“Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.”
-Charles Eames

Petty. Unproductive. Fruitless. Immature. Infantile. Callow.

These are all words which portray the common sentiment used to describe play in the “Adult World.”

Dr. Stuart Brown, MD, would have to (playfully, perhaps) disagree.

Play is serious business.

Lack of play, he says, is just as important as other variables in predicting criminal behavior among murderers in Texas prisons. Couples who play together are given more opportunities to strengthen their relationships and explore other forms of emotional intimacy which might reside outside of their comfort zones.

To be sure, says Dr. Brown, play doesn’t have to include fighting off invisible monsters, hanging upside-down from monkey bars and stomping in puddles while howling at a near dog-whistle pitch.

Play can be anything which doesn’t depend solely on an outcome. Such as, for example, art, books, movies, music, comedy, and daydreaming.

Play, Dr. Brown says, is a “state of being.” It’s “purposeless, fun and pleasurable.” It’s more focused on the experience in the moment than on accomplishing something in the future. So, unlike most things in the [cue the stiff posture and nasally tone] “Adult World,” it isn’t defined by results.

And, according to author Steven Johnson, play has played (yes, played) a pivotal role in history: “Delight,” he writes in his new book Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, “is a word that is rarely invoked as a driver of historical change. History is usually imagined as a battle for survival, for power, for freedom, for wealth. At best, the world of play and amusement belongs to the sidebars of the main narrative: the spoils of progress, the surplus that civilizations enjoy once the campaigns for freedom and affluence have been won.”

But keeping play on the sidelines, says Johnson, is a huge mistake.

If you were a time-traveler, you might watch in awe as the “lowly” caveman tooted around on a flute he crafted out of animal bones. If you were well-traveled enough, you would know that this primitive flute would eventually be modified to create the first organ. And the organ would then spur the invention of what was originally called the “Writing Harpsichord” — AKA the typewriter.

The inventions we use for play, Johnson says, would be just as telling clues about the future as “anything happening in Parliament or on the battlefield…”

A surprising number of inventions borne of play, as Johnson shows in his book, foreshadowed the rise of “mechanized labor, the digital revolution, robotics, and artificial intelligence.”

“History,” he says, “is mostly told as a long fight for the necessities, not the luxuries: the fight for freedom, equality, safety, self-governance. Yet the history of delight matters, too, because so many of these seemingly trivial discoveries ended up triggering changes in the realm of Serious History.”

He calls this phenomenon the hummingbird effect: “the process by which an innovation in one field sets in motion transformations in seemingly unrelated fields.”

For example, as Johnson explains in this Medium article, a change in the sexual reproduction strategies of plants led to the hummingbird’s unusual manners of flight.

“Hummingbird effects come in a variety of forms,” Johnson writes. “Some are intuitive enough: orders-of-magnitude increases in the sharing of energy or information tend to set in motion a chaotic wave of change that easily surges over intellectual and social boundaries. (Just look at the story of the Internet over the past thirty years.) But other hummingbird effects are more subtle; they leave behind less conspicuous causal fingerprints. Breakthroughs in our ability to measure phenomenon  —  time, temperature, mass  — often open up new opportunities that seem at first blush to be unrelated. (The pendulum clock enabled the navigational triumphs of the Age Of Discovery.)”

Through play, so goes the narrative in Johnson’s Wonderland, this hummingbird effect has shaped much of the modern world.

“When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight and amaze,” he says, “they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.

“Everyone knows the old saying ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world’s most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well.”

James Altucher recently had Johnson on his podcast to talk about the important role play has in innovation and growth, and why society should embrace rather than shun the practice.

It’s worth a listen.

Before you do, though, ponder these connections Altucher posted on his blog and see if you can figure out how they were formed on your own…

1. The lengthening of shop windows in London in the 1600s and the rise of American slavery in the 1800s.

2. The laugh of Sputnik, led directly to Tinder.

3. Gutenberg in the 1400s led to the study of genomics.

4. A tree used by the Mayans to make games led directly to car tires.

5. The invention of the phonograph in the mid 1800s directly led to their being more boys than girls born in China this year.

Click here to listen to the full, entertaining conversation.

Until tomorrow,

Chris Campbell
Managing editor, Laissez Faire Today

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