From: Play Doesn't End With Childhood: Why Adults Need Recess Too, Sami Yenigun, All Things Considered, NPR, August 6, 2014.
Defining play:
"Play is something done for its own sake," he explains. "It's voluntary, it's pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time. And the act itself is more important than the outcome." -Dr. Stuart Brown, National Institute for Play.
Brown calls play a ‘state of being’. Children learn empathy, communication skills and persistence/endurance through play. These learning process are different than what adults receive through play, but are harmonious to what adults receive.
Reasons adults play:
Build community, form connections with others, maintain healthy relationships (explore levels of intimacy)
Stay sharp, improve and maintain mental functions/skills (memory, thinking)
To have fun, experience pleasure, be silly
The consequence of not playing (as an adult) according to Brown:
"What you begin to see when there's major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they're not much fun to be around. … You begin to see that the perseverance and joy in work is lessened and that life is much more laborious."
The National Institute for Play
Mission statement: The National Institute for Play unlocks the human potential through play in all stages of life using science to discover all that play has to teach us about transforming our world.
Founded by Dr. Stuart Brown to gather research on play from a wide range of scientists and practitioners, expand the clinical scientific knowledge of human play in order to translate into programs and resources to bring to what through the research has proven to be the transformative power of play to all segments of society. Identifying the fragmentary and lack in quantitative research data in what has been revealed about play in the clinical setting -science and evidence based understanding of play that could be applied to improve ways of playing - has led to a Dr. Brown researching animal play as a means of gaining further insight into human play by working together with National Geographic Society and Jane Goodall, PhD. This has led Dr. Brown to the realization that play is “a long evolved behavior important for the well being and survival of animals,” and “humans are uniquely designed by nature to enjoy and participate in play throughout life”.
Cultivate an understanding and value for play throughout all stages of life.
Quotes on the home page:
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” -Plato
“The opposite of play is not work, it is depression.” -Brian Sutton-Smith
“The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that.” -Nagle Jackson
From website text:
The science/ patterns of play:
Object Play:
“The correlation of effective adult problem solving and earlier encouragement of and facility in manipulating objects has been established. … To be a good research engineer, for example may mean that the times spent in high school fixing cars or building airplane models are as important as getting an advanced degree, particularly if the engineer is also expected to function as an innovative problem solver.”
Imaginative and Pretend Play:
“The ability of the young child to create their own sense of their mind, and that of others, takes place through pretend play, which continues to nourish the spirit throughout life, and remains key to innovation and creativity. Deprivation studies uphold the importance of this pattern of play, as understanding and trusting others and developing coping skills depends on its presence.”
Storytelling -Narrative Play:
“Making sense of the world, its parts and one’s particular place in it is a central aspect of early development. … the constancy of stories that enliven and help us understand ourselves and others, … give us permission to expand our own inner stream of consciousness, enrich our personal narratives with pleasure and fun as our own life stories unfold.”
Creative Play:
“We can access fantasy-play to transcend the reality of our ordinary lives, and in the process germinate new ideas, and shape and reshape them. Given enriched circumstances, and access to novelty, our play drive takes us into these realms spontaneously. Whether like Einstein imaginatively riding pleasurably on a sunbeam at the speed of light, or a light-hearted group of IDEO corporation designers wildly imagining a new product, each is using their playfulness to innovate and create. With the advent of brain imaging technology, these natural tendencies, so important to adaptation in a changing world, may be better understood and fostered. Play + Science = Transformation.”
In the corporate environment-
“Yet science already provides data to show that playful ways of work lead to more creative, adaptable workers and teams. One researcher, Marian Diamond, in her Response of the Brain to Enrichment work describes how “enriched” (read playful) environments powerfully shape the cerebral cortex – the area of the brain where the highest cognitive processing takes place. She concludes “there are measurable benefits to enriching [making playful] an individual’s environment in whatever terms that individual perceives his immediate environment as enriched [i.e., discover practical ways for people to do whatever is playful, joyful to them].”
Suggested Resources:
Play by Stuart Brown, MD and Christopher Vaughn
Leslie, A.M. (1987) Pretense and representation: The origins of theory of mind.² Psychological Review, 94, 412-426.
Stevens, V. (2003, May). Metaphor and the poetics of the unconscious. Paper presented for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities Lectures, Cambridge University, UK.
Paley, V.G. (1992) You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press
Bekoff,M and Byers J.,(Eds) (1998) Animal Play, Evolutionary, Comparative, and Ecological Perspectives,: Brown, S. Play as an Organizing Principle, Ch 12, p. 243-259 Cambridge Univ Press
Singer, Jerome L. and Switzer, Ellen. Mind Play: The Creative Uses of Fantasy. 1980.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1999.
Frank Wilson, (1999) The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage)
Other findings:
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/benefits-of-play-for-adults.htm
https://wanderlust.com/journal/the-importance-of-play-in-adulthood/
Most of the examples given for play and adults are structured ‘games’, sport/fitness, or creative hobby-like activities and classes. There seems to be a focus more toward playing by the ‘rules’ than ‘playing’ by the rules when it comes to adult play. The exception might be in sex clubs, which raises its own question of why only in this situation is ‘pretend play’ acceptable?
When I google “how adults play differently than children” the results about the differences between adults and children are many, but play does not factor in other than through the ways children learn or experience the world differently than adults.