#brainplay

Let’s start with the easy stuff: Fitness. If your puppies are having some rough and tumble, then they’re being active, working their muscles, burning fat, and improving cardiovascular fitness. Same goes for a game of frisbee down the park with your friends.

Second: Social skills. Playing together leads to cooperation, communication, sharing, empathy, the list goes on. Have you tried building a Lego set with somebody else? You’ll run the gamut of CEO, architect, builder, motivator, detective, and even wince when your friend steps on a piece. That’s teamwork right there.

Third: Academic prowess. Stevenson and Lee (1990) highlighted the link between the short breaks that Chinese and Japenese students are given every 50 minutes at school, and the high achievements of these country’s students. Studies on rats (Gorden et al, 2003, Huber et al, 2007, etc) have shown that allowing them to play with each other leads to increased production of a protein responsible for brain cell growth and maturation -especially when playtime includes exploration.

More: Language skills, problem-solving skills, creativity, hand-eye coordination, rule-based learning, emotional maturity... playing really seems to be helpful in so many ways. For instance, playing in sand pits and water pits as a child is extremely helpful in understanding physics and the way objects behave in different environments. 

Diamond et al (1964) raised one group of rats in boring old solitary confinement (poor things) and another group within fun, toy-filled colonies... and guess what? The fun rats were found to have thicker cerebral cortices (the outer layer of the brain responsible for attention, perception, thought, consciousness, memory -basically all of the higher functions) than the solitary rats. It’s hard to do a study like this on human children, but the results would likely be the same. 

Playing is very much a beneficial behaviour. Or perhaps I wrote this whole thing to justify my videogame addiction...