the really key stage as it relates to play

because is in the next stage of development

is where young children start

to interact with other children

and there's an exchange and a possession

and then a letting go of certain things,

learning that not everything is yours

and that the entire world is not about you

is one of the key contingencies

that is established during play.

It's one of the key way in which children go

from being very self-centered

and basically unable to engage with other kids

for very long,

without some sort of eruption of crying

and some sort of battle of, you know,

kind of push pull over an object

to things like sharing and things like cooperative play.

So as we transition from forms of play

that are all about the self

that are all me, me, me, me,

"The Toddlers Creed"

to forms of play that involve

some discomfort in assuming roles

that maybe we don't want and not getting what we want.

It's really an opportunity for the brain

to start to explore different roles that people take,

how they work as individuals

and as pairs and in larger groups.

And to do that in a low stakes environment, right?

You wouldn't want this to be worked out

on the battlefield or when searching for food

or in some high stakes environment

where the survival of the species was important.

It appears that these circuitry for play evolved.

So that rules and contingencies around who's most important,

whether or not the group is important,

whether or not individuals are going to be leaders

or followers, et cetera,

that can be explored in a low stakes environment.

Now there are hundreds of different types of play

and hundreds of different types of contingency testing.

But the key theme here is that

play allows children and adults for that matter

to explore different outcomes

in a kind of low stakes environment.

If you're playing a board game or a card game,

you might get really into that game,

but unless there's a lot of money on the table, so to speak,

or you're really playing for something important

or unless your ego is swollen way out of proportion,

to reality,

if you lose, you might not feel good about it,

but it's truly not the end of the world.

And if you win,

you might feel really good about it,

but you're not really incredible.

You were just incredible in that particular situation

for that particular moment,

it doesn't really transform the rest of your life,

unless that game is of a particular type for sport

for instance.

We'll talk about sport later.

So the key theme here is that play is contingency testing.

play is contingency testing under conditions

where the stakes are sufficiently low,

that individuals should feel comfortable

assuming different roles,

even roles that they're not entirely comfortable

within their outside life.

And that all relates again

to the release of these endogenous opioids,

in this brain center periaqueductal gray

and the way that it allows the prefrontal cortex

in a very direct way I mean,

truly it allows it in a biological way

to expand the number of operations that it can run,

and start thinking about, oh, well, okay.

Normally I'm kind of a loner

and I like to read and work

and you know, hang out alone maybe and play alone

but you know okay,

I'll play a board game

or a game of tennis

where I have a partner and we're going to play as partners

against two other people.

Okay, that's a little uncomfortable, but I'll do it.

And in doing that,

you discover certain ways

in which you are proficient in certain ways,

in which you are less proficient,

you discover that the other person

actually tends to cheat a little bit

or the other person is extremely rigid about the rules,

or maybe it is extremely rigid about the way they organize

their pieces on the board,

or they're crossing the line

into your side of the tennis court.

There are all sorts of things that we learn

in these rather low stake scenarios.

That's the key theme here.

So before I continue,

I just want to point to a tool that anyone can use,

but in particular, the less playful of the group.

And I would put myself into this category.

Again, I'm not somebody who really engages

in spontaneous play.

I enjoy sports.

I enjoy exercise,

but that is distinct from play

because the sports and exercise that I engage in,

I take pretty seriously.

They're not low stakes for me.

I put actually I put a lot of importance on them.

Which is I'm saying all this,

I probably should put a little less importance on them

and have a little more fun with those.

And yet what I'm about to tell you is that

anyone and everyone can benefit from engaging

in a bit more of this playful mindset,

the playful mindset is not necessarily

about smiling and jumping around or being silly.

That's not it at all.

It's not Tigger character

from "Winnie the Pooh" necessarily.

It could be,

but it's really about allowing yourself

to expand the number of outcomes

that you're willing to entertain

and to think about how you relate

to those different outcomes.

So what this means is putting yourself

into scenarios where

you might not be the top performer, right?

Playing a game that you're not really that good at.

I had this experience recently,

friends that like to play cards,

they like to do some low stake gambling.

This is non illegal gambling ring.

They play for trivial things.

And I generally don't buy into the game.

I generally don't play

mostly because they end up winning and taking

whatever it is that I have.

But in the mode of assuming a more playful spirit,

the idea would be well,

if the stakes are low enough,

then to play simply for the sake of playing,

because there's something to learn there

about the other people in the group

and about one's self

and how one reacts to things like

someone who's clearly trying to take everybody's money

or somebody who is clearly trying to cheat

or somebody who's clearly very, very rigid

about every last detail,

including how the cards are dealt and shuffled right?

There is learning in this exploration.

And that is at a biological level, the prefrontal Cortex,

starting to entertain different possibilities,

starting to entertain different outcomes

in this low stakes way.

And if you think about it,

that's not something that we allow ourselves

to do very often.

Even if we listen to new forms of music

or we go see new art or new movies,

those are new experiences,

but that's not us making new predictions

about what's going to happen next.

It's not the brain working to figure out

new possibilities.

And so you can immediately see how

just a small increase in your willingness

to put yourself into conditions

where you don't understand all the rules perhaps,

or you're not super proficient at something,

but you enter it

because it is low stakes.

And because there is information to learn

about yourself and others

could start to open up these prefrontal cortex circuits.

And when I say open up,

I don't mean that literally there's an opening

in your skull.

What I mean is that your prefrontal cortex

can work in very rigid ways.

Meaning if A then B,

if I go down this street turn left and go that way to work,

it is fast.

If I go down the other street, it's slow.

If there's a traffic jam there,

I'm going to go there

but it's starting to explore different possibilities.

And there are very, very few opportunities in life

to explore contingencies in this low stakes way,

such that it engages neuroplasticity,

the prefrontal cortex.

So play is powerful

at making your prefrontal cortex more plastic,

more able to change in response to experience,

but not just during the period of play,

but in all scenarios,

because you get one prefrontal cortex,

you don't get a prefrontal cortex just for play.

You get a prefrontal cortex that engages in everything.

So going forward,

I will layer on some more concrete aspects of tools,

but for now,

if you're somebody that doesn't consider yourself,

particularly playful

consider,

and maybe even engage in just a little bit of play

in some way,

that is of discomfort to you

with the understanding that is increasing

your prefrontal cortical plasticity.

Another really interesting and important aspect of play

is so-called play postures.

These are seen in animals,

and these are seen in humans.

And for those of you that are watching this podcast

on YouTube, I'll do my best to adopt them here.

For those of you that are listening,

you'll just have to imagine them in your mind's eye,

but Jaak Panksepp and indeed Darwin himself,

study these play postures

that all animal engage in.

Perhaps the most familiar one

is seen in dogs and in wolves

where they will lower their head to the ground

and they'll put their paws out in front of them

and they will make eye contact

with another typically dog or wolf

to so-called call the play.

Now, when they do this posture,

it's obvious that they're lowering themselves.

They're not in an aggressive stance,

because they're lowering their head.

And this is universally known among canines as play posture.

There's some famous videos online.

You can look these up

of dogs actually doing this with bears

that they're confronted with

and the bears, at least in these videos

in exchange also lowering their head,

and there you see bear dog playful interactions.

Now you always have to be cautious with bears in general.

I would say you have to be cautious with bears,

but this speaks to the universality of this bowing,

this sort of the, the,

what some people call the puppy bow

or the play bow that dogs do

turns out that humans do this as well.

Although in a different form,

I'm sure there are some that go into the,

the down-dog play posture,

but more typically when humans want to play,

they will do a subtle or not so subtle head tilt.

The head tilt with eyes open

is considered the universal head

and facial expression posture of play in humans.

So when two people see one another,

if they are aggressive towards one another,

they will assume certain facial expressions and postures.

But if they're feeling playful towards one another,

oftentimes they'll tip their head to the side

just a little bit and they'll open their eyes.

They might even raise their eyebrows briefly.

This has been seen again and again and again.

Another hardwired feature of so-called play postures

is what's called soft eyes.

When animals are aggressive,

or when they're sad,

they tend to reduce the size of their eye openings

by basically making their eyelids closer together,

somewhat,

by keeping their eyes together

in particular for aggression,

they'll bring their eyes towards

what we call a vergence eye movement.

Bring it towards the center

that actually narrows the aperture of the visual field.

When people or animals want to engage in play,

they tend to open their eyelids somewhat,

and they tend to purse their lips just a little bit.

So it's not like stronger pursing when your lips like this,

it's, pursing their lips.

They'll open their eyes a little bit.

And they'll often do the head tilt as well.

Sometimes with a little bit of a smile.

These are reflexive these are not trained up.

Children do this.

Adults do this dogs, wolves do this.

Even certain birds will do this.

Most birds have eyes on the side of their heads,

but they do a sort of form of this soft eyes approach.

And certainly in raptors,

you see a softening of the eyes

and indeed raptors like Hawks and Eagles

they actually do have a certain form of play,

but only early in life.

The other thing that we see during play,

or what are called partial postures,

partial postures are a kind of play enactment

of postures that would otherwise be threatening.

So a partial posture that we see during play in animals

and humans that relates to aggressive play.

So things like wrestling

or things like rough and tumble play,

which is very common in animals and kids and some adults.

Is that because there's going to be physical interaction

in animals,

what will happen is

they will march toward one another often very slowly,

but rather than having their hair up,

which is we call piloerection,

which is when the hair goes up,

animals do this to make themselves look bigger.

Think of about the, the cat.

That's trying to look bigger or an animal

that's being aggressive, trying to look bigger

in the presence of a foe,

a different animal that they're either going to try

and kill or fight in some way,

even if it's to defend themselves,

partial postures occur when animals will approach

one another,

but they'll keep their fur down.

Humans will do this to,

they will approach during play,

but unless it's highly competitive play

like a football game or a boxing match,

they will actually shrink their body size somewhat.

We have hair on our bodies,

some of us more than others,

and that hair is capable of piloerection.

It can stand up.

That's the hair standing up on end phenomenon,

but most of us don't have enough hair on our bodies

that we can actually use that to make ourselves larger.

So what you see with people who are about to engage in play

is they tend to make their body a little bit smaller

unless they are highly competitive

and highly competitive play

is its own distinct form of play.

That we'll talk about later,

such as during sport, when the stakes are high,

a Super Bowl football game,

I'm revealing my ignorance about sports here.

The Super Bowl as it's typically called

is a very high stakes game, right?

Salaries depend on it.

Sponsorships depend on it.

It's on television,

reputations depend on it.

So that's not really playing a game.

That's playing a very high stakes game

and there you're not going to see these partial postures.

You're not going to see soft eyes and tilting of the head.

At least not between the opposing players on the team,

you're going to see quite the opposite.

Grunting, screaming, shouldering

people not blinking lowering their eyes,

or rather shrinking their eyes down to be,

to appear more aggressive.

These kinds of things

staring right through the other person,

you know verbal threats et cetera.

So that's not really play,

even though we say they're playing a game of football,

it's very high stakes play.

What I'm referring to here

is when it's fairly low stakes.

And we see this again in animals and human.

So there are many, many of these partial postures.

Again, they happen spontaneously.

So if someone ever looks at you

and they tilt their head a little bit

and they raise their eyebrows

and they maybe smile a little bit,

they're looking at you playfully,

that's the universal human exchange of, I want to play.

Do you want to play?

There's another play expression

that is considered the most extreme of the come on

let's play express and postures.

And this is one that's seen in a lot of primates

and indeed in some humans as well.

And that's the eyes wide open

and believe it or not tongue out,

it's the, that kind of silly thing.

That's I don't think that I've ever done that before.

Just that kind of thing

is basically what primate species of all kinds.

And indeed we are old world primates as well,

do when they want to say,

I'm definitely here to play

and that's why I'm here.

Okay it's it has this kind of silly look or connotation.

But if you watch chimpanzees or you look at Bonobos,

or even in the so-called new world monkeys,

which tend to be the smaller monkeys,

old world monkeys tend to be the ones that in general,

see the world as we do,

they have what we call trichromacy.

They're the ones that often can look very human-like.

The new world monkeys tend to be the little ones

in general I'll give you a little trick here.

Little tool based on primatology.

If you see a monkey and it's making very slow movements,

or you see an ape of any kinds, making very slow movements,

very likely to be an old world primate.

If you see a monkey

and it's, it can very quick movements

like it's doing this kind of thing,

like it's like a could be a squirrel monkey

could be a marmoset,

likely to be a new world monkey.

And they don't see the world that the same way we do,

they see the world more like a dog.

They don't really see reds.

They see reds as orange et cetera.

Okay that's not a hard and fast rule.

And I'm sure the primatologists are going to come after me

with whatever primatologists come after you

with monkey biscuits or something like that.

But in general, it's a good rule.

If you're at the zoo and you see a slow moving monkey

with slow deliberate gestures kind of moves its eyes

makes eye contact every once in a while,

those tend to be the old world primates,

those kind of jittery ones

that look like they're really nervous wrapping their tail

and kind of hiding there in a little bundle.

Those tend to be the new world monkeys, okay.

Again, not a black and white type division,

but that'll get you most of the way.

So the whole purpose of these partial postures

or the tongue out thing

is to limit power in deliberate ways

to really take bodily expressions

that could be portrayed or could be

interpreted as aggressive

or as threatening or as wanting to mate,

or as willing wanting to do anything for that matter.

And to limit the power with which they are expressed

in very deliberate way.

So that's the putting the hair down,

despite getting into a fighting stance.

That's saying let's fight,

but I'm not really here to fight fight.

It's low stakes fighting.

Like if I pin you,

then I'll let you go.

Or if you pin me, then you ought let me go.

And so immediately you can start to see

how play starts to call into action,

social dynamics in which both parties

have to make some sort of agreement

about how high the stakes are.

Now, the failures to do this are also very informative

in how we develop in social groups.

And this also can inform why some people

really play well with others and other people don't.

And some people seem to get along well with groups

and can handle other people.

And some people are very rigid.

In fact, I have an anecdote about this when I was a kid,

we used to play this game.

It's not a game I suggest,

but we used to do what were called "Dirt Clod Wars."

So a friend of mine,

his parents were generally not home in the afternoon.

So we must have been somewhere around 10 or 11 years old.

And we would set up these two big dirt mounds.

We would shovel them to big dirt mounds on two sides

of the yard.

And then we would just take dirt clods

and we throw them at one another and just have

dirt clod wars.

Again, not suggesting this

I'm not responsible for what happens

if you do,

but there were rules

and the rules were, for instance,

you couldn't pack rocks into the dirt clods

and you could run across to the other side

and you could jump on the other person's mound

and you could throw dirt clods in there.

I guess, as the stuff that we thought was entertaining.

But if someone got hit in the head,

generally there was an unspoken rule

that you kind of stop

and see whether or not they were damaged

or not before you'd continue,

you couldn't continue pelting them.

And of course, people broke this rule.

In fact I remember one kid

I'm not going to name him

because actually he's grown

into a very actually prominent and functional adult,

but he got hit once in the head.

And then I think someone had thrown a dirt clod

shortly thereafter,

and all of a sudden he just went into a rage,

picking up rocks and sticks and attacking another kid.

And so clearly that was a case in which

the rules of the game were now being violated,

but it served a very important purpose.

There was, you know,

the typical thing that the,

there were some tears I think,

as I recall from one kid or the other,

there was like snot coming out of the nose

and turning bright red, a kid went home.

It was a mess.

The parents had to say something,

or maybe there was a phone call.

I don't quite recall how it got resolved.

But the idea is that

there's an agreed upon set of rules

about how high the stakes are

and what we're all going to do.

And this is separate from sport

where there are clearly defined rules

about what's out of bounds.

What's in-bounds.

What sorts of behaviors will get you a yellow card

or a red card for instance on the soccer field,

all animals including humans

are doing this low stakes contingency testing

and all animals including humans you'll find,

start to up the stakes.

And inevitably in group play,

one member of the group will kind of break rules.

You see this also in puppies.

So for instance, puppies will bite one another

with those sharp little needle-like puppy teeth.

I remember when Costello had those teeth,

those things were so darn sharp

and puppies will yelp

when one of their littermates bites them,

that Yelp actually serves a very important

inhibitory function.

This is well defined

to tell the other one that's too tough,

and this is how animals learn soft bite.

Okay.

If they don't get that feedback from other littermates,

they never actually learn.

What's too hard and what's soft.

And so humans do this as well.

Now you can look at your adult,

counterparts,

and indeed we should probably look at ourselves and ask,

you know did we learn proper play contingency

when we were younger?

Do we tend to take things too seriously?

Do we tend to overreact aggressively

when other people are clearly engaging in,

you know, playful, jabbing or sarcasm

or things of that sort.

So each of you will have a different experience of this,

but the point is that play serves many functions,

it's not just about the self.

It's also about interactions between multiple people.

It's about rule testing

and low stakes contingency

rule breaking also serves an important role

as is with the example of the "Dirt Clod War"

puppies biting other puppies et cetera.

And last but not least,

there are different forms of play

that help us establish who we will become as adults.

One of the more powerful of these

is role play when children and sometimes adults

will take on different roles that are distinct

from their natural world roles

in order to for instance, establish hierarchies.

So someone's going to be the leader

and someone's going to be the follower.

Someone will be dominant.

Someone will be submissive.

Someone will work alone.

Other people will work in a group.

These kinds of role playing

are again ways in which the prefrontal cortex

has to expand the number of operations

in neuroscience we call these algorithms

that it has to run in order to make predictions.

You have to take in a lot of information

about your environment all the time

and make predictions.

But if you are suddenly cast into a new role,

well then you definitely have to

make even more predictions from a different standpoint.

So these are very powerful for teaching the brain,

how to function.

I had a sister growing up, I still have a sister,

fortunately,

and she and her friends largely played with dolls

and doll houses in the room next door.

And they take on different roles.

In fact, some kids,

if they play alone

will start to take on the role of leader

by taking on an imaginary or creating an imaginary friend.

And, you know, my apologies to my sibling,

but for a long time,

she had an imaginary friend

eventually that imaginary friend disappeared.

I don't know the science around imaginary friends

and what it makes them disappear or not

at what stage of development,

but imaginary friends are pretty common.

And that's just another way of being able to,

you know boss somebody around,

if that's your thing,

or to do engage in cooperative play.

So we can look at this stage of development,

we call childhood

and we can look at each stage of it and we can say, wow,

there are all these different dimensions of play

that really are about testing out

how we feel comfortable or uncomfortable,

how we react good or bad,

how we react with stress or with glee

when others behave in certain ways.

And so what I'm hoping is coming through

is that play is not just about having fun.

Play is about testing.

It's about experimenting

and it's about expanding your brain's capacity.

And that's through early in development,

and it's through throughout the lifespan.

So at this point in the discussion,

I want to take a step back,

look at the biology and neurochemistry of play

just a little bit.

And that really define what is effective play.

If the goal of play is to explore different contingencies

in low stakes environments

and to expand the function of our prefrontal cortex

so that we can see new possibilities

and new ways of being become more flexible, more creative,

more effective outside of the games of play

or the arenas of play, I should say.

Well then we should be asking,

how do I know if I'm playing?

How do I know if I'm playing correctly?

Turns out there's an answer to that.

Earlier I referred to this brain area,

the periaqueductal gray that releases opioids,

endogenous opioids into our brain and body,

and tends to relax us a bit.

It actually is what leads to these things like soft eyes

and head tilts and puppies making, you know,

puppy postures and things of that sort,

and how that opens up the number of different functions

or algorithms that the prefrontal cortex can run,

but there's another piece of the puzzle,

which is for something to genuinely be play and playful,

and for it to have this effect of expanding our brain

and engaging neuroplasticity of really changing our brain

so that we can see and engaging more possible behaviors

and thoughts et cetera.

We also have to have low amounts of adrenaline,

so called epinephrine in our brain in body.

Now the background science for this is quite extensive,

but for those of you that are interested in papers

and manuscripts,

perhaps the best one is a review published

in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

by the very Jaak Panksepp

although he has a co-author,

which is Stephen Siviy,

S I V I Y

I'll provide a link to this in the caption show notes.

And the title of this paper is;

"In Search of the Neurobiological Substrates for

Social Playfulness in Mammalian Brains."

And it's a quite extensive review,

but it basically boils down

to some key findings

whereby, any sorts of drugs or behaviors or scenarios

that increase levels of adrenaline too much,

will tend to inhibit play

and drugs and scenarios and I'm not suggesting

recreational drugs here,

but these were experiments that were done

in the laboratory setting

that increase the endogenous opioid output

will tend to increase playfulness.

And so really the state of mind

that one needs to adopt when playing is,

first of all you have to engage in the play it,

whatever it happens to be with some degree of focus

and seriousness

and focus and seriousness in the neurobiological context

generally means epinephrine

being able to focus is largely reliant on

things like adrenaline epinephrine,

but also the presence of dopamine,

which is a molecule that generates motivation

and focus in concert with epinephrine,

but also that these endogenous opioids be liberated.

And it's really the low stakes feature of play

that allows those endogenous opioids to be liberated.

What do I mean by that?

Well, if you are very, very concerned about the outcome,

like you've put a lot of money on the table in a given game,

or you're a football player in the Super Bowl,

or you're playing a game for which,

you know, defeating the other person

or your team winning is absolutely crucial to you.

Well then that's not really going to who engage

the play circuitry.

On the contrary,

if you are engaging in those same behaviors

or any other behavior in a way

that you're simply there to explore,

but you don't have high levels of adrenaline in your system,

you're not stressed about the potential outcome.

Well, then that constitutes play.

Now that's somewhat obvious on the one hand

that you take seriously what you take seriously,

and you can be more playful about things

that you don't take so seriously,

but what is absolutely not obvious

is that the state of playfulness

is actually what allows you to perform best

because the state of playfulness

offers you the opportunity to engage

in novel types of behaviors and interactions

that you would not otherwise be able to access

if you are so focused on the outcome. Okay.

So a state of playfulness is absolutely critical,

not just during play,

but during competitive scenarios of any kind.

I actually started to cultivate a practice related to this.

When I was in college,

I had this kind of general practice

of when I wanted to learn something.

I would tell myself that it was the most important

information in the world

and that I was very very interested in it.

I would kind of lie to myself

and say oh, I'm super interested in,

I won't name the topics,

but super interested in this or super interested in that.

And I could sort of delude myself into being hyper focused

on whatever it is

that I was learning

in ways that surprised me.

However,

when we are hyper focused on something

and we are rigidly attached to the outcome,

we can't engage in flexible thinking.

So it's a great tool to be hyper-focused on something

and take it very, very seriously

when we're simply trying to learn things

by kind of rote memory,

learn things and regurgitate,

learn and regurgitate of the sort that,

you know, I'm frankly a lot of schooling involves.

But if we are trying to get better at something,

we sort of hit a wall in athletic performance

or in cognitive performance,

where we're not creative enough,

where we're finding

let's just use a sports example

that, you know we only have a certain number of moves

that we can deploy

or certain number of swings of the racket

that we can deploy.

The way to actually expand your practice

is to engage in this kind of low stakes thinking,

the idea that, well, I'm just going to kind of play and tinker.

I'm going to explore in a way

that it doesn't really matter if the ball goes back over

the net,

doesn't really matter if the ball goes in the hole

and it's counterintuitive because you think,

no, the thing that we need to do is drill and drill

and drill and drill.

And indeed there's a place for that.

But this mode of play with modest levels

of endogenous opioids being released in our system,

plus low levels of adrenaline, right?

Epinephrine low levels of epinephrine and adrenaline

are possible only when the stakes are low enough

that we're not stressed.

Well that combination really allows the prefrontal cortex

to explore different possibilities

in ways that can truly expand our capabilities over time.

Now, this has been seen again and again,

also in the business sector,

some of the more challenging,

or I should say compare additive companies to get jobs at

are very interested in hiring people

that as children were so called tinkerers,

and actually NASA was first famous for this,

that many of the people that achieved great success

in engineering at NASA,

when they looked back into their childhood histories,

those people tended to be tinkerers.

They were people that would kind of play with things

in way that wasn't about rigidly following a recipe

or an instruction manual.

Great cooks discover new forms of food.

Indeed created entire genres of food

by way of being tinkerers.

Okay, musicians do this.

I grew up playing various sports,

but skateboarding was one that I was particularly involved

in for a long time.

One of the greatest skateboarders of all time

is some of you may recognize his name

as the Great Rodney Mullen.

And Rodney was kind of famous for evolving the sport

and continuing to evolve the sport in ways

that no one could predict

using skateboards and all sorts of ways

that no one had thought of previously.

And of course there are other skateboarders

that did that as well,

but he's particularly well known for that.

And his process is his own.

I can't speak to it too much,

but he was also known as a kind of a tinker

as somebody who would spend a lot of time,

just kind of flipping the board

and just flipping it into the air

and watching the ways in which it flipped

and kind of studying the physics of it really

and expanding on his existing understanding

of what could happen on a skateboard

by way of just playing.

Now, he took it very seriously,

but it's this kind of razor's edge

between taking something very seriously,

but also tinkering and playing and exploring

and just seeing what happens and kind of like,

well, let's just see what happens if we did this,

that mindset is extremely powerful

to export from this thing that we call play

into what we could call more serious endeavor

of one's occupation or sport,

whether or not it's behind a desk

or whether or not it's running around on a field

really for or engineering, any endeavor.

And so the whole purpose of this episode on play

is yes on the one hand

to illustrate the incredible evolutionary utility of play

for setting up the self

and relation of the self to others,

indeed for setting up cultures entirely,

cuz' cultures will watch sport together

or they'll celebrate their team winning.

I mean, World Cup,

I've never been a big soccer fan,

even though my dad is Argentine, but it's incredible.

I mean the entire world kind of lights up

and gets engaged around whether or not their team,

their country is going to win the Olympics also

being another example,

but play and sport are not quite the same

as I've pointed out before.

And for all of us who are thinking about tools

and things that we can extract from science

to enrich our lives,

I would say for those of you that are already playing

on a regular basis

in one form or another

terrific start to expand other forms of play

in particular forms of play

that involve new groups of individuals.

So if you're somebody that typically plays

one-on-one with somebody,

try to expand into playing as teams.

If you're somebody who only plays alone,

then try to expand into playing in perhaps

one-on-one first and in groups,

this is the way that your brain learns

and evolves and changes and gets better.

And I raised this because

another one of the top 10 questions I get

is how can I keep my brain young?

How can I continue to learn?

How can I get better in school

and sport in life and relationships, et cetera,

emotionally, cognitively,

and on and on and on.

And yes,

there are supplements that can support neuroplasticity.

Yes, there are brain games and apps

that can support neuroplasticity.

But if you really want to engage neuroplasticity at any age,

what you need to do is return to the same sorts

of practices and tools

that your nervous system naturally used

throughout development.

And it evolved over hundreds of thousands of years

to trigger this thing that we call neuroplasticity.

And the reason this is so important is because

it starts to move us away from what some people call hacks.

I define hacks as using one thing for a different purpose

to kind of get a shortcut.

I don't really like the term, frankly,

and I don't like it because it's not grounded

in any biological mechanism.

But when we look at play,

we can say, play is the portal to plastic.

Play at every stage of life

is the way in which we learned the rules

for that stage of life.

And play is the way in which we were able to test

how we might function in the real world context.

So play is powerful.

And we could even say that play is the most powerful portal

to plasticity.

The reason for that is that

yes, this high opioid, low epinephrine or adrenaline state

is what opens up play.

But then inside of the arena of play,

when the prefrontal cortex is running

all these different possibilities in this low stakes way.

But with some degree of focus,

there are a number of other chemicals that are deployed.

Things like Brain-derived neurotrophic factor

and other growth factors that actually

trigger the rewiring of brain circuits

that allow for it to expand.

And indeed that's what is neuroplasticity.

If you're interested in those chemicals

and kind of arena of things that happen

when one engages in neuroplasticity,

there's a vast literature out there.

But one of the more popular books

that I think is quite good

is from my friend and colleague, John Ratey,

who's a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

That's R A T E Y.

He wrote the book "Spark"

a few years back,

and I think it's still very relevant.

And John talks about

the important role that play

exerts in the neuroplasticity process

and points to a number of different protocols

that one can engage in.

He also points to the importance of navigating

new environments

to not just go on the same hike every week,

or take the same walk,

but actually get into new novel environments.

So you're starting to sense a theme here.

There's novelty,

exploring contingencies,

keeping the stakes relatively low,

et cetera, et cetera.

But these really are the gates

to this holy grail that we call neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity as I've talked about in the podcast before

is a two step process.

It involves focusing very intensely

or at least focusing somewhat on whatever it is

that one is trying to learn,

and then engaging in deep rest,

ideally deep sleep in the following nights.

And I've also talked about the benefits of things

like naps and Yoga Nidra so-called NSDR,

Non Sleep Deep Rest

for enhancing or accelerating plasticity.

You can check out the episodes on Focus at hubermanlab.com

or the episodes on How to Learn Faster.

The detail all of those.

We had a newsletter that lists out

all the tools for neuroplasticity enhancing neuroplasticity,

all that is available.

Zero cost to you at hubermalab.com, et cetera.

You can just download that information,

but John's book that newsletter those episodes.

They really point to this two step process

where it's focus and then rest

focus and then rest

and play is its own unique form

of focus and then rest, focus and rest.

It's not the same as learning something for sake of school

or critically trying to learn a motor behavior

for sake of sport.

It's really about expanding the number of things

that you could learn down the line.

Okay, so said once again.

So I just want to make sure it's abundantly clear

play is about establishing a broader framework

within which you can learn new things.

It's not about learning some specific thing.

It's not about the game you happen to be playing.

It's not about the dollhouse that the kids are playing with

so that they can become amazing dollhouse players

when they grow up. Right.

The dirt Clod war that I referred to earlier

for better or for worse

was not about becoming the best dirt clod thrower

or winning the trophy for dirt clods

in the neighborhood.

Although we actually had a trophy

for the best dirt clod team.

Alas, it was not my team that year.

But the point is that you're learning rules

and establishing a broader foundation of practices

that then can learn more things within that context.

Thus far I've tried to convince you

through a combination of data and anecdote and explanation

that adopting a stance of playfulness

and indeed engaging in play

on a somewhat regular basis

could be beneficial to you

regardless of circumstances or goals.

If I haven't done that already,

what I'm about to tell you,

hopefully will push you over the line.

It turns out that when you look across the kingdom

of all animals,

what you find is that animals

that engage in playful behaviors

for the longest period of time

are also the animals that have the greatest degree

of neuroplasticity,

the brain and nervous system's ability

to change in response to experience,

put differently,

animals that only play for a very small fraction

of their entire life

have very rigid brains that don't learn new things,

whereas animals that play for a long period

throughout their life

have very plastic brains.

And there's even some evidence that's at this point,

largely anecdotal,

but there's some data starting to emerge

that adults that maintain a playful stance

that engage in things again

that are low stakes contingency exploring

important enough that people focus

and that people pay attention to what they're doing,

but that they are not, you know,

filled with adrenaline, you know,

freaked out about the outcome being A or B,

they're not super, super competitive,

maybe just a little bit competitive

or not competitive at all.

That allows for more ongoing plasticity.

And one of the people that comes to mind

in thinking about this is of course the Physicist,

and I should say the Great Physicist, Richard Feynman,

Nobel Prize Winner Professor at Caltech

was involved in the Manhattan Project,

but was also known for being a lifelong tinker, right?

He also is a mischievous tinker.

If you read any of the books about Feynman or by Feynman

"Surely You're Joking."

Mr. Feynman, or "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

these are wonderful short stories,

mostly about Feynman,

doing things like

picking all the locks at the Los Alamos Laboratory

and putting all the top secret documents

out on the floor of the office

so that when people came men in the morning,

they were all out there.

Obviously they weren't released to the general public.

He didn't want to threaten national security,

but playing pranks like that.

And actually Caltech,

I don't know if this is still the case,

but Caltech where he was employed

was always known for doing very

technologically challenging pranks.

They're not known for their athletic pros at Caltech,

sorry, Caltech,

but they were known for example,

disrupting the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena,

for instance,

and things of that sort

through technological feats, at least at the time

required a lot of playfulness

and technological pros.

So if you look in science or you look in art,

or you look in medicine or you in any domain,

what you find is the people that continue to evolve

new practices

tend to be people that were tinkerers.

People that are very creative,

tend to be people that are unafraid

of exploring things in a, this low stakes way.

They're not so rigidly attached to the outcome

that they have to do everything perfectly all the time.

Now they might cloak these playful behaviors

so that their final works

always look perfect or always look incredible,

but they have this kind of playful nature about them.

I would venture even say that the,

the street artist Banksy, for instance,

obviously an incredible artist puts a ton of thought

and preparation into their work,

but there's a kind of playfulness to the whole thing too,

of using two dimensional paintings

in concert with three dimensional city dwellings

in ways that,

you know I think that most people hadn't previously,

there were other people like Christo and, you know,

artists of that sort that did that.

But I think Banksy is kind of recognized

as the modern, the modern rendition

of that kind of playfulness using cities in ways

that most people don't use cities

using art in ways that most people don't use art,

for instance.

So to go back to the example of Feynman.

Feynman was somebody who learned to paint

and draw quite well into his sixties.

He was somewhat famous or infamous,

I should say for Bongo Drumming on the roof of Caltech.

I say infamous because

he was known also for doing that naked.

Something that certainly not in concert

with the ethical standards and behaviors

of universities today.

But Feynman had this playful spirit as a child.

He had that playful spirit as a teenager,

and he had that playful spirit as an adult.

And that's one of the whole hallmarks of Feynman

was that he wasn't just a rigid physicist

who could explain things clearly to the general public.

He always carried through this playful spirit

and in some of his writings,

he pointed to the fact that that playful spirit

was something that he worked very hard

to continue to cultivate in himself

because it was the way in which he could see

the world differently

and to indeed make great discoveries

in the field of physics,

but also to kind of evolve his relationship

to life more generally.

And so he comes to mind

as a prominent example of somebody who did this.

And if I could achieve anything with this episode,

besides teaching you something about the biology of play,

it would be to teach you about the utility of play.

Again, I'm,

don't consider myself a particularly playful person

by nature,

but I've tried over the years to adopt

this stance of exploring things that are, you know,

very focused on contingencies of different kinds,

but keep the stakes low enough

that I can have some fun doing them.

And I like to think that it's benefited me somewhat.

Now, I'd like to drill a little bit further

into this thing that we called neuroplasticity.

Again neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system's

ability to change in response to experience.

And I should just say that throughout the entire lifespan,

the nervous system can change very quickly

in response to negative experiences.

We can almost all engage in what's called one trial learning

where if something really terrible or traumatic happens

to us,

our nervous system will rewire almost immediately,

at least within a few days,

such that we tend to want to avoid the experience

that led to that trauma.

Now the whole business of why people return to things

that are traumatic to them

is a whole other issue.

There are books about things like trauma bonding.

There's the so-called repetition compulsion

from psychoanalysis

that people go back into trauma to retest

and gain new opportunities to overcome the trauma,

et cetera, et cetera.

But in general, what I'm referring to here is,

you know,

you have a bad experience at the swimming pool

when you're a kid

where someone holds your head underwater too long,

and then you just don't want to get back in the water.

That's one trial learning of sorts,

that of course can be overcomed

through proper exposure therapy

or someone that you trust taking you there,

or any number of behaviors

that allow you to overcome that,

be that particular scenario and experience something new

in that same context.

But across the lifespan,

the learn earning of new things, new contingencies,

new possibilities

occurs very differently

from about age zero when we're born

until about age 25 and thereafter.

So from about, about,

I want to emphasize approximately age 25 onward

neuroplasticity occurs through the process

that is exactly as I described before, focus, rest,

focus, rest, we focus very intensely.

We can't do the thing.

We can't do the new movement.

We can't do the golf swing.

We can't learn the math.

We try, we try, we try, we try, we sleep a few nights.

And then all of a sudden we can do it, right,

because the rewiring actually occurs during deep rest

or naps,

but mostly during deep sleep.

From birth till about out age 25 however,

we can learn things, new things,

and new contingencies,

not just negative things

and traumatic things

through somewhat passive exposure to those things, right.

I will never forget the first time

that we went on a family trip to Washington DC.

And we went to the Smithsonian.

I got to see the, the old fighter planes.

And I think,

I think the Kitty Hawk

or the first one of the first planes was there.

Anyway, I obviously my recollection isn't terrific.

My hippocampus is, is flailing on that one,

but I'll never forget the trip.

And I'll never forget who went.

And I think I was probably eight or nine years old.

It's embedded somewhere in my memory.

And so just through passive experience

and my focusing on the things that excited me

about that trip,

I have a recollection of that experience.

I didn't have to deliberately focus.

I didn't, wasn't telling myself focused,

you're going to need to remember this trip someday

and you're going to be podcasting about this,

you know, in 39 years, or whenever

again, I forget exactly how old I was.

But the key feature here is that

the developing brain is able

to learn through passive experience

because the neurons, the nerve cells in the developing brain

are much more over-connected

than they will be later in life.

The way to think about this is sort of,

if you use Google maps,

as I do too often I think

when I drive,

there are a number of roads and pathways

that would get you from point A to point B.

We could imagine those as neural circuits,

or we could imagine neural circuits as those roads.

Early in development, the nerve connections

are much more extensive.

It it's like having a Google maps

that where everything is connected to everything

through tiny little cross streets.

And the whole thing is just a complete mess.

But then by taking particular routes

of behavior of thought of emotion,

certain routes become well established.

And the other routes that are not taken

simply disappear.

Now in the biological context in the brain,

we call that process pruning.

And the simple way to envision this is early in development.

You have many, many more neurons than you will have

as an adult.

Those neurons are extensively interconnected,

and approximately 40% of those interconnections

will disappear by the time you're 25 years old,

they are gone.

They are actively removed through processes

that involve things like glial cells that come in

and literally sneak their little processes

in between neurons at the synapse,

which are the points of contact and communication

between neurons and push those apart,

even eat neurons, right?

There's some incredible work from for instance,

Beth Stevens' Lab at Harvard Medical School,

showing that glial cells go in and eat synapses

that are not functional for that particular circuit.

Now, what this tells us is that much of our learning

during development is the removal of incorrect connections,

but it also involves the strengthening of connections

that are going to serve certain emotions, certain functions,

motor functions, cognitive functions, et cetera.

The process of play

is largely a process of engaging pruning

of neural connections

and strengthening of the remaining connections.

I'm sure that many of you have heard the term

fire together wire together.

That phrase is often incorrectly attributed

to the great Donald Hebb, who indeed was great.

Did incredible work a psychologist from Canada

who established a lot of the basic cellar learning rules

for learning and memory,

but it was the also great Dr. Carla Shatz,

who is now at Stanford

and was at Berkeley and Harvard as well,

but who is at Stanford Medical School

who coined this term fire together wire together.

Indeed that's what happens

when children play

when adolescents play

and when young adults play,

whether or not it's social play

or play with an object,

whether or not it's a sport or a play of any kind

imaginary play imaginary friend play,

there is a strengthening of certain neural connections

and a pruning away of up to 40%,

perhaps even more of connections

that are not necessary for certain types of behaviors,

emotions, and thoughts.

And what this means is

that it is through the process of play,

that we become who we are as adults.

And as I mentioned earlier,

it is through the process of play

that we are able to adjust who we are as adults.

Now, there are bounds on this process,

as far as I know there's never been a reported case

of an individual who had a hyperplastic

or I should say a brain that was as plastic in adulthood

as it was in childhood.

But what this tells us is that

what we do in the process of play as children

is really how we set up the rules

for how we behave as adults in almost all domains,

which is really incredible.

And of course the reassuring thing is that

playing as an adult

will allow you to expand on those neural circuits.

You can literally grow new connections.

Some of you may be saying,

does it create new neurons

for better or for worse?

It does not seem that many new neurons are added

to your brain in adulthood.

There are some papers that report a few neurons

in certain brain areas, isolated brain areas,

but by and large,

most of the rewiring of neural connections

is the removal of certain connections.

This process we're calling Pruning

and the strengthening of the remaining connections

that make those kind of Google maps roads.

And the analogy I laid out before

thicker and more robust think about as

taking little trails

and turning them into roads, then paving those roads.

Then turning those roads into highways,

then putting up more lanes on those highways

and eliminating all the small little back-country roads

that one could take.

And again,

this is an analogy for what is happening

at the level of neuro circuitry.

Now,

one of the key findings that has emerged from the literature

is children that have been subjected to trauma

or immense amounts of stress of any kind,

have a harder time both engaging in play,

but also a harder time accessing neuroplasticity later

in life.

The good news is this is not a permanent effect.

And we'll talk about some of the ways to overcome that

in a moment,

but this should make sense to you

because earlier we talked about

how a high level of adrenaline

epinephrine in the brain and body

actually inhibits blocks the circuits

in the brain and body that generate play behavior.

And when I say that,

I mean that in a very concrete way,

that epinephrine and adrenaline

can actually suppress the sorts of circuitry

that can lead to things like soft eyes

or tongue out, or the head tilt,

or what we called partial postures

of being able to engage in,

you know, a rough and tumble play,

but not take that to the point of outright aggression

and damaging the other person or them damaging you.

So when I say that,

you know, trauma and stress can inhibit neuroplasticity

by way of inhibiting play

at a deeper neuro biological level.

What I'm really saying is

that the high levels of adrenaline

that are generated from trauma and stress actually

shut down the circuits

that allow a child or a young adult

to enter the game of play

or in the game of play

in the same way that a child or young adult

who didn't have high levels of adrenaline

in their system could possibly engage in.

Now,

the good news is that many of the existing trauma therapies

that are out there now,

including things like EMDR

Exposure Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral therapy,

and on and on,

including some of the therapies

that are more neurochemical,

things like ketamine, or are more engineering based,

things like Transcranial magnetic stimulation for instance,

many of those are paired with forms of talk therapy

that are really about the same thing that play is about,

which is exploring different contingencies.

It's about exploring different types

of emotional experiences

as they relate to the same sort of scenario

that created the trauma.

And we did an entire episode on fear and trauma,

and I recommend you check out that episode.

It's easy to find again at hubermanlab.com,

it's on YouTube, Apples, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera,

very easy to find.

And there I talk all about trauma treatments

and the various kinds of trauma treatments

that are out there,

their efficacy in different scenarios and traumas and so on.

But the point I'd like to make now is that

the reason why children who experience a lot of trauma

and stress have limited plasticity later on

is because the neurochemical substrates

that are created from trauma and stress,

because after all

stress is epinephrine and epinephrine is stress.

Those are inseparable

and the way in which it more or less shuts down

or at least inhibits suppresses

those play circuits.

And again the reassuring thing

is that by engaging in play as adults,

we can reactivate some of those circuits

and reopen the plasticity.

In fact one very prominent trauma treatment now,

especially for people that have been subjected

to very severe traumas,

in the ongoing sense,

meaning traumas that went on for many, many years

is to get them to engage in play

in things like dance

in basically getting them to engage

their bodily movements

in ways that they would otherwise

not feel comfortable to engage in.

And I find this area so interesting

because on the face of it, you could say,

oh, that's kind of, you know,

is that really biomedical treatment?

You know, you're taking people who traumatized

and having them dance.

I mean, it seems kind of silly on the one hand,

depending on your, you know,

your particular orientation.

But on the other hand,

it's actually quite profound and quite grounded

in the mechanisms by which the brain circuits change.

So again,

back to this original principle,

which is that play, isn't just one portal to plasticity

play is the fundamental portal to plasticity

and that play and dance

and exploration of novel movements,

exploration of novel athletic movements

are the route

by which we access new ways of thinking

new contingencies.

And I find it wonderful that the trauma release

and the psychiatric and psychology community

are exploring things like play and dance

and other forms of reopening these circuits

because indeed we would all love

for there to be a magic pill

by which trauma could be erased

and new memories could be laid down

or a device that could do that.

But frankly, if you ask me or a number of my colleagues,

whether or not that's likely to happen anytime soon

in an effective way,

I think the short answer is going to be no,

that there are going to be chemicals

and things that can augment and support that process,

but that there's not going to be just a magic pill

that will suddenly reverse trauma altogether.

That it's always going to be a case whereby

shifts in neurochemical states

are going to have to be combined

with new ways of thinking and new behaviors.

And I find it wonderful in reassuring

that people are looking at play and play behavior

as a not just one tiny shard of possibility there,

but that it might actually be the main driver

and a highly productive lever

by which to rewire the traumatized brain.

So if you're like me, you might be thinking,

okay, I'm willing to be more playful.

I'm willing to explore,

play as a portal to plasticity.

And that all makes good sense,

but what should I play?

What should I do?

Well, we've already established that you want to keep

your adrenaline low.

You have to keep the stakes slow enough

that you're not going to get totally consumed by the outcome.

Now, for some people who are highly competitive,

that's going to be challenging.

And yet I don't want to make it seem

as if you can't be competitive during play.

There are many forms of competitive play

that because you are a competitive person,

allow you to drive great joy from that competitive play.

I have a friend who's particularly good at horseshoes.

I'm not particularly good at horseshoes,

but whenever we play horseshoes,

I can tell he's out there to crush me on horseshoes.

And it's just one of these things where, you know,

I can tell he derives great pleasure

from crushing me at a game of horseshoes.

I can't say because I haven't actually done

the microdialysis,

which is a way of extracting chemistry

from the brain in real time,

nor have I recorded from his brain or image it in a scanner,

whether or not he has high levels of epinephrine

or low levels of epinephrine.

During those games of horseshoes,

I suspect his low levels of epinephrine

and high levels of dopamine, especially when he wins.

And he has, he wins every time.

But the win is that you can be competitive during play,

provided that you were enjoying yourself.

Okay, you can be competitive

provided that you were enjoying yourself.

There are particular forms of play

that lend themselves best to neuroplasticity.

And those particular forms of play again,

are not designed to necessarily just engage

the plasticity that allows you to perform that behavior,

but rather to expand the number of possibilities

for your brain to change in general throughout life

and the two major forms of those

for which there's good Peer Reviewed Research

is to engage in novel forms of movement,

including different speeds of movement.

So let's say for instance, you're somebody who runs.

I happen to like running.

I try and run three times a week.

And generally when I run, I run forward,

I don't run backward, although recently,

because I've become very excited

about the work of so-called "Knees Over Toes Guy,"

his name is Ben Parker,

but he goes by "Knees Over Toes Guy" on Instagram.

I've never met him,

but we've exchanged a few messages back and forth.

And some of his practices involve

walking backwards or doing sled poles backwards.

I found these to be very beneficial

for my back and for my,

you know, interior tibialis

and some things that have really helped

with my posture and so forth.

But in general, when I run, I run forward,

I don't tend to run backward that much.

And I might do that for a few minutes at the end,

but not so much throughout the entire run.

Running doesn't lend itself to a lot of novel forms

of movement, lateral movements.

So for the nerds out there movement in the Sagittal plane

or angled movements,

but it does appear that things like dance or sports

where you end up generating a lot of dynamic movements

where there's jumping,

where there's movement at different angles,

where there's ducking, where there's leaping,

that basically involve a lot of dynamic movement.

And aren't just strictly linear.

Those seem to open the portals for plasticity.

And that's because they mimic a lot of the brain circuitry

that is associated with play.

And the reason for that is the way in which

those dynamic movements

and movements of different speeds

engage the vestibular system.

The balance system,

the vestibular system is in the inner ear,

relates to the cerebellum,

which translates the mini brain.

You got a little mini brain in the back of your brain.

It brings together visual information in a very direct way.

I talked a lot about this in the episode

on how to learn faster.

So if you want to go in depth on how vestibular

and different types of motor movements can open plasticity,

I talk a little bit more, I should say a lot more there,

but suffice to say that engaging in play

that has a lot of dynamic movement

or movements of different speeds,

things like dance,

things like sports,

like soccer where you're moving in different dimensions.

That tends to be very conducive

to what we would call play related circuitry

provided you don't take it too seriously.

You don't get those high levels of epinephrine.

Now for those of you that

are also interested in non-physical

or non-athletic forms of play

that can really expand plasticity.

There's some very interesting research

about the game of Chess.

I don't play the game of Chess.

I've played a few times.

I confess I don't know how to move all the pieces.

So I'm not going to try and describe that here,

but I've always wanted to learn Chess.

And I think after reading some of the Peer Reviewed Research

about chess and play and neuroplasticity,

now I understand why

there's a really nice paper

published in the International Journal of Research

in Education and Science in 2017.

And the title of this paper is,

"Is Chess Just a Game or Is It a Mirror

That Reflects a Child's Inner World?"

That's a very, a very intense title

for a biologist like me,

but this paper is so interesting

because what it really points to is

the fact that in a single game chess,

you have at least as I understand two players,

and those two players are moving pieces on the chess board,

for which each piece can do different things, right?

Can move in different ways under different scenarios,

but they're different rules for different pieces.

And so each player actually has to assume

multiple identities during the same game.

And each of those identities has different rules

and ways of interacting.

So in a way we can think of chess as one game,

but actually chess is a kind of a substrate

for exploring multiple roles for different characters.

And this is quite a bit different

than for instance, video games

where somebody has their favorite video game player,

or they have an avatar.

And they're always in the same role.

It's also quite a bit different

for when you engage in any kind of play

where you are yourself,

you're just being you in that game.

And so now I'm highly incentivized to explore chess.

You see quotes out there, for instance,

things like "Chess is life or jiu jitsu is life."

I always assumed that that meant that someone's entire life

was chess

or their entire life was jiu jitsu for instance,

but in reading over the research about chess in particular,

but at also certain forms of martial arts,

also certain forms of dance.

What one finds is that

indeed those games are life

in the sense that they involve adopting multiple roles

and exploring contingencies in a number of different ways.

So there are some games

that allow you to explore a much vaster landscape

of movements or of mental roles

or of ways of engaging in strategic movement

as is the case with chess.

And so when you hear that,

you know, activity blank is life.

It often reflects the passion for that activity,

but I think looked at differently.

It also reflects the fact that that activity

is a portal through which you can explore life

through many, many different lenses.

And I think that that's especially powerful

in terms of thinking about how play

can be leveraged for plasticity.

So for those of you that are interested in leveraging play

for neuroplasticity and expanding your mind,

if you will,

I highly recommend picking an activity

that will allow you to adopt different roles

within that activity

where it's not rigidly linear.

This is actually a way in which

I start to depart from this modern and important,

but somewhat narrow idea.

That exercise is the only route to plasticity.

Yes, it's true.

I have Nobel Prize winning colleagues

that swim for two miles a day

and have done on that for a long time.

And they will tell you,

I always think more clearly after my swimming

and I certainly in my experience after a good run

or a good workout, my mind seems to work best.

Unless of course, that workout was very, very intense.

I've talked about this before.

If you do work out very, very hard

in whether or not it's aerobic

or resistance training or sport of any kind,

you brain won't function as well afterwards,

mostly because of the diversion of oxygen

to tissues away from your brain,

you actually are getting less oxygen to your brain,

but in general,

most of us feel that if we exercise regularly,

our brain functions better.

But there are activities that extend beyond linear exercise,

beyond just generating the same sets of movements

over and over again,

when or not it's exercise or not.

And that's really what play is.

Play is about dynamically exploring different kinds

of movements,

dynamically exploring different kinds of thoughts,

dynamically exploring different kinds of roles

that one could adopt.

And that is the way that the brain learns new things.

So I encourage you to explore chess.

I intend to learn chess this year.

I'm very excited to do that.

Now, if you already play chess

and you are an expert chess player,

you actually will derive less benefit

in terms of this play induced neuroplasticity

than you would, for instance,

if you went out,

and I don't know, played a game of soccer

or did something that was very novel

for your nervous system,

because in that novelty

and in that exploration of new behaviors

and new ways of thinking,

you are opening the portal to plasticity,

whereas in doing what you already know how to do

and trying just to perform better and better at it,

you will get better at chess,

but again, that's just chess.

You are not expanding the realms

in which you can become more plastic,

that you are able to learn new things

in relationship,

in life, in finance and friendship, et cetera.

In researching this episode,

one of the most interesting areas I discovered

was this notion of personal play identity,

personal play identity is a term

that at least to my knowledge was coined by

a Turkish researcher by the name.

And forgive me, I'm going to mispronounce this

is Gökhan Güneş

G O K H A N,

last name G U N E S.

And forgive me Gökhan

and if we have any Turkish speaking members of the audience,

please put the correction in the comment section on YouTube,

make it fanatic so I can understand what it is.

Please I'd love to correct it and apologies,

or who knows if I got it right

then it was pure luck.

Gökhan Güneş has coined this term personal play identity,

and the key role that personal play identity

establishes in who we see ourselves as being,

and not just in the context of play.

Personal play identity

has four well defined dimensions.

And I should say that if you're interested

in learning more about this,

the paper that I found particularly informative

is published in Current Psychology

and the title is "Personal play identity

and the fundamental elements in its development process."

And the author of course,

is Gökhan Güneş G U N E S last name.

This is from 2021.

So recent review.

There are four components to personal play identity,

how you play,

your personality,

socio culture and environment.

So that's the third one that's together,

socio culture environment,

and economics and technology.

Now that sounds somewhat complex,

and this paper is somewhat complex,

but basically what it says is that

we bring together certain aspects of ourselves

and how we react to different place scenarios

when we're younger.

And we bring that forward into the world.

In all context as adults.

To illustrate this,

I'm going to ask you a question,

when you were a child,

let's say 10 years old,

would you have considered yourself competitive?

Would you have considered yourself

somebody who's cooperative?

And realize of course

that those are not mutually exclusive,

you could be competitive and cooperative.

Would you consider yourself somebody

that preferred to play alone

or preferred to play with one or two close friends?

Or were you somebody that really enjoyed playing

in large groups?

Here's a key one.

Were you somebody that enjoyed

playing the leader in one moment

and was equally okay

with being a follower at a later moment?

Were you okay with having your role switched

midway through a game?

Were you get up upset or be delighted

or not care at all about having to switch teams

during the middle of game

because your team was winning right?

To even things out,

you can imagine how that would play out internally.

You would immediately register

that you must be a valuable player

because you're being moved off the winning team

toward the losing team.

But then again,

you're now being forced to join the losing team.

How did you feel about that?

Were you somebody that was comfortable

with other people breaking rules

or perhaps even yourself breaking rules

or bending rules,

kind of be able to find term,

or were you somebody that

really needed to know all the rules?

And if everyone didn't rigidly adhere to those rules

was quite disturbed by that?