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(Photo of Tim Ferriss by Susan Burdick)

Previously:

Gweek 077: Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Chef

Tim Ferriss's new book about learning

Timothy Ferriss: Cheat Sheets for Everything

Tim Ferriss explains how to hyperdecant wine

“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.

In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?

In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.

A MacArthur Fellow told me that, when he was a teenager, his single mother would drop him off at an industrial supply store on Saturdays while she ran errands. Using library books as his primary resource, he built a linear accelerator in the garage. It wasn’t until neighbors complained about scrambled television and radio signals in the hours just after school and after dinner that his “playful” invention was discovered.

Photo: Linda Stone. "This is the "office" of a 14 year old I know."

Play researchers’ findings indicate that self-directed play, for both children and adults, nourishes the human spirit and helps develop resilience, independence, and resourcefulness. Yet, our desire to be efficient and productive, and our tendency to over-schedule and over-program, has crowded out opportunities for self-directed play in our education system and in our lives at home.

According to Pellis, self-directed play supports us in better handling the complex and the unpredictable, both in social and in non-social situations.

Play scholar, Brian Sutton-Smith, wrote “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” NIMH reports that one in ten adults are depressed, up over 400% in the last two decades, with far more suffering from anxiety and other mood-related disorders. When psychiatrist Stuart Brown conducted play histories of over 6,000 people from a variety of backgrounds, he noticed that childhood play histories often have a strong relationship to what people do in their adult lives.

A technology consultant I interviewed told me about his passion for stamp and coin collecting. When I probed about his interest in stamps and coins, he said he was fascinated that countries that spoke different languages and had different currencies had found ways to cooperate on services like mail delivery, and had figured out currency exchanges. As an adult, one of his areas of expertise is global internet policy.

One of Brown’s studies covered the life and death of Charles Whitmore, a college campus mass murderer, who, in 1966, on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 people and wounded another 31, after killing his wife and mother the previous evening.

Extensive interviews with those who knew Whitmore, revealed that a “lifelong lack of play” had been an important factor in his psychopathology. Whitmore was always pressured by his parents to “do something useful” -- the antithesis of self-directed play.

In the course of his research and through extensive interviewing, Brown found that many violent criminals shared this same lack of childhood play.

Play can be risky. During self-directed play, our imagination and curiosity guides us as we venture into the areas where we can fail and iterate. Consequently, we play when we feel safe and secure, and self-directed play tends to reinforce a feeling of safety and security.

Researcher Jaak Panksepp, suggests that depriving young animals of play can delay and disrupt brain maturation. Panksepp’s research found evidence that play increased gene expression of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein involved with brain maturation.

On the flip side, a life rich with self-directed play can nourish genius. I had an opportunity to interview a handful of Nobel Laureates on their childhood play patterns, every one of them reported many memorable hours of self-directed play. Many of these Nobel Laureates went on to say, “This is actually what I do in my lab today.”

I worry that our education system focuses on measures related to rote learning versus the type of student engagement enabled by self-directed play. I worry that in our desire to develop our potential through densely packed schedules and programmed activities, we are actually stifling our potential and suffocating imagination and curiosity.

Stuart Brown, author of The Neuroscience of Play, advocates, “Play is…more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults – and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.” It is through self-directed play that we discover who we are. Coaches and experts often admonish us,  "Find your passion!" Then they offer questionnaires and processes.  The truth is, the very best way to find our passions is to give ourselves the gift of time for self-directed play.

[Brain maze illustration: Shutterstock.com]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/06/tim-ferrisss-new-book-about.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/06/tim-ferrisss-new-book-about.html#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:02:51 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=192459 The 4-Hour Chef is a howto guide to learning anything.]]>

Mark and I are both big fans of Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. Many things that Tim says about fitness, diet, work, and life-hacking have really resonated with me over the years. But beyond the subjects Tim writes about, it's his approach to learning that truly inspires me whenever we see each other or I read his stuff. Like many people I know (including me), Tim is a novelty addict. He's curious about most everything and when he wants to know something, or know how to do something -- like cook, salsa dance, kick-box, speak Japanese, or hold your breath for crazy lengths of time -- he seeks out the experts and immerses himself utterly and completely in the subject matter. That's why I'm excited to read Tim's new book The 4-Hour Chef, due out in a few weeks. I'm sure it has lots of great information about how to cook, but according to Tim it's really a book about how to learn anything. That's perfect because there's a lot I've got to learn. Listen for Tim on a coming episode of our Gweek podcast. Congrats, Tim!

"The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life" (Amazon)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/06/tim-ferrisss-new-book-about.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/zapping-the-brain-into-exper.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/zapping-the-brain-into-exper.html#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:26:23 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=142463 The "flow state" is how neuroscience researchers describe that zone you can get into when you're doing something that you've become highly skilled at. It's a zen-like place in your brain — that state where you lose track of time doing something that you enjoy doing for its own sake, and where the job of doing the task seems to become something you don't even have to think about. You just do it, and you do it right.

The catch, of course, is that usually it takes a lot of heavy work to get to the point where the flow can take over. This is where Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of practice comes into play. But, over the years, scientists have learned that there are some ways around that 10,000-hour rule. Some people just seem to pick up on the flow easier than others, for instance.

If your brain isn't just naturally inclined toward the flow, though, there is the option of zapping it into line. This is called transcranial direct current stimulation—basically running a very small electric current through specific parts of the brain. In some studies, and for some tasks, it's been shown to induce a feeling very much like a flow state, and possibly make it easier for people to get to a high level of skill faster. Last spring, Pesco wrote about some of the research that's being conducted on this intriguing but still-not-proven technique. Recently, New Scientist reporter Sally Adee tried it out, and saw a significant short-term improvement in her ability to spot and hit targets in a video shooter game.

The mild electrical shock is meant to depolarise the neuronal membranes in the region, making the cells more excitable and responsive to inputs. Like many other neuroscientists working with tDCS, Weisend thinks this accelerates formation of new neural pathways during the time that someone practises a skill. The method he is using on me boosted the speed with which wannabe snipers could detect a threat by a factor of 2.3

It's not yet clear why some forms of tDCS should bring about the flow state. After all, if tDCS were solely about writing new memories, it would be hard to explain the improvement that manifests itself as soon as the current begins to flow.

One possibility is that the electrodes somehow reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex - the area used in critical thought, which Csikszentmihalyi had found to be muted during flow. Roy Hamilton, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, thinks this may happen as a side effect of some forms of tDCS. "tDCS might have much more broad effects than we think it does," he says. He points out that some neurons can mute the signals of other brain cells in their network, so it is possible that stimulating one area of the brain might reduce activity in another.

The first thing I thought of when I read this: The way drinking one (but not more than two) beers can change the way I approach a billiards game. It doesn't improve my skills, per se—I don't suddenly become graceful with a pool cue. But when it's a game that I have some skill at already, like table hockey, one beer is often just enough to allow me to stop over-thinking and just play the game ... making it feel like I'm better at it then than I am stone-cold sober. I'd be really interested to know if/how these experiences are related.