1. 40 Times Higher Education 1 May 2014 1 May 2014 Times Higher Education 41
More
than just
a game
Academics have linked play
deprivation to criminality,
declining creativity and
impaired social interaction.
Rob Parr asks why having fun
is not taken more seriously
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2. 42 Times Higher Education 1 May 2014 1 May 2014 Times Higher Education 43
violence. (Others have hypothesised that
Whitman’s glioblastoma, a type of brain
tumour, helps to explain his actions.)
Brown went on to catalogue the detailed
play histories of more than 6,000 people over
the course of his career. He writes: “What all
these studies repeatedly revealed…was that...
normal play behaviour was virtually absent
throughout the lives of highly violent, antisocial
men, regardless of demography.” It seems that
Jack Torrance’s threatening repetition of “All
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in
The Shining has more than pop resonance.
Brown’s work reveals that severely play-
deprived children manifest multiple psycho-
pathologies: conversely, the histories of
successful, creative people show social play’s
vital part in healthy development. It seems that
emotional control, social competency, personal
resiliency and curiosity accrue through devel-
opmentally appropriate play experiences.
Other studies, such as the work of Swiss
researchers Marco Hüttenmoser and Dorothee
Degen-Zimmermann, have also found that
play-deprived children manifest responses on a
scale ranging from unhappiness to aggression.
W
hy is play deprivation so damaging?
John Byers, professor of zoology at the
University of Idaho, says that among
“mammals with well-developed play, the
behaviour represents a substantial energy
expenditure and may involve physical risk.
These two facts indicate that play most likely
is involved in post-natal brain development (in
mammals, a larger adult brain size requires a
longer period of development), and the benefit
of play must be substantial (to outweigh the
energy and risk costs).”
Byers’ research over the past 40 years has
also shown that in a number of mammals,
“the ages at which play reaches a peak rate
coincide with the ages during which there is
performance-based selective elimination of
synapses in the cerebellum, the part of the
brain that permits sophisticated movement”.
Play as brain “hygiene”?
The work of Sergio Pellis, professor of
neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge in
Alberta, Canada, offers further neurological
support for play’s significance.
“In a nutshell, research has shown that if
juvenile rats fail to engage in peer-to-peer play,
as adults they have deficiencies in social,
cognitive and motor skills,” he says. “There is
some evidence that these deficiencies may arise
because of impoverished emotional regulation:
consider how your motor skills or thinking are
impaired when you are scared.
“The work in my laboratory has shown
that peer-to-peer interactions in the juvenile
period shape the connections among the
neurons of parts of the prefrontal cortex that
have connections to other brain circuits
involved in motor, cognitive and emotional
processes. Moreover, we have shown that
normally reared rats with damage to the
prefrontal cortex in adulthood produce some
of the same deficits seen in those with intact
brains reared without play experience.”
Pellis argues that “play is beneficial for
developing a range of skills and at least some
of them are improved by play-induced changes
in the prefrontal cortex. This has important
implications for human development.”
He continues: “First, the prefrontal cortex is
crucial for such capacities as impulse control,
and the ability to inhibit inappropriate action is
critical for suitable functioning in such contexts
as the schoolroom. Second, the growing
absence of play experience in childhood
appears to be correlated with a variety of
psychiatric disturbances and loss of social skills.
Third, the animal research clearly shows that it
is unstructured play, where partners have to
negotiate the rules and learn how to deal with
infringements, that is most important for the
beneficial effects on the prefrontal cortex. That
is, neither non-social play on a video screen nor
structured play as in organised sports provide
the relevant experiences provided by the free
play generated by kids themselves.”
As there is no denying the evolutionary
reality of the natural world and our place in it,
looking to nature for insights into human
development can offer fascinating insights
without recourse to sociobiology or “Just-so”
stories. As Byers points out, play has costs, so
the fact that it is so ubiquitous among large-
brained mammals must mean it pays well, too.
For example, let’s consider our moral
currency. Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus
of ecology and evolutionary biology at the
University of Colorado Boulder, has spent a
lifetime studying play among canids (dogs,
wolves, coyotes, etc), including hour after
painstaking hour watching videotape of animal
play cues: for example, an exaggerated “bow”,
where the animal crouches on its forelimbs
while standing on its hind legs, solicits canid
play and informs all parties that “this is just a
game”.
In the wild and in domestic settings, the
animals play according to the rules (putting to
one side thornier questions of intentionality, or
whether they may be playing according to
rules they are not cognisant of). Deception is a
rarity: indeed, those that do cheat are ostra-
cised – with potentially disastrous conse-
quences in nature. Bekoff says: “Animals,
including humans, learn the rules of the game
and there is strong selection for fair play
because those who violate it can suffer from
not being part of the group.”
Indeed, his long-term field research shows
that juvenile coyotes (the “trickster” of Native
American legend) generally play fair in an
intra-species context: those that don’t usually
end up leaving the pack – and have much
poorer survival rates than those that remain.
B
ekoff (in a co-written book of the same
title) postulates the concept of “wild
justice”, that social play may be the
evolutionary foundation stone for human
morality.
Academic research from a variety of disci-
plines demonstrates the importance of play to
mind and body across mammalian species,
including Homo ludens. Studies the world
over also show that outdoor “free play” (in
other words, not crushed under the weight of
adult supervision) has the best results for chil-
dren’s physical, social and intellectual growth,
perhaps exemplified in urban environments by
the “playscapes” offered by adventure play-
grounds (there are 180 such spaces across the
UK, 90 in London).
In this light, you’d think that such settings
would be properly funded and protected.
Wrong.
In January, Children &Young People Now
magazine published the results of Freedom of
Information requests sent to local authorities
across the UK. The magazine writes that some
48 had closed playgrounds between April 2010
and October 2013, accounting for 145 unstaffed
and 23 staffed facilities. The cuts have also
caused widespread job losses among play
professionals (such as those who run play
settings), with 62 per cent of councils reporting
that they now employ fewer full-time staff than
in 2010 and 22 per cent saying that they no
longer have any at all. The FoI data reveal
that council spending on play fell from
£67.9 million in 2010-11 to £41.5 million in
2013-14, a drop of £26.4 million: all this
before austerity really sinks its teeth in.
We read much about the obesity time bomb
ticking away at the heart of Western societies,
and outdoor play could play a massive part in
defusing it. In one of many examples, a
University College London report, Making
Children’s Lives More Active, published in
2004, found that outdoor, unstructured play is
one of the best forms of exercise for children.
Yet the scales still rise.
As the state rolls back, charities do their
best to fill the breach: in the capital, London
Play leads on the Street Play campaign, while
the company Adventure Playground Engineers
(APES) plans to create a not-for-profit arm to
make up for the lack of training opportunities
for would-be play workers. But the “big society”
(remember that?) is not big enough.
And this is not just a physical crisis. Hughes
warns that “because play has been such an
important part of the behavioural repertoire of
the human organism through so many evolu-
tionary stages, we now expect to play. If we
don’t we are thrown into what [Czech psychia-
trist] Stanislav Grof called ‘an agonising exis-
tential crisis’ so grave that we lose all reference
points, spiralling into childhood pathologies
and eventually barbarism.”
Besides the link to criminality, there is also
a price to pay in terms of declining creativity.
In their book Play, Playfulness, Creativity and
Innovation (2013), Bateson and his Cambridge
colleague Paul Martin argue that playfulness
facilitates originality in nature and society (so
a lack of it should be particularly worrying for
academics).
“Interventions that provide children with
greater opportunities for play make them more
creative,” Bateson says. “Conversely, fears
about safety and the pressures of school
curricula are reducing opportunities for free
play. These trends are associated with a decline
in the ability to come up with new ideas.”
Gray concurs. He points out how US scores
on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking
have declined since the 1980s as teaching has
become more prescriptive and play time has
declined. And decline it has. As Gray recounts,
sociologists at the University of Michigan
assessed how US children spent their time in
1981 and in 1997. In both years, they asked a
large, representative sample of parents to keep
records of their children’s activities on days
chosen randomly by the researchers. They
found that children not only played less in 1997
than in 1981 but also had less free time for all
self-chosen activities. For six- to eight-year-olds,
the study identified a 25 per cent decrease in
time spent playing over the 16-year period.
These changes are costing us. In his latest
book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the
Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children
Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better
Students for Life (2013), Gray describes “what
I think is the most dramatic effect of the play
deficit: the increase in childhood depression,
anxiety and self-control…over the past half-
century”. The Boston College scholar also
warns that “helicopter parenting”, over-super-
vised play and too much testing in school have
the potential to create a “world full of narcis-
sists…a sad world indeed”.
Just as the child is father to the man, so
childhood play fosters the flexibility of
thought and deed, the sociability and the
empathy our species will require in the trials
ahead. Michael Gove, please take note: rote
learning won’t turn back the floods. Children
and adults need the space to mess around if
we are to get out of the mess we are making
for ourselves. l
Rob Parr, a former sub-editor at Times Higher
Education, is an associate at A5cend, a
fundraising and advisory body that works in
partnership with charities and small businesses
including London Play and APES.
P
lay is serious business. This sounds para-
doxical and it is, in so much as something
that comes so naturally to large-brained
mammals (and birds, according to some
authorities), that is so much fun, is so vital.
Play is a banquet for the brain, a smorgasbord
for the senses, providing nourishment for body
and spirit: sad then that as a society we seem
to be starving ourselves of it.
How does one define “play”? According to
Patrick Bateson, emeritus professor of ethology
at the University of Cambridge, “‘play’ as used
by biologists and psychologists is a broad term
denoting almost any activity that is not ‘serious’
or ‘work’ ”. Peter Gray, research professor at
Boston College, writes that play “is self-chosen
and self-directed”, an imaginative, non-literal
activity “in which means are more valued than
ends”, with “rules that are not dictated by
physical necessity but emanate from the minds
of the players”. And leading play theorist Bob
Hughes, author of Evolutionary Playwork
(2001), says that “the interaction we call social
play enables children to discover that the rules
governing any form of social interaction need
to be revealed, explored and amended” via
“protocols and meta-communication”.
The academic study of the subject has a
distinguished lineage: Charles Darwin,
G. Stanley Hall, Jean Piaget, William James,
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Lev Vygotsky and
Brian Sutton-Smith all aided its development.
One seminal contribution was Homo Ludens
(“Man the player”), the 1938 book written by
Dutch historian and theorist Johan Huizinga.
Huizinga emphasised play’s natural basis as a
not-so-trivial pursuit: “Play is older than
culture, for culture…always presupposes
human society, and animals have not waited
for man to teach them their playing.”
Many academics continue to find plenty of
interest in this intellectual sandpit.
Take the work of Stuart Brown, founder
and president of the US’ National Institute for
Play and author of Play: How it Shapes the
Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates
the Soul (2009). As a researcher at Baylor
College of Medicine in the 1960s, he identified
play’s importance through the study of
26 young (male) murderers, beginning with
Charles Whitman: in August 1966, Whitman,
a 25-year-old architectural engineering student
at the University of Texas at Austin, killed his
wife and mother, then mounted the campus
tower, shooting dead a total of 17 people and
wounding more than 30 before being gunned
down himself.
Brown and his colleagues expected to find a
history of physical abuse in Whitman’s and the
other murderers’ pasts, which they did: but
they also discovered that “play deprivation
and other major play abnormalities” were
present in most cases. For example, Whitman’s
playfulness was systematically beaten out of
him (literally and figuratively) by his overbear-
ing father. Neighbours testified that he was not
allowed to play with other children. A Texas
state committee, convened to investigate the
university shootings, concluded that lack of
play was a key factor in Whitman’s killing
spree: if he had been allowed to play, it theo-
rised, he would have been better able to cope
with life’s vicissitudes without recourse to
It is unstructured play, where partners
have to negotiate the rules, that is
most important for the beneficial
effects on the prefrontal cortex
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