PLAY: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. by Stuart Brown, M.D.
Early last month marked the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of one of our most post-mortemly celebrated authors in American literature. Any guesses? I’ll give you a hint – “Nevermore!” I am of course referencing the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. What correlates Edgar Allan Poe with Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollack, and several other popular artists down through the centuries is that none of them would have received a mental bill of health. The old stereotypes of the Modern genius tortured in her soul by an enslaving talent fit well with our assumptions toward the artist. We expect them to act irrationally and erratically because such extreme behavior is the result of living on the existential extremities of life where the divine is experienced, on the border-lands of the mind and the thin-places of the soul. Forgive me if I steal the reader from out of the clouds to seek a more incarnational approach; more down to earth.
Over the years Stuart Brown has been making a name for himself and for his foundation, The National Institute of Play. He’s directed and produced a PBS series on the topic of play, counseled Fortune 500 companies how to harness the benefits of play in the work place, and now has co-authored a book that came out earlier this year as a follow up to his widely acclaimed lecture at the 2008 Art Center Design Conference here in Pasadena, California. You may have seen the lecture on TED Talks, in which case his book follows the same basic outline but is obviously longer than the twenty-six minutes it take to watch this lecture. To meet the minimum word requirement Brown fills the pages with anecdotal stuffing, along with trimmings of easy-to-read tables and b&w photographs of children and animals naturally having fun. In short, the book is an easy read with a light peppering of that confusing hard science, which the publishers must have assumed the average consumer has a hard time chewing.*
Another issue Brown discusses, which struck a dissonant note in my philosophy of aesthetics, was the antithesis of Play. He states, “The opposite of Play is NOT Work. The opposite of Play is Depression.” How can this be if all of the greatest artists that we’ve come to idolize for their misery could have qualified for a lifetime prescription to Prozac? This is understandable on the biological level since an PET scan of a patient diagnosed with clinical depression can literally show signs of depressed brain activity. It is as if the mind is shutting in on itself, a chronic low-grade malaise prematurely simulating a lethargic death. However, a growing amount of research is showing remarkably just how close the body-mind connection actually is and how we can best harness this to our fullest potential.
From a creativity standpoint, the old body-mind dualism of Western philosophy culminating in the Modernist agenda of the Cartesian theatre is daily finding new challenges that refute such assumptions. If the creative process is indeed a mental process, then a case is made that a healthy brain is more capable of such things. A correlative issue that Brown briefly discusses is from John Ratey’s new book SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. In it Ratey shows with substantially adequate science that another one of our stereotypes is completely wrong. In this new understanding the Jock is the Nerd! The Bronze is the Brains, or at least has more potential to be so. Of course proper input of time into any given task is necessary to become adept at it. Anybody up for 10,000+ hours of Sodoku? This being said, waddle on friends, waddle on!
But what do we do with people like Edgar Allan Poe? Or for that matter, what do we do with artwork that by and large seems to be unbearably depressing for most individuals, save our hyper-morose teenagers who love their own melodramatic agony? It may be understood that Edgar Allan Poe, or Virginia Woolf, or Vincent van Gogh (take your pick), didn’t necessarily create their art out of their misery but as a response to it. The artistic process was a means through which they were able to break loose from these cold chains of melancholic conventions of the mind. The difference is one of subtlety where in the former the state of depression is lifted up as an idol of perceived authenticity. In the latter it serves as catharsis and if playfully and properly grappled with, like Jacob wrestling with God, serves as a moment of transcendence.
So what new models are there for us to use if the old paradigms fail to set the standard for creative achievement? Numerous examples abound. But what comes most earnestly to mind is the old photograph of Albert Einstein at a ripe old age riding a bicycle. The argument here is not that depression and concepts of the tortured artist are invalid. Every aspect of human experience is worthy of the palate’s objectification. Instead what is proposed is that the experience of play, most akin to what ‘Jack’ Lewis might have called JOY, is the entry point into the creative process.
*Thanksgiving is today, so thanks for putting up with the bad humor.
Aa.Da.Ra. 