Playfulness is one of nature's most powerful tools. Laugh and learn. Compete and grow. Pretend and experience.
“Children keep you young” is a true statement. They may wear you out with all their energy and questions and maintenance, but the wonder and sideways creativity that they fill life with is contagious. It’s hard not to smile or chuckle a bit when they are around. Their playful nature is priceless and reawakens our own.
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." -Heraclitus
Play is not just silliness, though. It has a very real and critical job in the development of any intelligent creature. The more intelligent, the more play there is. Consider spinner dolphins. chimps, octopuses or dogs; play is a part of them even beyond youth. Physical play hones accuracy, agility, speed, sensory acuity and awareness of environmental factors. All play hones cognitive skills by:
heightening awareness
practicing concentration
advancing critical thinking (objective analysis, bias recognition)
improving memory (transforming information into experience)
necessitating creativity and problem solving (strategy, risk assessment, improvisation)
developing social skills (teamwork, body language, taking turns, calling a bluff)
promoting experimentation (trial and error, cause and effect)
developing character (courage, perseverance, humility, respect, integrity)
Play uses knowledge that might otherwise seem banal, to achieve a clear objective and overcome light-hearted challenges in a safe environment. The break from mundane patterns of thought, movement or experience is like water and sunshine for the brain, allowing for prime neurogenesis conditions. Play can arouse enough of our instincts to exercise our emergency systems: (fight or flight, freeze or appease) depending on the game. Since play grants a freedom from expected practices, knowledge and skills are used in unusual ways, tested and stretched to their limits even.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination." -Albert Einstein
Incorporating play into academics lightens the pressure of achievement while accelerating the absorption, application and reinforcement of knowledge. Even if much of it seems to merely flitter through the short-term, working memory, more than expected can often be recalled with a little jog of the episodic memory. Chatting and laughing about it later rethreads that memory, and if you really want it to matter, talk smack about the next time. The competitive threat makes everything learned critical.
An academic twist on a classic game is all you need to take it to a new level. When studying logic, my brilliant nephew made fallacy bingo cards for play with his siblings during political debates. Each square had a different type of fallacy to be claimed when a candidate made such statements. Fun and lively debates of their own ensued. I love the stealthy game of Spoons, so on a blank deck of cards I scrawled equivalency suits (fractions, decimals, percentages and ratios). Thus was born the game Spoons n Pieces, a comically effective way to memorize equivalencies. Long car rides are more entertaining with Mad Libs, especially when all common words are banned, and vocabulary gets out-of-hand.
Have some serious fun, play to build brilliance, and lend the world a few of your ideas. If you have a playful way to learn, share in the comments below or send me an email at bocker@hsangle.com.
-S. E. Bocker
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