Miscellaneous

The New York Time Magazine?s article "Taking Play Seriously" by Robin Marantz Henig offers interesting perspectives on the nature and function of play:   

Armed with research grounded in evolutionary biology and experimental neuroscience, some scientists have shown themselves eager ? at times perhaps a little too eager ? to promote a scientific argument for play. They have spent the past few decades learning how and why play evolved in animals, generating insights that can inform our understanding of its evolution in humans too. They are studying, from an evolutionary perspective, to what extent play is a luxury that can be dispensed with when there are too many other competing claims on the growing brain, and to what extent it is central to how that brain grows in the first place.

Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. Play, in their view, is a central part of neurological growth and development ? one important way that children build complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.

Their work still leaves some questions unanswered, including questions about play?s darker, more ambiguous side: is there really an evolutionary or developmental need for dangerous games, say, or for the meanness and hurt feelings that seem to attend so much child?s play? Answering these and other questions could help us understand what might be lost if children play less.

The article goes on to discuss a number of scientific hypotheses about the nature of play and studies that support them.

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