#play project

the common explanation for that feeling is “oh, social media causes you to compare yourself to others, and that makes you unhappy,” but i’ve been thinking for a while that it must go beyond that, because often i’m not even engaging with content that would prompt comparison between my life and someone else’s (or engaging with ads that would make me feel dissatisfied about my body/life/job/whatever). i’ve also been thinking a lot about why it is that when i put my phone away (FAR away, like in my car or in a drawer in my closet) and read a physical book, it’s like something in my brain lights up again, and i find that suddenly my mind is spilling over with thoughts and ideas and hypotheses and plans for the future. i also feel so much happier and more buoyant in the second reading mode, in part because i experience that burst of creative thinking as intensely pleasurable and i begin to engage in a kind of future-thinking that projects me from the mundane present into an exciting, speculative future. in both situations—mindless scrolling and reading a book (or a PDF where i have all social media stuff blocked)—i’m actively reading text on a page. but the experience is so different (and the felt switch between the two states so dramatic) that i know there’s got to be something really different happening in the brain as i read.

the article i’m reading today is about the neurobiological basis of “combinatory play,” which is a form of creative, imaginative thinking that involves combining and recombining seemingly disparate ideas or schemas—in essence, engaging playfully with “what-ifs” and other kinds of speculative thinking (“could this be connected? what happens if i put this idea in conversation with that one?”). it outlines the four different stages of creativity: preparation, incubation, flash of insight (the eureka! or breakthrough moment), and then the methodical testing and validation of the eureka idea. but it focuses especially on the incubation period, which is the phase where you take a break from focused, deliberate work and instead engage in activities like daydreaming, mental wandering, doodling, meditating, sleeping and dreaming, walking, washing dishes, etc., ie activities where you disengage the conscious mind (with its desire for rational solutions and clear answers) and allow the unconscious mind to “play” with different, seemingly illogical ideas or combinations of ideas beneath the surface of conscious thought.

most interestingly: using brain-imaging technology, researchers have been able to demonstrate that in the moments before the flash of insight (the “aha!” moment), activity in your left frontal cortex slows and the visual cortex shuts down completely. according to this article, this slowing/shutdown “suggests that the brain needs to cut out external sensory input to increase connections between the conscious and unconscious mind and to let it play.” those moments directly precede the flash of insight, which occurs “with a burst in the right temporal lobe.” 

HERE is why i think that fact is so interesting re: mindless social media scrolling. when i am reading a book, i have significantly more control over the amount of external stimuli entering my brain. i am reading in a linear fashion, but i am also often pausing, looking up from the page, gazing off into the distance to speculate about possible connections, asking myself questions about what i’m reading, testing the information i’m encountering against what i already know or think to be true, etc. in other words, when i am reading a book or from a printed page, my brain moves fluidly between focused attention (the “preparation” stage of creative thinking) and daydreaming or speculative reverie (the incubation stage). the page itself is static, but it’s that stable foundation that allows my mind to wander freely in and out of focused attention, as i alternate between focused reading and a more playful, imaginative, speculative mode of thinking. being able to daydream (a state in which my unconscious or semi-conscious mind weaves in and out of conscious thought) is what allows unexpected new ideas and connections to surface in my mind, and that’s what prompts that exciting rush of creative thinking and future-oriented "what-if” thinking, which in turn triggers those feelings of intense pleasure and delight that lift my mood. 

you can’t daydream when reading on a screen, because there is no stable base, and no point at which the brain can momentarily taking in external stimuli can slow or stop (that slowing / shutdown in the left frontal cortext and visual cortex that necessarily precedes a burst of creative insight). on a screen, with the ability to endlessly scroll past content that is designed to hijack your attention and keep your brain continually stimulated. there’s no break in that flow of external stimuli, and no natural stopping points (like the end of a page) that would prompt your mind to rest for a moment or allow you to slip into that state of reverie. we also know that phones are SO GOOD at hacking into our brain’s attention system and trapping us in these extraordinarily addictive & self-reinforcing feedback loops, so we continually seek out more and more stimuli even as addiction makes us increasingly desensitized to the dopamine burst (and thus makes the activity itself less and less pleasurable to engage in).

finding it difficult or impossible to break out of mindless scrolling mode is not a personal failure of willpower. mindless scrolling is a behavior that social media apps are deliberately designed to elicit & repeatedly, unceasingly reinforce, which (because of our neuroplastic brains!) creates these addictive feedback loops we struggle to get out of. and, while comparative thinking might be part of why social media makes us unhappy, i think an even stronger reason might be that mindless scrolling traps us in this state of captivated attention (we can’t look away, bc the addictive loop has become too strongly reinforced) which is also simultaneously a state of continually distracted attention (it’s not sustained focus on a single idea or thread, because the endless scroll means we are continually barraged with stimuli—the emotional content of people’s opinions, ads designed to catch our eye, features of the app like alerts or notifications that continually distract us/break sustained focus, etc etc). hoo boy that is the WORST state of mind to be stuck in, and it’s the one that almost all of us operate in when we’re in that mindless scrolling phase!!!

so we are stuck in mindless scroll, but we are also continually having our equilibrium disrupted by a flow of stimuli designed to trigger strong instinctive or emotional reactions. AND THEN, on top of that, social media apps are essentially designed to eliminate the “incubation” stage—because time spent daydreaming, mental wandering, getting up to do something else, looking off into the distance to engage in imaginative speculation, etc., is time not spent engaging with the app, and therefore is “unprofitable” time that doesn’t serve the core purpose of social media: to keep us hooked on our phones, so that companies can continue harvesting our data (for profit) and/or selling us things. it’s not necessarily that companies are deliberately setting out to kill creative thinking or daydreaming or whatever (i mean... there’s an argument to be made here), but more just that incubation stage thinking isn’t profitable or productive in any way, and thus—in a culture obsessed with maximization and efficiency and productivity—is wasted time that could be harnessed for other ends. 

My project is based on the word "play".

I started out focusing my project on how play is related to body image and body confidence, and how society views it.

I felt I was running into a dead end with it, so I decided to explore my options by referring to the mind-map i created with my peer group at the start of the project.

I then decided to branch out to play through self expression and identity through makeup, fashion etc and focused on the makeup aspect of it, as I can directly relate.

Through this, I'm exploring play through self portraits, and I'm currently playing around with merging self portraits of me with makeup vs self portraits of me without.

PLAY project

6. NOV. 2021

PLAY project

PLAY project

Why not put into practice right in the classroom the school they dream of? Why not, in discussing imagination projects, point out to students the concrete obstacles to attaining imagination, obstacles that, for the time being, are not easily overcome? Why not emphasize their right to imagine, to dream, and to fight for that dream? The imagination devoted to the possible and necessary dream of freedom has to confront the reactionary forces who feel that freedom is exclusively for them. Finally, it is important to make it clear that imagination is not an exercise for those detached from reality, those who live in the air. On the contrary, when we imagine something, we do it necessarily conditioned by a lack in our concrete reality When children imagine free and happy schools, it is because their real schools deny them freedom and happiness.”

one of the most healing things for me... so i think there's this nexus of inhibition & confidence/security & perspective/scale & playfulness & resilience. to be playful you have to be a bit silly and vulnerable and willing to take a risk on doing something "wrong" i.e. not take yourself too seriously, but if you feel chronically unsafe you'll take yourself & everything else too seriously and want to do it "right" so you minimize the perceived risk of harm. going back to my singing teacher (2/3)

the most important thing she did for me was create an explicitly safe, non-judgmental environment where it's not only ok but even desirable to "fuck up" and "look/sound stupid" and to reinforce that message multiple times. so anyway that quote just made me think that "don't take things/yourself too seriously" sits at this interesting intersection between increasing playfulness & coping strategies for emotional damage. sorry to ramble about it in your ask box lol! (3/3)

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yes I think this is so so true!! all of this, lol, but especially the part about how acute stress can make it increasingly difficult to be playful. i have written a lot about working through internalized shame here in the past, and especially about the ways that shame causes you to both physically and emotionally shut down parts of yourself. (i actually gave a talk about this subject recently! it was like, a layman’s intro to the neuroscience of shame, with a specific focus on how shame responses affect people’s ability to learn & to connect socially with others in learning spaces.) 

i do just want to clarify that the excerpt i posted was from a study that was very narrowly focused on answering the question: “is there a link between playfulness levels and positive/adaptive coping mechanisms in responding to stress?” the study wasn’t designed to answer larger questions about what kinds of life experiences might produce higher levels of playfulness vs. make it difficult to be playful (such as past trauma, not having one’s basic needs for security met, etc.). in the conclusion the authors note that their findings (i.e., that playful people seem to be more able to readily access and use positive coping mechanisms) means that we should be doing more research on how to cultivate playfulness and how to help people unlearn maladaptive coping mechanisms like self-blame. so the point of the study was not to blame individuals or place the responsibility on individual people (“if you could just lighten up, you wouldn’t be so stressed / unhappy / bad at coping!”). it was more like, an attempt to establish that playfulness (as a way of engaging with the world) seems to be associated with all of these positive ways of coping and managing stress, and so we might want to research playfulness more deeply and/or focus on cultivating it in college students.

so i think you are absolutely right that when we talk about playfulness it’s important not to think of it as something that something people just “have” or don’t have (detached from any consideration of people’s backgrounds, lived experiences, etc.). and we also want to avoid pathologizing its absence (“if you don’t have a playful attitude then there’s something wrong/flawed/messed up about you that needs to be fixed”). my research is focused on understanding how we can better create learning environments like the one your singing teacher has created for you -- i.e., spaces where people feel more secure and less vulnerable to scathing or hypercritical judgment; where failures and mistakes are encouraged & normalized as a natural, healthy part of the learning experience; where instructors are modeling self-compassion and deliberately not using shame-based methods; and just in general, where students are getting the kind of gentle, compassionate, consistent messaging you describe receiving from your teacher. basically I’m interested in creating classrooms that provide the stability and consistency people need in order to learn adaptive coping mechanisms that will serve them well outside of those learning spaces.

i think these questions are so important because most college instructors are VERY aware that our students come into our classrooms carrying many different kinds of trauma—whether it’s the more extreme forms that we tend to think of when we think about trauma (childhood abuse, sexual assault, trauma experienced by combat veterans or refugees from warzones), or the forms of pervasive lowgrade trauma associated with financial precarity, racialized stress, etc., or even just the “lighter” or harder-to-classify forms of trauma that rachel naomi remen calls “the cultural shadow” (i.e., the toxic dominant culture that many of us grow up immersed in). and anyone who has taught at the college level (or taught any age level) knows that as a teacher you often have to at least temporarily play aspects of counselor / social worker / person adept at navigating university bureaucracy to help keep students in crisis from slipping through the cracks. (that is obviously NOT ideal, as those roles should be filled by trained professionals! but we have all been in those situations, where you are the first line of support for a student in crisis, or sometimes the last line of support because they have slipped through the giant holes in our country’s social safety nets.)

i think there’s been a shift in recent years towards “trauma-informed pedagogy,” but the slightly watered-down version of this approach many instructors receive tends to be very focused on mitigating harm in the classroom (ie, avoiding certain things or framing material in certain ways so as to avoid re-traumatizing students). this work is obviously HUGELY important (and my own research project is v much informed by it!). but i sometimes feel like these approaches are very damage-centered, ie very focused on understanding how students are “damaged” by their experiences and how we can “prevent further damage” in the classroom space. again, wanting to adopt teaching practices that avoid retraumatizing students is a good thing!!! but i think what i am hoping my work can do is suggest that we can and should strive for more than just limiting damage. to put this another way: i’m looking for ways to go beyond asking “how can we avoid re-traumatizing students in our classrooms?” to thinking more broadly about how we (as teachers, mentors, etc) can design learning environments and learning experiences that help students grow into healthier, happier, more emotionally resilient versions of themselves—and hopefully help build a foundation of social-emotional skills that they will take with them into their adult lives.

play is not the sole "answer” or solution! but i think that for me, it’s been one useful way to think about things like trauma-informed teaching, restorative practices, and social-emotional mentoring strategies, in ways that center a more positive, joyful understanding of what happy and emotionally well-adjusted adulthood can look/feel like. does that make sense?? i think about cultivating playfulness as just one angle onto answering these questions, or as one approach or set of strategies that people could have in their toolkits as they think about how we design learning environments. it won’t work for all students or all teachers or all learning environments, and it won’t solve all of the problems in higher ed (or in a culture where traumatic experiences are so prevalent and yet are so often left unacknowledged and untreated). but i think for me at least it’s been one generative way to reimagine some of the common structures and norms that structure higher ed learning environments.