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**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 02:54 PM

Burghardt's research illustrates how play is embedded in species' biology, including in the brain. Play, as much of animals' psychology including emotions, motivations, perceptions and intellect, is part of their evolutionary history and not just random, meaningless behavior, he said.

"Play is an integral part of life and may make a life worth living."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...132045.htm

And then from the article science daily links to.....

LAUGHING RATS

For years, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp had been watching rats play at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University, and recording some extremely high-pitched vocalizations they made as they did so. Then one morning in 1996, it hit him. Maybe, he thought, the bizarre sounds his lab rats made while they played were something akin to human laughter.

“I just walked into the lab and [said], ‘Let’s go tickle some rats,’” he recalls. Sure enough, flipping the rats on their backs and giving them a good belly tickle elicited a response that “was so wonderfully strong and powerful,” he says—the rats just couldn’t stop “laughing.”

Panksepp saw great value in studying rat laughter (technically termed ultrasonic vocalizations, or USVs). He suspected that the sound could be used as an objective measure of the animals’ positive affect, or pleasure, as it was produced most consistently during playtime, which was known to be a pleasurable and rewarding activity. Sure enough, as he and his colleagues began to work out the brain circuitry underlying the vocalization, they found that it overlapped with a reward pathway in the brain known to be activated during feelings of enthusiasm, joy, anticipation, and eagerness.

“Every place in the [pathway] that we stimulated, we got a chirp,” Panksepp says. “That’s the gold standard that [this vocalization] is [associated with] a big reward.” As the laughter is heard robustly during playtime, it indicates that play is in and of itself rewarding, or fun. But more important, rat laughter itself could provide the first objective measure of positive affect in nonhuman animals. This finding could lead to greatly improved animal models for psychiatric disorders, which currently rely on indirect measures such as sugar intake.

“If we take animal feelings seriously and develop ways to measure [them], [we can] profoundly increase our understanding of ourselves, especially at the lower levels where we’re so similar,” Panksepp says. “This is the first deep neuroscience of the mind.”

Read more: Recess - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/10/1/4...z13NHrYqKl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTnam8z0Z...r_embedded

**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 02:56 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AZn5nWIj_g

**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 03:00 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHj82otCi7U

**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 03:29 PM

An interesting comment in the comment section of the second link:

Jaak Panksepp?s observation that [the] higher brain is not needed for play ?because we?ve taken it away and animals [still] play normally? could be turned on its head: How is higher order thinking enhanced by play? What is higher order thinking without play? The emotions facilitate, warm, and precede cognition. Play does not originate in the outer cortex.

One working definition is that Play whips the brain?s resources into a fully integrated state. Play is the brain?s integrator. Play is an invention of the brain that helps the brain to engage to a higher levels of functioning.

Applied to classrooms and to the challenges of formal education, Play, when directed into communication, transforms elements of classroom culture in 3 distinct areas: communication, behavior, and knowledge itself. If the objective in education is to move past the factory model into something more akin to a learning habitat, play is a scientific principle that needs to be looked at to a degree not yet explored. In this case, it is not fish or birds that are pointing us to the mystery of play?but kids and their response to a kinetic, symbolic, play-based art form that is kin to clever movement strategies such as the bait-like wiggle of the snapping turtle?s tongue at a passing fish.

Play?s roots are in the bedrock of cell movement. Cells learned to reach out and connect and grow selectively. The brain invented Play to enhance that process. Kids live and breathe play. It?s time education looked at the brain through the lens of play.

Read more: Recess - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/10/1/4...z13NQkhPuP

**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 03:39 PM

Dr. Stuart Brown is co-author of the new book, "Play -- How it Shapes Our Brains, Opens the Imagination, and Shapes the Soul." He's also the founder of the National Institute for Play. On "The Takeaway," he explains the science behind play:

"The evidence is broad. It starts objectively by watching animals at play and seeing what it does for them -- it improves their performance, immune system, their capacity to remember things. And if you follow that through to a human system, those same benefits appear to us -- particularly in fertile imagination, in a sense of optimism, in capacity to persevere and to do things that you enjoy -- are all by-products of play. And if you then hook someone up to a brain imaging machine you'll find out that when they're at play, the brain lights up more from that than virtually anything else they can do."

In the chapter, 'We Are Built for Play,' Dr. Brown writes: "If we stop playing, we share the fate of all animals that grow out of playing. Our behavior becomes fixed, we suddenly are not interested in new and different things; we find fewer opportunities to take pleasure in the world around us."

http://www.pri.org/science/science-of-play.html

Have WE forgotten how to play?

~~Urinal Cake~~ · **~~Urinal Cake~~** Banned User ID: 11033 10-25-2010 04:00 PM **Posts: 4,611**

I haven't, I do it everyday. In my own way of course.

**Full Circle** lop guest User ID: 11042 10-25-2010 04:06 PM

Urinal Cake Wrote:

I haven't, I do it everyday. In my own way of course.

Same here. I sometimes don't see a lot of play going on though. Too much stress and worry, and it takes over people's lives.

~~Urinal Cake~~ · **~~Urinal Cake~~** Banned User ID: 11033 10-25-2010 04:15 PM **Posts: 4,611**

Full Circle Wrote:

Urinal Cake Wrote:
I haven't, I do it everyday. In my own way of course.

Same here. I sometimes don't see a lot of play going on though. Too much stress and worry, and it takes over people's lives.

Only if they let it take over.

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