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So, here we go: a flyby of play.

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It's got to be serious if the New York Times

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puts a cover story of their February 17th Sunday magazine about play.

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At the bottom of this, it says, "It's deeper than gender.

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Seriously, but dangerously fun.

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And a sandbox for new ideas about evolution."

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Not bad, except if you look at that cover, what's missing?

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You see any adults?

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Well, lets go back to the 15th century.

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This is a courtyard in Europe,

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and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play.

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All ages, solo play, body play, games, taunting.

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And there it is. And I think this is a typical picture

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of what it was like in a courtyard then.

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I think we may have lost something in our culture.

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So I'm gonna take you through

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what I think is a remarkable sequence.

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North of Churchill, Manitoba, in October and November,

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there's no ice on Hudson Bay.

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And this polar bear that you see, this 1200-pound male,

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he's wild and fairly hungry.

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And Norbert Rosing, a German photographer,

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is there on scene, making a series of photos of these huskies, who are tethered.

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And from out of stage left comes this wild, male polar bear,

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with a predatory gaze.

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Any of you who've been to Africa or had a junkyard dog come after you,

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there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze

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that you know you're in trouble.

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But on the other side of that predatory gaze

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is a female husky in a play bow, wagging her tail.

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And something very unusual happens.

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That fixed behavior -- which is rigid and stereotyped

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and ends up with a meal -- changes.

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And this polar bear

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stands over the husky,

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no claws extended, no fangs taking a look.

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And they begin an incredible ballet.

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A play ballet.

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This is in nature: it overrides a carnivorous nature

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and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death.

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And if you'll begin to look closely at the husky that's bearing her throat to the polar bear,

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and look a little more closely, they're in an altered state.

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They're in a state of play.

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And it's that state

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that allows these two creatures to explore the possible.

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They are beginning to do something that neither would have done

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without the play signals.

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And it is a marvelous example

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of how a differential in power

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can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us.

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Now how did I get involved in this?

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John mentioned that I've done some work with murderers, and I have.

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The Texas Tower murderer opened my eyes,

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in retrospect, when we studied his tragic mass murder,

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to the importance of play,

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in that that individual, by deep study,

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was found to have severe play deprivation.

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Charles Whitman was his name.

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And our committee, which consisted of a lot of hard scientists,

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did feel at the end of that study

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that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play

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led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated.

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And that finding has stood the test of time --

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unfortunately even into more recent times, at Virginia Tech.

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And other studies of populations at risk

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sensitized me to the importance of play,

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but I didn't really understand what it was.

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And it was many years in taking play histories of individuals

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before I really began to recognize that I didn't really have a full understanding of it.

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And I don't think any of us has a full understanding of it, by any means.

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But there are ways of looking at it

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that I think can give you -- give us all a taxonomy, a way of thinking about it.

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And this image is, for humans, the beginning point of play.

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When that mother and infant lock eyes,

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and the infant's old enough to have a social smile,

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what happens -- spontaneously -- is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother.

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And she begins to babble and coo and smile, and so does the baby.

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If we've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram,

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the right brain of each of them becomes attuned,

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so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes

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and the physiology of that is something we're beginning to get a handle on.

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And I'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play

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builds on this base for us humans.

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And so now I'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play,

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but it's never just singularly one thing.

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We're going to look at body play,

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which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity.

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This is a mountain goat.

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If you're having a bad day, try this:

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jump up and down, wiggle around -- you're going to feel better.

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And you may feel like this character,

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who is also just doing it for its own sake.

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It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play.

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If its purpose is more important

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than the act of doing it, it's probably not play.

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And there's a whole other type of play, which is object play.

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And this Japanese macaque has made a snowball,

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and he or she's going to roll down a hill.

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And -- they don't throw it at each other, but this is a fundamental part of being playful.

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The human hand, in manipulation of objects,

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is the hand in search of a brain;

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the brain is in search of a hand;

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and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way.

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JPL we heard this morning -- JPL is an incredible place.

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They have located two consultants,

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Frank Wilson and Nate Johnson,

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who are -- Frank Wilson is a neurologist, Nate Johnson is a mechanic.

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He taught mechanics in a high school in Long Beach,

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and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems.

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And he tried to figure out why. And he came to the conclusion, quite on his own,

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that the students who could no longer solve problems, such as fixing cars,

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hadn't worked with their hands.

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Frank Wilson had written a book called "The Hand."

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They got together -- JPL hired them.

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Now JPL, NASA and Boeing,

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before they will hire a research and development problem solver --

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even if they're summa cum laude from Harvard or Cal Tech --

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if they haven't fixed cars, haven't done stuff with their hands early in life,

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played with their hands, they can't problem-solve as well.

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So play is practical, and it's very important.

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Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter)

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But it has to be safe exploration.

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This happens to be OK -- he's an anatomically interested little boy

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and that's his mom. Other situations wouldn't be quite so good.

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But curiosity, exploration, are part of the play scene.

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If you want to belong, you need social play.

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And social play is part of what we're about here today,

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and is a byproduct of the play scene.

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Rough and tumble play.

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These lionesses, seen from a distance, looked like they were fighting.

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But if you look closely, they're kind of like the polar bear and husky:

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no claws, flat fur, soft eyes,

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open mouth with no fangs, balletic movements,

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curvilinear movements -- all specific to play.

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And rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us.

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Preschool kids, for example, should be allowed to dive, hit, whistle,

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scream, be chaotic, and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation

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and a lot of the other social byproducts -- cognitive, emotional and physical --

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that come as a part of rough and tumble play.

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Spectator play, ritual play -- we're involved in some of that.

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Those of you who are from Boston know that this was the moment -- rare --

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where the Red Sox won the World Series.

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But take a look at the face and the body language of everybody

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in this fuzzy picture, and you can get a sense that they're all at play.

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Imaginative play.

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I love this picture because my daughter, who's now almost 40, is in this picture,

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but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination,

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her ability to spin yarns at this age -- preschool.

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A really important part of being a player

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is imaginative solo play.

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And I love this one, because it's also what we're about.

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We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story.

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The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story.

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I'm telling you a story today about play.

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Well, this bushman, I think, is talking about the fish that got away that was that long,

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but it's a fundamental part of the play scene.

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So what does play do for the brain?

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Well, a lot.

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We don't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain,

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because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play.

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I walked into the Carnegie asking for a grant.

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They'd given me a large grant when I was an academician

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for the study of felony drunken drivers, and I thought I had a pretty good track record,

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and by the time I had spent half an hour talking about play,

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it was obvious that they were not -- did not feel that play was serious.

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I think that -- that's a few years back -- I think that wave is past,

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and the play wave is cresting,

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because there is some good science.

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Nothing lights up the brain like play.

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Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum,

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puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe --

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the executive portion -- helps contextual memory be developed,

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and -- and, and, and.

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So it's -- for me, its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure

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to look at the neuroscience that's associated with play, and to bring together people

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who in their individual disciplines hadn't really thought of it that way.

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And that's part of what the National Institute for Play is all about.

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And this is one of the ways you can study play --

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is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram.

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I'm sorry I don't have a playful-looking subject, but it allows mobility,

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which has limited the actual study of play.

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And we've got a mother-infant play scenario

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that we're hoping to complete underway at the moment.

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The reason I put this here is also to queue up

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my thoughts about objectifying what play does.

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The animal world has objectified it.

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In the animal world, if you take rats,

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who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years

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and you suppress play -- they squeak, they wrestle,

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they pin each other, that's part of their play.

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If you stop that behavior on one group that you're experimenting with,

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and you allow it in another group that you're experimenting with,

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and then you present those rats

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with a cat odor-saturated collar,

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they're hardwired to flee and hide.

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Pretty smart -- they don't want to get killed by a cat.

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So what happens?

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They both hide out.

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The non-players never come out --

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they die.

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The players slowly explore the environment,

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and begin again to test things out.

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That says to me, at least in rats --

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and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do

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and a similar cortical architecture --

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that play may be pretty important for our survival.

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And, and, and -- there are a lot more animal studies that I could talk about.

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Now, this is a consequence of play deprivation. (Laughter)

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This took a long time --

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I had to get Homer down and put him through the fMRI and the SPECT

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and multiple EEGs, but as a couch potato, his brain has shrunk.

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And we do know that in domestic animals

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and others, when they're play deprived,

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they don't -- and rats also -- they don't develop a brain that is normal.

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Now, the program says that the opposite of play is not work,

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it's depression.

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And I think if you think about life without play --

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no humor, no flirtation, no movies,

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no games, no fantasy and, and, and.

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Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise

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without play.

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And the thing that's so unique about our species

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is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime.

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And we all have capacity to play signal.

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Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago.

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What's going to follow from that behavior

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is play.

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And you can trust it.

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The basis of human trust is established through play signals.

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And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults.

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That's a shame.

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I think we've got a lot of learning to do.

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Now, Jane Goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps.

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So part of the signaling system of play

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has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural.

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You know, you can tell -- and I think when we're getting into collective play,

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its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety

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through their own sharing of play signals.

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You may not know this word,

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but it should be your biological first name and last name.

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Because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood.

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And we are, by physical anthropologists,

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by many, many studies, the most neotenous,

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the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures.

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And therefore, the most playful.

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And this gives us a leg up on adaptability.

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Now, there is a way of looking at play

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that I also want to emphasize here,

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which is the play history.

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Your own personal play history is unique,

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and often is not something we think about particularly.

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This is a book written by a consummate player

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by the name of Kevin Carroll.

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Kevin Carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances:

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alcoholic mother, absent father, inner-city Philadelphia,

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black, had to take care of a younger brother.

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Found that when he looked at a playground

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out of a window into which he had been confined,

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he felt something different.

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And so he followed up on it.

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And his life -- the transformation of his life

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from deprivation and what one would expect -- potentially prison or death --

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he become a linguist, a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker.

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And he gives play as a transformative force

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over his entire life.

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Now there's another play history that I think is a work in progress.

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Those of you who remember Al Gore,

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during the first term and then during his successful

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but unelected run for the presidency,

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may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person,

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at least in public.

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And looking at his history, which is common in the press,

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it seems to me, at least -- looking at it from a shrink's point of view --

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that a lot of his life was programmed.

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Summers were hard, hard work, in the heat of Tennessee summers.

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He had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, D.C.

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And although I think he certainly had the capacity for play --

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because I do know something about that --

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he wasn't as empowered, I think, as he now is

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by paying attention to what is his own passion

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and his own inner drive,

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which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history.

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So what I would encourage on an individual level to do,

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is to explore backwards as far as you can go

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to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have,

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whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation.

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And begin to build to build from the emotion of that

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into how that connects with your life now.

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And you'll find, you may change jobs --

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which has happened to a number people when I've had them do this --

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in order to be more empowered through their play.

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Or you'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it

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and paying attention to it.

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Most of us work with groups, and I put this up because

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the d.school, the design school at Stanford,

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thanks to David Kelley and a lot of others

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who have been visionary about its establishment,

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has allowed a group of us to get together

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and create a course called "From Play to Innovation."

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And you'll see this course is to investigate

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the human state of play, which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state

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and its importance to creative thinking:

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"to explore play behavior, its development and its biological basis;

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to apply those principles, through design thinking,

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to promote innovation in the corporate world;

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and the students will work with real-world partners

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on design projects with widespread application."

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This is our maiden voyage in this.

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We're about two and a half, three months into it, and it's really been fun.

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There is our star pupil, this labrador,

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who taught a lot of us what a state of play is,

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and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there.

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And Brendan Boyle, Rich Crandall -- and on the far right is, I think, a person who

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will be in cahoots with George Smoot for a Nobel Prize -- Stuart Thompson,

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in neuroscience.

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So we've had Brendan, who's from IDEO,

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and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students

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as they put play principles into practice in the classroom.

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And one of their projects was to

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see what makes meetings boring,

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and to try and do something about it.

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So what will follow is a student-made film

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about just that.

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Narrator: Flow is the mental state of apparition

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in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing.

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Characterized by a feeling of energized focus,

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full involvement and success in the process of the activity.

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An important key insight that we learned about meetings

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is that people pack them in one after another,

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disruptive to the day.

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Attendees at meetings don't know when they'll get back to the task

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that they left at their desk.

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But it doesn't have to be that way.

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(Music)

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Some sage and repeatedly furry monks

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at this place called the d.school

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designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it's over.

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Take the meeting off, and have peace of mind that you can come back to me.

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Because when you need it again,

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the meeting is literally hanging in your closet.

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The Wearable Meeting.

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Because when you put it on, you immediately get everything you need

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to have a fun and productive and useful meeting.

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But when you take it off --

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that's when the real action happens.

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(Music)

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Stuart Brown: So I would encourage you all

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to engage

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not in the work-play differential --

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where you set aside time to play --

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but where your life becomes infused

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minute by minute, hour by hour,

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with body,

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object,

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social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play.

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And I think you'll have a better and more empowered life.

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Thank You.

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(Applause)

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John Hockenberry: So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that

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there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work

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and go --

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I think I've heard this, in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play,

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that somehow,

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the way animals and humans deal with play,

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is that it's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity.

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Your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong.

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SB: Yeah, I don't think that's accurate,

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and I think probably because animals have taught us that.

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If you stop a cat from playing --

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which you can do, and we've all seen how cats bat around stuff --

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they're just as good predators as they would be if they hadn't played.

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And if you imagine a kid

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pretending to be King Kong,

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or a race car driver, or a fireman,

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they don't all become race car drivers or firemen, you know.

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So there's a disconnect between preparation for the future --

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which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as --

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and thinking of it as a separate biological entity.

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And this is where my chasing animals for four, five years

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really changed my perspective from a clinician to what I am now,

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which is that play has a biological place,

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just like sleep and dreams do.

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And if you look at sleep and dreams biologically,

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animals sleep and dream,

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and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory

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and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams.

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The next step of evolution in mammals and

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creatures with divinely superfluous neurons

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will be to play.

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And the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear

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or you and I and our dogs can crossover and have that experience

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sets play aside as something separate.

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And its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain.

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So it's not just something you do in your spare time.

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JH: How do you keep -- and I know you're part of the scientific research community,

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and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else --

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how do you prevent --

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and some of the data that you've produced, the good science that you're talking about you've produced, is hot to handle.

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How do you prevent either the media's interpretation of your work

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or the scientific community's interpretation of the implications of your work,

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kind of like the Mozart metaphor,

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where, "Oh, MRIs show

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that play enhances your intelligence.

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Well, let's round these kids up, put them in pens

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and make them play for months at a time; they'll all be geniuses and go to Harvard."

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How do you prevent people from taking that sort of action

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on the data that you're developing?

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SB: Well, I think the only way I know to do it

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is to have accumulated the advisers that I have

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who go from practitioners --

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who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever --

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a state of play.

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So people know that it's there.

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And then you get an fMRI specialist, and you get Frank Wilson,

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and you get other kinds of hard scientists, including neuroendocrinologists.

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And you get them into a group together focused on play,

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and it's pretty hard not to take it seriously.

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Unfortunately, that hasn't been done sufficiently

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for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health

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or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously.

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I mean you don't hear about anything that's like cancer or heart disease

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associated with play.

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And yet I see it as something that's just as basic for survival -- long term --

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as learning some of the basic things about public health.

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JH: Stuart Brown, thank you very much.

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(Applause)