Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discussed science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are going to talk about the biology, psychology and utility of play.

Play is something that Normally we associate with children's games and indeed with being a child, much of our childhood velocity ment centers around play, whether not its organized play or spontaneous play. But as adults, we also need to play. And today i'm going to talk about what i'd like to referred to as the power of play. The power of play resides in place, ability to change our nervous system for the Better, so that we can perform many activities, not just play activities Better. Play can also function as a way to explore new ways of being in different scenario, in work, in relationships, in settings of all kind, and indeed also in the relationship to oneself.

In fact, we are going to explore how assuming different identities during the same game of play or the same forms of play has been shown to be immensely powerful for allowing people to engage in more creative thinking and dynamic thinking, and indeed to become Better leaders and more effective workers and students and learning and happier people. I'm also gonna ver some data that shows that learning to play properly can enhance one's ability to focus and is an active area of research for treatment of things like A D H D attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Just says a little sneak preview of where that added children who do not access enough play during certain stages of childhood are more prone to develop adhd.

The good news is all of us, regardless of whether not we have A D hd or not, whether not we had ample access to play during childhood or not, can engage and grow the neural circuits that allow for this incredible power of play. And this can be done again at any stage of life. Today we're going to talk about the protocols, the science.

We review all of that, and I promise you will come away with a lot of knowledge, whether not you a parent, whether not you a child, whether not you a person of any age, you're going to have tools and knowledge that will benefit you. Before we begin, I want to share with you the results of what I think to be an extremely exciting and certainly an actionable study that was just published in the journal scientific reports. This is an excEllent journal, nature press journal, peer reviewed at sea and the finding center around what sorts of devices we happen to be reading on and accessing information on and how that's impacting our physiology and our capacity to learn.

One of the more frequent questions I get is what are all these devices, phones, tablets, computers, video games, that that they are doing to our brains? And finally, there's some good peer review data to look at that and to address IT directly. This study for southern hama H O N M A huma at all is entitled reading on a smartphone affects sii generation.

That's sig H I generation brain activity and comprehension. And they just summarized what they found. They ran a study on thirty four healthy individuals and had them either read material on a smart phone or on regular printed paper or a book.

And what they found is that comprehension on devices, in particular smartphones, is much poor. Much worse than IT is when one reads on actual paper. Now, some of you may experience this yourself. Now they compared smart phones with paper.

And what they found was that when they looked at people's breathing, the Normal patterns of breathing that people were engaging in did not differ between people reading on a smart phone or reading from paper. However, one particular feature of breathing did differ, and that particular feature is what we call physiological size. I've talked a lot about physiological size on this podcast and on social media.

We had a horrific guest, professor jack feldman, from university, california. Los Angeles is a world expert in breathing and respiration and its impacts on the brain, and help brain controls breathing and resprayed. And what you can learn from that episode, or just tell you again right now, is that every five minutes or so, whether that we are sleep or awake, we do what's called a physiological side, which is a big, deep in hill of a double in hill, followed by a long x sale, and go something like this.

Now you might think, or I never breathe like that, but you do unless there's something severely wrong with your brain stem. Every five minutes or so, you do one of these physiological size, which reopens all the little hundreds of millions of sacks in your lungs, called the eva, bring more oxygen as a consequences, that big, deep double in hail. And then you are able to exham carbon oxide, offload carbon oxide through that long x sale.

I've also encourage people to use the physiological side deliberately, not just spontaneously, as a way to reduce their stress quickly. And indeed, my lab works on physiological size and been expLoring this, and they're quite effective in reducing our stress very fast. Reading on a smart phone seems to suppress physiological sign.

People are aware that is happening, but it's happening. Some people have talked about so called email apia, which is the fact that people hold their breath while while they email or while they text. And indeed, many people do that.

This is distinct from email or texting opener. What's happening here is people are reading on the phone and for whatever reason. And i'll talk about what the likely reason is. But for whatever reason, they're suppressing their sign. And as a consequence, the brain is not getting enough oxygen and is not offloading enough carbon dioxide. And another finding in this study was that the prefrontal cortex and area of the brain that's involved in focus and attention in learning becomes hyperactive in a kind of desperate attempt to focus.

All of this can be summarized, ed, by saying, if you happen to read on a device, whether not a tablet, a standard computer screen of any kind, but in particular on a smart phone, regardless of how smaller, large that smart phone screen is, you want to remind yourself to engage in these physiological size fairly regularly and you might even be Better to just read the most, at least the key issues and things that you're trying to learn about, the key information from paper, either books or printed out material of some other sort. What's the underlying mechanism here? Well, one of the reasons I like the study so much is that IT brings together two of my laboratories in my particular interest in neuroscience, which is, how does our visual system and the APP, meaning the size of our visual window, relate to our so called automatic function of our internal state.

And basically, what's happening here is, as any of us bring our visual window in more nearly as we contract our visual window, which is exactly what happens when we're looking at a little smart phone in front of us. IT seems to suppress the breathing APP aratus because we know that physiological size are controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem called the paraphrase. Nuclear is discovered by doctor jack felman.

And so there must be a mechanism thereby, when we tighten our visual window, we somehow, and we don't know yet how this happens, but somehow suppress the activity of these neurons in the proficient nucleus that generate these physiological sizes. So again, you have two choices, or I suppose you have many choices, but two main choices to contend with this new information. One is that you remind yourself to engage in deep breathing, and in particular physiological size, every five minutes or so while reading anything or texting on your smart phone.

The other would be, again, if there's material that you really need to learn for the sake of refrigeration later, or something particularly important, try and read that from either a larger screen or even Better would be from printed materials or books. Another reason I bring that up is that IT relates to a larger thing, which is that I get many, many questions about A D H D and about people's chAllenges with focus. And much of what we're told these days is that we are chAllenge with focus because of the hundreds of videos that we can see streaming bias in any moment on our phone, which probably is true.

The fact that the information that we're reading on the internet, on our phones is emotionally disturbing or distressing in some way, and that probably is true as well in many cases. This study really points to the fact that independent of the information that we are looking at or consuming independent, whether not its movies or text or anything that sort the mere size of the window, the apache, the screen that we are looking at, is also strongly impacting our ability to learn and remember information. So brought in that visual window, print things out.

Look at a book. I didn't design the system. I would say, you know, however, our visual system in respiratory system happened to evolve. I wasn't consult the design phase. This is just simply how your brain circuits work.

So if you want to learn things wide in that visual window and even Better, print things out, pick up a book or read on a tablet even, but try and make that tablet larger than a smart phone screen side. Before we begin our discussion about the power of play, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one of vitamin mineral probiotic c drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they've sponsor in the podcast the reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs that makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbial on health.

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Again, go to athletes ens dot com slag huberman in to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin three k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electronic light drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

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I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I have longer to meditate.

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Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about play. Now, in researching this episode, I thought that I was going to come across a bunch of papers that say this brain area connects to that brain area which controls play in animals and their similar areas, in babies and in adults.

And indeed, that's true. And we will talk about rain circuitry. But I think more importantly is to understand what is the utility of play and why do we play when we're Younger? Why do we tend to play less as we get older? And what in the world is play for? Some of us would be categorized as more playful.

I'm sure that you know, people like this, maybe we are like this, people that can walk into a room, a social setting of any kind. And they seem to already have A A playful, maybe even a misgivings quality about them. We'll talk about this for a little bit later, but this will look at an environment to our social setting as an opportunity for different kinds of novel interactions.

Other people, and I probably put myself into this category. If I walk into a novel environment, I tend to be more in the mode of I was just assessing what the environment is like. I'm not a particularly spontaneously playful person, although around certain individuals I might be more spontaneous ly playful.

We are all on a continuum of this kind of seriousness to playful nature that turns out that all Young animals, including humans, have more playfulness, intending, engaging, more spontaneous play in their earlier years than in their later years. And there in lies a very interesting portal to understanding what the utility, what the purpose of play is. First of all, I want to lay down a couple of key facts about play that point to the fact that play is not just about games.

Play is about much, much more. And play, in particular, how we played as a child, and still, how we can play as adults is really how we test and expand our potential roles in all kinds of interactions. One of the most important, interesting and surprising features of play that i'd like everyone to know about is that IT is homeostatic ally regulated.

Some of you are familiar with the term homeostasis homes. Stasis is just this aspect of biological systems to try and remain imbaLance. You know, you stay, wait for a long period of time.

You tend to want to sleep for a long period of time. If you sleep for a long period of time and you're arrested, then you tend to be very energetic the next day. And of course, I know people out there.

Will you say so well, if I left too long than i'm groggy? The next state, of course, there exceptions. But in general, sleep and wakefulness are in homeostatic baLance.

Thirst and water consumption are in homeostatic baLance. If you don't drink any fluid for a while, you tend to get more thirsty. You drink fluid and your thirst tends to diminish.

Likewise with food, likewise with most all motivated behaviors. Well, one of the most important discoveries of the last century was largely the work of a guy named jack pinks up. No, it's not jack.

It's ypfb who really pioneer this understanding of the biology of play and relating that to the psychology of play in animals and humans. He's considered kind of luminary in the field of play. And what a great title to have, right? If you could have a title and be a scientific luminary, you might as well be the the play guy.

In fact, he was known. And i'll get into this later as to why. But he was known as the ratio ler because he tickled rats, and he actually found that rodents and animals of many kind generate laughter in response to tickling. And in fact, they don't have the capacity to tickle themselves. Something also talk about why that is, and he was called the particular, but then he discovered that many species of animals engaged in laughter in response to kling and particular each other.

And the reason you don't hear to them laughing, no, you can't hear your dog laughing, that isn't laughing at something else, is that most animals, besides humans, laugh at kind of ultrasonic levels of auditory output, meaning the frequencies of sound are just too high for you to hear. But with the appropriate devices, he was able, with his colleagues, to isolate this so called the rat laughter. And then turns out there's kitten laughter and there's poppy laughter, and of course, there's human laughter.

So yuk ping up was a very interesting in pioneering person in this field. And he also discovered that play as homeostatic tics regulated, meaning if animals, including children, are restricted from playing for a certain amount of time, they will play more when given the opportunity, in the same way that if I would restrict you for a long period of time, you eat more when you are finally one to eat. And this is important because IT moves this thing that we call play, from the dimension of hero functions, or things that evolved recently, you know, that are really kind of at the front edge of human evolution, deeper into the circuitry of the brain, whereby we say, the brain stem, the kind of ancient parts of the brain are going to be involved.

In fact, that's the case as we're going to learn later in the podcast. Play is generated through the connectivity of many brain areas, but one of the key brain areas is an area called P A G paraquat cal grade. The paraquat cal grade is a brain stem area, so it's pretty far back as the brain kind of transitions into the spinal.

And it's rich with neons that make endogenous ous oppoi. So these are other kinds of opioid that are causing the opioid crisis. These are neurons that you and I all have that release in dogen's, meaning self made or biologically made opiates.

They go by named, like in kaolin. And things of that sort play evokes small amounts of opioid release into the system. They kind of dopy up a little bit, not so much a, as one would see if one were to take exogamous oios.

In fact, exogenous oppos, as we now know, our potentially very hazards, highly high addiction potential, high overdose potential. They caused all sorts of problems. Yes, there are clinical uses for them, but they are causing a lot of problems in note days. But these indulgin ous oppos are released in children and adults anytime we engage in play.

And that turns out to be a very important chemical state, because there's something about having an abundance of these indulgence ous oppos released into the brain that allows other areas of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, the area of the front that's responsible for what we call executive function. Executive function is the ability to make predictions to assess contingencies. Like if I do this, then that happens.

If I do that, then that happens with preference to cortexes, often seen as a kind of rigid executive of the whole brain. That's one way to of view IT. But probably a Better way of view IT is that the preference of cortex works in concert with these other, more primitive circuit, ries.

And when the paranoid ducal grey releases these inaugural opioid during play, the profondo cortex doesn't get stupid. IT actually gets smarter. IT developed the ability to take on different roles and explore different contingencies. And we're going to talk about role play later in different context.

And what we will find is that so much of play is really about expLoring things in a way that feel safe enough to explore, right? This is not what happens when we drive down the street or when we bike down the street. When we are ahead ed to work, commuting on our bicycle or walking or driving, we tend to be very lenient, and we've tend to be very goal directed.

We're not gonna take a new street just because we're spontaneity um riding in the midst road and then on the sidewalk in them back. And although I can remember the kid, I was doing something that I like to jump off curb cuts when I was a kid, and then eventually I graduated. And sorry to the cyclist, but I graduated the skateboarding.

And then I look on skateboarding, and you always kind of expLoring terrain. But, you know, as I got older, actually, i'd find myself becoming much more, Linda, I just don't play with my commute very much. It's really just about getting to work and then working.

When indulgence opiates are in our system, when we are in this mode of play, the preference to cortex starts seeing and expLoring many more possibilities of how we interact with our environment, with others, in the rules that we can assume for ourselves. And so we're going to dissect, one by one, the different aspects of play, role play, social play, individual play, a marginal play, competitive play, the enormous number of dimensions of play. And by the end of this episode, we are going to arrive at a very key feature.

The key feature is one that's called your personal play identity. All of us have what we call a personal play identity. This personal play identity was laid downstream development, and IT is the identity that you assume in playful scenarios, and IT is the identity that you adopt in non playful scenarios.

Great news is that your personal play identity is plastic. Throughout your entire life span. You can adjust your personal play identity in ways that will benefit you in work and relationships and your overall level of happiness.

We will discuss protocols in ways to do that. But I do want to give A A nod to the late jack. Jack, excuse me, a yak picks up the particular. And I also wanted just give a nod to play generally as we move forward in the discussion. What i'd love everyone to do is to stop thinking about play as just a child activity, not just a sport related activity, but really as an exploration in contingencies.

Again, it's an exploration of if I do a what happens if I do b, what happens if someone else takes on behavior or um attitude? See what am I going to do? And play is really where we can expand our catoche of potential outcomes and IT can be enormously enriching.

And indeed, as we talk about the tinkers of the world, the true creatives, the people that build incredible technologies and art, and also they just have incredibly rich, emotional and intellectual and social lives, all have a strong element of play. And so today I hope to convince you of some protocols that allow you to expand your various roles in life through the portal of play. So we establish that play as homeostatic, meaning we all need to do IT.

Many of us, including myself, I haven't played that much as adult. Pretty busy. Number of us are stressed. We got got to do in life. But as children, most all of us engaged in a lot of play. And in looking at the way that very Young children, and especially toddlers, play, we can learn a lot, because IT reveals the fundamental rules by which the toddler brain interacts with the world.

Now, one of the key things about the baby brain is that the baby brain somehow knows that I can do everything in the world, right? If a baby needs something, IT generally will cry or make some sort of vocalization, or some sort of facial expression or combination of those. And the caretaker, whoever that may be, will provide IT.

This is an ancient hardwired mechanism. Whether this so called automatic nervous system that generates stress will create this kind of winning and discomfort. Maybe arriving, maybe the baby gets kind of read in the face and the caretaker delivers something based on a good guess of what that baby needs.

So maybe it's breast milk, maybe it's bottle milk, maybe it's a dire change. Maybe it's to be warmed up if the baby is cold. Maybe it's to be cool down if the baby to warm.

Maybe of the babies in its low one's y thing is feeling restricted and just wants to move and they'll get taken out of there, the cover, the stroller, whatever is, and allowed to stretch out on the floor. Remember, the baby doesn't know exactly what IT needs to, only knows the state of discomfort. And of course, we don't know exactly what babies and dollars are thinking because they can express themselves with language yet.

But what key to understand is the rule or the contingency that is set up in that scenario. In that scenario, the child IT feel some discomfort, expresses that discomfort verbally or through a facial expression or both, and then some force. Some person from the outside world resolves IT. And so the very Young baby, and indeed many children up to certain ages, and let's confess, many adults are not able to meet or adjust their internal states of stress. And so they looked to things outside of them.

That's the first rule, the fundamental rule that we all learn when we come into life, that when, in a state of discomfort, to look outside our immediate biology, beyond the confines es of our skin and find a solution, a simple water for adults, they might be simple alcohol, right? Probably not the best tool to relieve stress. But that's one that many people do, in fact, engaging for the baby, the hungry, the bottom milk comes from the outside.

As we gain more proficiency in moving through life and we can get things for ourselves, we still often bring things from the external world in to resolve this. What i'm calling auto omy discomfort or atomic, this regulation, that's not a game, but that's a rule. As we advances from infant to toddler, we start to think more in terms of where we are in what we own relative to what's out there in the world.

And now in the world of child psychology, there's a somewhat famous poem that was written by a research child psychologist. His name was bertin White, and he wrote a phone called the toddlers creed. The todd's creed defines well what the rules and contingencies of play are in very Young children.

And IT reveals to us just how marrow and limited their world view is and how self centered their world is. So the toilers creed red quickly, because I don't want take up too much shine with this is if I wanted, it's mind. If I give IT to you and change my mind later, it's mine.

For anyone that splayed with a taller, you can imagine this in your mind. If I can take that away from you, it's mine. If I had a little while ago, it's mine.

If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine. If IT looks just like mine, it's mine. If it's mine, IT will never belong to anyone else, no matter what. And of course, as we hear, this sounds quite awful, right? And yet this is actually a reflection of what a healthy toddler would think about the world, that the objects and things, and even the people in the world are theirs, that they are actually possessions, that belge to them.

Of course some people never actually transition beyond the stage of moral and social development and there are indeed some adults that fit the toddlers creed and you're welcome to share this with them um if ever you think that I might be of benefit to um their self reflection but in all seriousness, burton Whites todgers creed is really grounded in this transition from when we are infants. And we have to have things delivered to us to the point where we are todgers and we can access things in the world, but we tend to assume that they are all hours. And then the next stage is the really key stage, as IT relates to play, because in the next stage of development is where Young children start to interact with other children, and there is an exchange and a possession, and then a letting go of certain things, learning that not everything is yours and that the entire world is not about you is one of the key contingencies that is established during play.

It's one of the key ways in which children go from being very self centered and basically unable to engage with other kids for very long without some sort of eruption of crying and some sort of battle of, you know, push, pull over an object. Two, things like sharing and things like CoOperative play. So as we transition from forms of play that are all about the self that all me, me, me, me, the todd's creed, two forms of play that involve some discomfort in assuming roles that maybe we don't want and not getting what we want, it's really an opportunity for the brain to start to explore different roles that people take, how they work as individuals and its pairs, and in larger groups, and to do that in a low stakes environment, right? You wouldn't want this to be worked out on the battlefield or when searching for food, or in some high stakes environment where the survival of the species was important.

IT appears that these circuit aries for play evolved so that rules and contingencies around whose most important, whether not the group is important, whether not individuals are going to be leaders or followers at set up, that can be explored in a low stakes environment. Now there are hundreds of different types of play and hundreds of different types of contingency testing. But the key theme here is that play allows children and adults, for that matter, to explore different outcomes in kind of low stakes environment.

If you're playing a board game or a card game, you might get really into that game. But unless there's a lot of money on the table, so to speak, or you're really playing for something important or unless your ego is sweet and way out of proportion to reality, if you lose, you might not feel good about IT, but it's truly not the end of the world. And if you win, you might feel really good about IT, but you're not really incredible.

You are just incredible in that particular situation for that particular moment. IT doesn't really transform the rest of your life unless that game is of a particular type. Let for sport, for instance, we'll talk about sport later.

So the key theme here is that play is contingency testing. Play is contingency testing under conditions where the stakes are sufficiently low that individuals should feel comfortable assuming different roles, even rules that they're not entirely comfortable with in their outside life. And that all relates again to the release of these indulgence ous opiates in this brain center, paraos dual grey.

And the way that allows the prefrontal cortex in a very direct, truly IT allows IT in a biological way to expand the number of Operations that I can run and start thinking about a well, okay, Normally i'm kind of a loner and I like to read and work and you know hang out alone, even play alone. But okay, i'll play a board game or a game of tannis where I have a partner. We're going to play as partner's against two other people.

Okay, that's a little uncomfortable, but i'll do IT. And in doing that you discover certain ways in which you are profession and certain ways in which you are less profession. You discovered that the other person actually uh ten to cheat a little bit or the other person is extremely rigid about the rules or maybe extremely rigid about the way they organized their pieces on the board or you're crossing the line into your side of the tennis court.

There are all sorts of things that we learn in these rather low stick scenario. That's the key theme here. So before I continue, I just want to point to a two, or that anyone can use, but in particular the less playful of the group.

And I would put myself into this category again. I'm not somebody who really engages in spontini play. I enjoy sports, I enjoy exercise, but that is distinct from play because the sports and exercise that I can gain, I take pretty seriously.

They're not low stakes for me. I put actually put a lot of ortons on them. SHE is i'm saying all this. I probably should put a little less importance on them and have a little more fun with those.

And yet, what i'm about to tell you is that anyone and everyone can benefit from engaging in a bit more of this playful mindset. The playful mindset is not necessarily about smiling and jumping around or being silly. It's not at at all.

It's not the tigger character from any the pool necessarily IT could be, but it's really about allowing yourself to expand the number of outcomes that you're willing to entertain and to think about how you relate to those different outcomes. What this means is putting your self in the scenarios where you might not be the top performer, right, playing a game that you're not really that good at. I had this experience recently.

Friends that like to play cards, they like to do some low stakes gambling is not legal gambling ring. They play for trivial things. And I generally don't buy into the game. I generally don't play most of because they end up winning and taking whatever does I have.

But in the mode of assuming a more playful spirit, the idea would be, well, if the stakes are low enough then to play simply for the sake of playing because there's something to learn there about the other people in the group and about oneself and how one reacts to things like someone who's clearly trying to take everybody's money or somebody who is clearly trying to um cheat, or somebody who's clearly very, very rigid about every last detail, including how the cards are dealt in, shuffled right there is learning in this exploration. And that is at a biological level, the prefrontal cortex starting to entertain different possibilities, starting to entertain different outcomes in this low stakes way. And if you think about IT, that's not something that we allow ourselves to do very often.

Even if we listened to new forms of music or we go see new art or new movies, those are new experiences. But that's not us making new predictions about what's going to happen next. It's not the brain working to figure out new possibilities.

And so you immediately see how just a small increase in your willingness to put yourself into conditions where you don't understand all the rules perhaps, or you're not super proficient at something, but you enter IT because IT is a low stakes and because there is information to learn about yourself and others could start to open up with these profondo cortex circuits. And when I say open up, I don't mean that literally there's an opening in your school. What I mean is that your preference to cortex can work in very rigid ways.

Meaning, if a then b if I go down this street, turn left and go that way to work, IT is fast. If I go down the other street is slow. If there is a traffic game there, i'm gonna there, but it's starting to explore different possibilities.

And they're very, very few opportunities in life to explore contingencies in this low stakes way such that IT engages a neuroptera the prefrontal cortex. So play is powerful at making your preference to cortex more plastic, more able to change in response to experience, but not just during the period of play, but in all scenario, because you get one prefrontal cortex, you don't get a prefrontal cortex just for play. You get a prefrontal cortex that engages.

In everything. So going forward, I will layer on some more concrete aspects of tools. But for now, if you're somebody that doesn't consider yourself particularly playful, consider and maybe engaging just a little bit of play in some way, that is of discomfort to you with the understanding that is increasing your prefrontal cortical plasticity.

Another really interesting, an important aspect of play is so called play posters. These are in animals, and these are seen in humans. And for those of you that are watching this podcast on youtube, i'll do my best to adopt them here. For those of you, they're listening, you'll just have to imagine them in your mind's eye, but yet paying up. And indeed, Darwin himself study these play posters that all animals engaged.

Perhaps the most familiar one is seen in dogs and in wolves, where they will lower their head to the ground and theyll put their paws out in front of them, and they will make eye contact with another typically dogger wolf to so called call the play. Now when they do this posture, it's obvious that they're lowering themselves. They're not in an aggressive stance because they're lowering their head.

And this is univerSally known among kline's as play posture. Some famous videos online, you can look this up of dogs actually doing this with bears that they are confronted with. And the bears, at least in these videos, in exchange, also lowering their head.

And there you see bear dog playful interactions. Now you always have to be cautious with bears. In general, I would say you have to be cautious with bears.

But this speaks to the university of this bowing, the sort of the some people call the puppy bow or the playhouse that dogs do, turns that humans do this as well. Although in a different form, i'm sure there are some that go into the the download play posture. But more typically, when humans wanted play, they will do a subtle, or not so subtle, le head.

Tilt the head till lt. With eyes open is considered the universal head and facial expression posture of play in humans. So when two people see one another, if there are aggressive towards one another, they will sum certain facial expressions and postures.

But if they're feeling playful towards one another, often times they'll tip their head to the side just a little bit, and they open their eyes, they might even raise their eyebrows briefly. This has been seen again and again and again. Another hardwired feature of so called play postures is what's called soft eyes, when animals are a great if or when they're sad, they tend to reduce the size of their eye openings by um basically making their islands closer together somewhat.

We keep in their eyes together, in particular for aggression. They'll bring their eyes towards we call a virgins I movement, bring IT center that actually narrow the appearance of the visual field. When people are animals want to engage in play, they tend to open their eyes lids somewhat, and they tend to purse their lips just a little bit.

So not like departing. When you're lips like this, it's pursing their lips, the open their eyes a little bit, and they're often do the head till as well, sometimes with a little bit of a smile. These are reflective.

These are not trained up. Children do this. Adults do this. Dogs, wolves do this. Even certain birds will do this. Most birds have eyes on the side of their head, but they do a sort of form of this soft eyes approach. And certainly rappers, you see a softener ing the eyes.

And indeed, rappers like hawks and eagles, they actually do have a certain form of play, but only early in life. The other thing that we see during player, what are called partial posters, partial posters, or kind of play and action of posters that would otherwise be threatening. So a partial posture that we see during play in animals and humans, that relates to aggressive play.

So things like gasoline or things like rough and tumble play, which is very common in animals and kids and some adults, is that because there's going to be a physical interaction in animals, what will happen is they will march toward one another, often very slowly. But rather than having their hair up, which we call piloerection, which is when the hair goes up, animals do this to make themselves look bigger. Think about that, the cat that's trying look bigger, or animal that's being aggressive, try look bigger in the presence of a foo, a different animal that they're either going to try and kill or fight in some way, even if it's to defend themselves.

Partial posters occur when animals will approach one another, but they'll keep their third down. Humans will do this too. They were approach during play, but unless it's highly competitive, play like a football game or a boxing match, they will actually shrink their body size.

Someone we have here on our bodies um some of us more than others and that hair is capable of piloerection um I can stand up that's the hair standing up on end phenomenon. But most of us don't have enough hair on our bodies that we can actually use that to make ourselves larger. So what you see with people who are about to engage in play is they tend to make their body a little bit smaller unless they are highly competitive.

And highly competitive play is its own distinct form of play that will talk about later, such as during sport when the stakes are high. A superbowl football game, revealing my ignorance about sport here. The super bowl, as it's typically gold, is a very high stakes game, right? Salaries depend on its sponsorships, depend on IT.

It's on television reputations that depend on IT. So that's not really playing a game that's playing a very high stakes game. And there you're not going to see these partial sters. You're not going to see soft eyes and tilting of the head, at least not between the opposing players on the team.

You're going to see quite the opposite, granting screaming, shouldering um people not black inking lowing their eyes or um rather shrinking their eyes down to be to appear more aggressive, these kinds of things staring right through the other person, verbal threats at a that's not really play even though we say they're playing a game of, but its very high stakes play. What i'm referred to hear is when it's fairly low stakes. And we see this again in animals, in the humans.

So there are many, many of these partial posters. Again, they happen spontaneously. So if someone ever looks at you and they told they are had a little bit and they raised their ebrow and they may smile a little bit, they're looking at you playfully, that's the universal human exchange of I want apply.

Do you want apply? There's another play expression that is considered the most extreme of the common let's play expressions and posters. And this is one that seen in a lot of primates, and indeed in some humans as well. And that's the ice wide open and believe are not tongue out. Is that that kind of silly thing and that's I don't think that i've ever done that before.

That kind of thing is basically what primate species of all kinds, and indeed, we are old real primates as well, do when they want to say, i'm definitely here to play and that's why i'm here, okay, has this kind of silly look or connotation. But if you watch chimpanzees, or you look at bonobos, or even in the so called new world monkeys, which tend to be the smaller monkeys, old world monkeys tend to be the ones that, in general, see the world as we do. They have what we call track romsey.

Um they are the ones that often can look very human, like the new world monkeys. Time to be the little ones in general. I give you a little trick here. No tool based on prime matos. Gy, if you see a monkey and it's making very slow movements, or you see an APP of any kind of making very slow movements, very likely to be an old world primate.

If you see a monkey and it's making very quick movements like it's doing this kind of thing like it's like this could be a squirrel monkey, could be a arma set, likely to be a new world monkey, and they don't see the world that the same way we do, they see the world more like a dog. They don't really see reds. They see reds as orange sa o that's not a hard and fast rule.

And i'm sure the prime matou gist are going to come after me with whatever prime matou gist come back to you with monkey biscuits or something like that, but in general is a good role for the zoo. And you see a slow moving monkey with slow delivered gestures kind of move its eyes, makes the eye contact everyone somehow. Those tend to be the old world primates, kind of jittery ones that looked like a really nervous rap in their taye, and kind of hiding there in a little bundle.

Those tend to be the new world monkeys, OK. Again, not of a black and White type division, but that'll get you most of the way. So the whole purpose of these partial posters, or the turnout thing, is to limit power in deliberate ways to really take bottling expressions that could be portrayed or could be interpreted as aggressive or as threatening, or as wanting to meet, or as wanting to do anything for that matter, and to limit the power with which they are expressed in very deliberate way.

So that's the putting the hair down despite getting into a fighting stance that saying, let's fight but i'm not really here to fight fight its low stakes fighting like if I pin you, then i'll let you go, or if you pin me, then you want to let me go. And so immediately you can start to see how play starts to call into action, social dynamics in which both parties have to make some sort of agreement about how high the stakes are. Now the failures to do this are also very informative in how we developed in social groups.

And this also can inform why some people really play well with others, and other people don't. And some people seem to get long, well with groups and can handle other people. And some people are very rigid.

After I A anette about this, when I was a kid, we to play this game, not a game, I suggest, but we used to do what we're called dirt cloud wars. So a friend, his parents, were generally not home in the afternoon. So we must have been some around ten or eleven years old.

And we would set up these two big dirt mounds. We would travel into big dirt mound on two sides of the yard, and then we would just take dirt clads and we throw them at one another and just have dirt cloud wars. Again, not suggesting this.

I'm not responsible for what happens if you do. But there were rules, and the rules were, for instance, you couldn't pack rocks into the dirt clouds, and you could run across to the other side, and you could jump on the other person mounting and throw dirt clouds in there. And this is the stuff that we thought was entertaining.

But if someone got hit in the head, generally there was an unspoken rule that you kind of stop and see whether not they were damaged or not before you would continue. You can continue pelting them. And of course, people broke this rule.

In fact, I remember one kid i'm not going to name him um because actually he's grown into a very, very actually prominent and functional adult but he got hit once in the head and then I think someone had thrown a dirt clod shortly there after and all of the sun, he just went into a rage, picking up rocks and sticks and attacking another kid. And so clearly, that was the case in which the rules of the game were now being violated. But IT served a very important purpose.

There was the typical thing that there were some tears. I think, as I recall from one kid or the other, there was like snow coming out in OS and turning bright red. A kid went home.

I was a mass that parents had to say something, or maybe there's a phone call. I don't quite recall how IT got resolved, but the idea is that there is an agreed upon set of rules about how high the stakes are and what we're all going to do. And this is separate from sport, where they are clearly defined rules about what's out of bounds, what's in bounds, what sort of behaviors will get you a yellow card or red card.

For instance, on the soccer field, all animals, including humans, are doing this load stakes contingency testing. And all animals, including humans, you will find, start up the stakes. And inevitably, in group play, one member of the group will kind of break rules.

You see this also in puppies. So for instance, puppies will bite one another, those sharp little needle like puppy teeth. I remember in costal how those see those things were so darn sharp.

And puppies will yelp when. And one of their literature bites them, that yelp actually serves a very important inhibitory function. This is well defined to tell the other one, that's too tough.

And this is how animals learn soft bite. Okay, if they don't get that feedback from other litter mates, they never actually learn what's too hard and what's soft. And so humans do this as well.

Now you can look at your adult counterparts. Indeed, we should probably look at ourselves and ask, did we learn proper play contingency when we were Younger? Do we tend to take things too seriously?

Do we tend to overreact aggressively when other people are clearly engaging and you know, playful jabbing or sarcasm or things to that sort? Each of you will have a different experience of this. But the point is that play serves many functions.

It's not just about the self. It's also about interactions between multiple people. It's about rule testing and loisa s contingency rule breaking also serves an important role, as is with the example of the dirt claud war puppies biting other puppies at set up.

And last but not least, there are different forms of play that help us establish we will become, as adults, one of the more powerful of these is role play, when children and sometimes adults will take on different roles that are distinct from their natural world rules in order to, for instance, establish higher keys. So someone's going to be the leader and someone's going be the followers. Some will be dominant, and someone will be submissive.

Someone will work alone. Other people will work in a group. These kinds of role playing are, again, ways in which the profondo cortex has to expand the number of Operations in the sense we call these algorithms that he has to.

In order to make predictions, you have to taking a lot of information about your environment all the time and make predictions. But if you are suddenly cast into a new role, well, then you definitely have to make even more predictions from a different standpoint. So these are very powerful for teaching the brain how to a function.

I had a sister drawing out. I still have a sister, fortunately. And shiner friends largely played with doll and doll houses in the, in the room next door, and they would take on different roles.

In fact, some kids, if they play alone, will start to take on the role of leader by taking on an imaginary or creating an imaginary friend and apologies to my sibling. But for a long time, SHE had an imaginary friend. Eventually that imaginary friend disappeared. Um I don't know the science around imaginary friends and what makes them disappear or not at what stage development, but imaginary friends are pretty common and that's just another way of being able to you know boss somebody around if that's your thing, or to do engaging CoOperative play so we can look at this stage of development we call childhood.

And we can look at each stage of IT and we can say, oh, there are all these different dimensions of play that really are about testing out how we feel comfortable or uncomfortable, how we react good or bad, how we react with stress or with glee when others behave in certain ways. And so hoping is coming through is that play is not just about having fun. Play is about testing. It's about experimenting and it's about expanding your brain's capacity. And that's through early development, and it's true throughout the lifespan.

So at this point in the discussion, I want to take a step back, look at the biology and neurochemistry of play just a little bit, and in doing that, really define what is effective play if the goal of play is to explore different contingencies in low stakes environments and to expand the function of our preferences cortex, so that we can see new possibilities in new ways of being, become more flexable, more creative, more effective outside of the games of play or the arenas of play. I should say, well, then we should be asking, how do I know if i'm playing? How do I know i'm playing correctly? Turns out there's an answer to that.

Earlier, I refer to this brain area, the parietal dotal grey, that releases opioids, indulgence opioids, into our brain and body and tends to relax us a bit. IT actually is what leads to these things, like soft eyes and head tilts. And puppy is making a puppy posters on things that sort and how that opens up the number of different functions or algorithm s that the prefrontal cortex can run.

But there's another piece of the puzzle, which is for something to genuinely be play and playful, and for IT to have this effect of expanding our brain and engaging neuroplasticity, of really changing our brains that we can see and engaging more possible behaviors and fought at a, we also have to have low amounts of a drennen, so called economic in our brain, in body. Now, the background science for this is quite extensive, but for those of you, they are interested in a papers and manuscripts. Perhaps the best one is a review published, neuroscience and bio behavioral reviews by the very yuk ping step, although he has a co author, n, which is Stephen civ Y S I V I Y.

I'll provide a link to this in the caption shown notes. And the title of this paper is in search of the neurobiological substrates for social playfulness in a million brains. And it's a quite extensive review, but IT basically boiled ed down to some key findings whereby any sorts of drugs or behaviors or scenarios that incase levels of a drennen too much will tend to inhibit play in drugs and scenarios. And i'm not suggesting recreational drugs here, but these were experiments that we're done in laboratory setting that increase the endarkenment opposite output will tend to increase playful ness.

And so really, the state of mind that one needs to adopt when playing is, first of all, you have to engage in the play, whatever IT happens to be with some degree of focus and seriousness and focus on seriousness in the newbie logical context generally means a benefun um being able to focus is largely reliant on things like a general apparent but also the presence of dopamine, which is a molecule that generates motivation and focus in concert with a penetrant. But also that these indigenous ous ops be liberated and it's really the low stakes feature of play that allows those indigenous ous ops to be liberated. What do you mean by that? Well, if you are very, very concerned about the outcome, like you've put a lot of money on the table in a given game um or a you're football player in the super bowl or you're playing a game for which you know defeating the other person or your team winning is absolutely crucial to you, well then that's not really going to engage the play circuitry.

On the contrary, if you are engaging in those same behaviors or any other behavior in a way that you're simply there to explore, but you don't know have high levels of a journey in your system, you're not stressed about the potential outcome that constitutes play. Now that's somewhat obvious on the one hand, that you take seriously what you take seriously, and you can be more playful about things that you don't take so seriously. But what is absolutely not obvious is that the state of playfulness is actually what allows you to perform best, because the state of playfulness offers you the opportunity to engage in novel types of behaviors and interactions that you would not otherwise be able to access if you are so focused on the outcome.

okay. So a state of playfulness is absolutely critical, not just during play, but during competitive scenario of any kind. As he started to cultivate a practice related to this, when I was in college, I had this and general practice of one.

When I wanted to learn something, I would tell myself that I was the most important information in the world, and that I was very, very interested. I kind of lie to myself and say, i'm super interested in, I want them in the topics. But super interesting in this are super interesting in that.

And I could sort of a delude myself into being hyper focused on whatever is that I was learning in ways that surprised me. However, when we are hyper focused on something and we are rigidly attached to the outcome, we can't engage in flexible thinking. So it's a great tool to be hyper focused on something and take IT very, very seriously when we're simply trying to learn things by kind of wrote memory, learn things and regenerate, learn and regenerate of the sort that, Frankly, a lot of schooling involves.

But if we are trying to get Better at something, we sort hit wall and athletic performance or in cognitive performance where we're not creative enough or we're finding, let's just use a sports example, that you we only have a certain number of moves that we can deploy, a certain number of swings of the racket that we can deploy. The way to actually expand your practice is to engage in this kind of low stakes thinking, the idea that, well, i'm just going to a play and tinker. I'm going to explore in a way that IT isn't really matter if the ball goes back over the net, that really matter if the ball goes s in the whole.

And it's counterintuitive because you think, no, the thing that we need to do is drill and drill and drill and drill. Indeed, there is a place for that. But this mood of play with modest levels of inorganic ope is being released in our system, plus low levels of adjani eenie. In low levels of appendant, a journey are possible only when the stakes are low enough that we're not stressed. While that combination really allows the prefrontal cortex to explore different possibility in ways that can truly expand our capabilities over time.

Now this has been seen again and again also in the business sector, some of the um more chAllenging or I just say competitive companies to get jobs that are very interested in hiring people that as children were so called tinkers and actually NASA was first famous for this that many of the people that achieved great success in engineering and NASA when they looked back into their childhood histories, those people tended to be tinkers. There were people that would kind of play with things in a way that wasn't about rigid dly. Following a recipe and instruction manual, great cooks discover new forms of food.

Indie create entire generation of food. Uh, by way of being tinkers. Okay, musicians do this. Um I grew up playing various sports, but skateboarding was won that I was particularly involved in for a long time.

One of the greatest skates orders of all time is some of you may recognize his name as the great roddy mollen and rodney was kind of famous for um involving the sport and continued to all the port in ways that no one could predict using skateboards and all sorts of ways that no one had thought of previously. And of course, there are other skype ards. They did that as well, but he's particularly well known for that.

And his process is his own. I can't speak to IT too much, but he was also known as kind of a tinkers somebody who would spend a lot of time just kind of flipping the board and just flipping in in the air and watching the ways in which you flipped and studying the physics of of IT really, and expanding on his existing understanding of what could happen on a skate board by way of just playing. Now he took IT very seriously, but it's this kind of razors edge between taking something very seriously, but also tinkering and playing and boring and just seeing what happens, a kind of, well, it's just see what happens if we did this.

That mindset is extremely powerful to export from this thing that we call play into what we could call more serious endeavors of one's occupation or sport, whether not it's behind a desk or whether not it's running around on a field really for or engineering any endeavor. And so the whole purpose of this episode on play is yes on the one hand, to illustrate the incredible um evolutionary utility of play for setting up uh the self and relation of the self to others indeed for setting up cultures and to ali because cultures will watch sport together or we'll celebrate their team winning I mean world cup. Never been a big soccer fan even though my dad is.

Um but it's incredible in the entire world kind of lights up and gets engaged around whether not their team, their country is going to win the olympics also being another example. But play and sport are not quite the same as i've pointed out before. And for all of us who are thinking about tools and things that we can extract from science to enrich our lives, I would say for those of you that are already playing on a regular basis in one form, another terrific start to expand other forms of play, in particular, forms of play that involve new groups of individuals.

So if you're somebody that typically plays one on one with somebody, try to expand into playing as teams. If you're somebody who only plays alone, then try to expand into playing in perhaps one on one first and in groups. This is the way that your brain learns and evolves and changes and gets Better.

And I raised this because another one of the top ten questions I get is, how can I keep my brain Young? How can I continue to learn? How can I get Better in school, in sport, in life, in relationship? Is that that are emotionally incognito, ly, and on and on and on? And yes, there are supplements that can support our plastic.

Yes, there are brain games and absolutely support dinner plasticity. But if you really want to engage neuroplasticity at any age, what you need to do is return to the same sorts of practices and tools that your nervous system naturally used throughout development, and that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to trigger this thing that we called neuroplasticity. And the reason this is so important, because IT starts to move us away from what some people called hacks.

I define hacks, is using one thing for a different purpose to kind of, I get a shortcut. I don't really like the term, Frankly, and I don't like IT because it's not grounded in any biological mechanism. But when we look at play, we can say, play is the portal to plasticity.

Play at every stage of life is the way in which we learned the rules for that stage of life. And play is the way in which we were able to test how we might function in the real world context. So play is powerful, and we could even say that play is the most powerful portal to plasticity. The reason for that is that, yes, this high opioid, low evenement, or a journal state, is what opens up play.

But then inside of the arena of play, when the preference of cortex is running all these different possibilities in this low stakes way, but with some degree of focus, there are a number of other chemicals that are deployed, things like brain arrived in trophic factor and other growth factors that actually trigger the rewiring of brain circuits that allow for IT to expand. And indeed, that's what is city, if you're interested in those chemicals and kind of arena of things that happen when one engages in neuropathy, there's a vast literature out there. But one of the more popular books that I think is quite good, as from my friend and colleague, john rady, who's a psychiatrist at harvard medical school, that's R A T E Y.

He wrote the books Spark a few years back, and I think it's still very relevant. And john talks about the important role that play exerts in the neuroplasticity process and points to a number of different protocols that one can engage in. He also points to the importance of navigating new environments, did not just go on the same hike every week or take the same walk, but actually get into new novel environments.

So you're starting to sense a theme here. There's novelty, expLoring contingencies, keeping mistakes relatively low at seat ta. But these really are the gates to this holy grail that we call neuroplasticity uo plasticity, as i've talked about the podcast before, is a two step process.

IT involves focusing very intensely, or at least focusing somewhat on whatever is that one is trying to learn, and then engaging in deep breast, ideally deep sleep, in the following nights. And i've also talked about the benefits of things like nps in the yoga edra, so called nsd r non sleep depressed for enhancing or accelerating plasticity. You can check out the episodes on focus at a huberman lapdog m episodes on how to learn faster, the detail, all those we had a newsletter that list out all the tools for neuroplasticity enhancing neutral plasticity.

All that is available, your cost to you at your room and lab outcoached set, you can just download that information. But john, book that news letter, those episodes, they really point to this two step process where it's focus and then rest, focus and then rest and play as its own unique form of focus and then rest. Focus and rest is not the same as learning something for the sake of school or critically trying to learn a motor behavior for sake of sport.

It's really about expanding the number of things that you could learn down the line. okay. So said once again.

So I just want to make sure it's abundantly clear players about establishing a broader framework within which you can learn new things. It's not about learning some specific thing. It's not about the game you happen to be playing. It's not about the dollhouse that the kids are playing with so that they could become amazing dollhouse players when they grow up, right?

The dirt clock war that I referred red too earlier, for Better for worse h was not about becoming the best dirt clad through or um or winning the trophy for dirt clothes in the neighed od although we actually had a trophy for the best dirt road team, um allait was not my team that year. But the point is that you're learning rules and establishing a broader foundation of practices that then you can learn more things within that context. Thus far, I i've tried to convince you through a combination of data and anette and explanation that adopting a stance of playfulness and indeed engaging in play on a somewhat regular basis to be beneficial to you regardless of circumstances or goals.

If I haven't done that already, what i'm about to tell you hopefully will push you over the line. IT turns out that when you look across the kingdom of all animals, what you find is that animals that engage in playful behaviors for the longest period of time are also the animals that have the greatest degree of neuroplasticity the brain and neurotic stems. Ability to change in response to experience.

Put differently, animals that only play for a very small fraction of their entire life have very rigid brains that don't learn new things. We're as animals that play for a long period throughout their life have very plastic brains. And there's even some evidence at this point, largely anecdotal, but there's some data starting to emerge.

The adults that maintain a playful stance, that engaging things again, that are low stakes, continue expLoring important enough that people focus and that people pay attention to what they are doing, but that they are not. You filled with a drennen. You freaked out about the outcome being a or b. They're not super, super competitive, maybe just a little bit competitive or not competitive at all. That allows for more ongoing plasticity.

And one of the people that comes to mind and thinking about this is, of course, the physicist, and I should say, the great physicist, Richard fine, nobel prize winner, professor called tech, was involved in the manhattan project, but was also known for being a lifelong tinker, right? He also was a missive ous tinker, if you read any of the books about fine or buy fine men, surely you're joking. mr.

Fine men or what? You care what other people think? These are wonderful short stories, mostly about fine man. Doing things like um picking all the locks to the loss ale's laboratory and putting all the top secret documents out on the floor of the office so that when people came in in the morning they were all out there. Um obviously they weren't released to the general public.

Um he didn't want through a national security playing pranks like that or and actually kal tech, I don't know this is still the case, but caltech, where he was employed, was always known for i'm doing very technologically chAllenging pranks. They're not known for their athletic promise caltech sorry, tech but um they were known for example, um disrupting the score board at the rose ball in patina, for instance. And things of that sort through technological feeds, at least at the time, required a lot of playfulness and technological process.

So if you look in science, or you look in art, or you look in medicine, or you look in any domain, what you find is the people that continue to evolve new practices tend to be people that we're tinkers. People that are very creative tend to be people that are unafraid of expLoring things in a this low stake's way. They're not originally attached to the outcome that they have to do everything perfectly all the time.

Now they might cloak these playful behavior so that their final works always look perfect or always look incredible, but they have this kind of playful nature about them. I would venture even to say that the the street artist, banksy, for instance, obviously an incredible artist that puts a ton of flood in preparation into their work. But there's a kind of playfulness to the whole thing too, of using two dimensional paintings in concert with three dimensional city dwellings in ways that you know I think that most people hadn't previously.

There are other people like Crystal artist sort they did that. But I think on banca is kind of recognized as the modern um the modern condition of that kind of playfulness, using cities in ways that most people don't use cities, using art in ways that most people don't use art, for instance. So to go back to the example of fine men, fine men with somebody who learn to paint and rock White well into the sixties he was somewhat famous um or infamous, I should say for bono jumping on the roof, kal tech, I say infamous because he was known also for doing that naked, something that certainly not in concert with the ethical standards and behaviors of universities today.

But five men had this playful spirit as a child, he had that playful spirit as a teenager, and he had that playful spirit as an adult. And that's one of the hallMarks of fineman, was that he wasn't just a rigid physicist who could explain things clearly. The general public, he always Carried through this playful spirit.

And in some of his writings, he pointed to the fact that that playful le spirit was something that he worked very hard to continue to cultivate in himself, because I was the way in which he could see the world differently and to indeed make great discoveries in the field of physics, but also to kind of evolved his relationship to life more generally. And so he comes to mind as as a prominent example of somebody who who did this, and if I could achieve anything with this episode, besides teaching you something about the biology of play would be to teach you about the utility of play. Again, I don't consider myself a particularly playful person by nature, but i've tried over the years to adopt the stance of expLoring things that are, you know, very focused on contingencies of different kinds, but keep the stakes low enough that I can have some fun doing them.

And I like to think that it's benefit would be somewhat I like to drill a little bit further into this thing that we call neuroplasticity. Again, neuroplasticity is the brain ervy systems ability to change in response to experience. And I should just say that throughout the entire life span, the nerve system can change very quickly in response to negative experiences.

We can almost all engage in what's called one trial learning, where if something really terrible or traumatic happens to us, our nervous system will require almost immediately, at least within a few days, such that we tend to want to avoid the experience that LED to that trauma. Now, the whole business of why people return to things that are traumatic to them is a whole other issue. There are books about things like trauma bonding.

There's the so called repetition compulsion from psychoanalysis that people go back in the trauma to retest and gain new opportunities to overcome the trauma. But in general, what i'm referred to hear is, you know you have a bad experience to the swimming when you're a kid where someone holds your head underwater too long than you just don't want to give back in the water. That's one trial learning of sorts that of course can be overcome through proper exposure therapy or one that you trust taking you there or um any number of behaviors that allow you to overcome that, be that particular scenario and experiences something new in that same context.

But across the lifespan, the learning of new things, new contingencies, new possibilities occurs very differently from about age zero when we're born until about age twenty five and thereafter. So from about about, I want emphasize, approximately age twenty five onward, new plasticity occurs through the process. That is exactly that I describe before.

Focus rest. Focus rest. We focus very intensely. We can do the thing.

We can do the new movement. We can do the golf swing. We can learn the math. We try, we try, we try, we try.

We sleep a few, and then all some we can do IT, right? Because the rewiring actually crs during depressed or nps, but mostly during deep sleep from birth till about age twenty five. However, we can learn things, new things and new contingencies, not just negative things and traumatic things, through somewhat passive exposure to those things.

right? I will never forget the first time that we went on a family trip to washington, dc. And we went to the missy. I got to see the the old fighter planes.

And I think I think the Kitty hawk or the first one of the first planes as there, anyway, obviously, my regulation isn't terrific. My hippo campuses is falling on that. But i'll never forget the trip and i'll never forget who went.

And I think was probably eight or nine years old. It's embedded somewhere in my memory. And so just through passive experience and my focusing on the things that excited me about that trip, I have a recollection of that experience.

I didn't have to deliberately focus. I didn't wasn't telling us. I'll focus. You're gonna to remember this trip someday, and you can be podcasting about this, you know, thirty nine years or whatever I did. I forget exactly how old I was. But the key feature here is that the developing brain is able to learn through passive experience, because the neurons, the nerve cells in the developing brain are much more over connected, then they will be later in life.

The way to think about this, a sort of if you use google maps as I do um too often, I think um when I drive, there are a number of roads in pathways that will get you from point eight to point b. We could imagine those as neural circuits s or we can imagine neural circuits as those roads early in development. The nerve connections are much more extensive.

It's like having a google maps that where everything is connected to everything through tiny, little cross streets, and the whole thing is just a complete mess. But then by taking particular routes of behavior, of thought, of emotion, certain routes become well established, and the other routes that are not taken simply disappear. Now, in the biological contexts, in the brain, we call that process pruning.

And the simple way to envision this is early development. You have many, many more neurons than you will have as an adult. Those neurons are extensively interconnected, and approximately forty percent of those interconnections will disappear by time. In twenty five years old, they are gone.

They are actively removed through processes that involve things like leal cells that come in and literally sneak their little processes in between neurons at the synapse, which are the points of contact and communication between neons and push those apart, even eat neurons, right? There's an incredible work from, for instance, is best Stevens lab, IT, harvard medical school, showing that glial cells going and eat synapses that are not functional for that particular circuit. Now what this tells us is that much of our learning during development is the removal of incorrect connections.

But IT also involves the strengthening of connections that are going to serve certain emotion, certain functions, motor functions, cognitive unctions at sea. The process of play is largely a process of engaging pruning of neural connections and strengthening of the remaining connections. I'm sure that many of you i've heard the term fire together, wired together.

That phrase is often incorrectly attributed to the great Donald heb, who indeed was great, that incredible work as psychologists from canada who established a lot of the basic seller, learning rules for learning and memory. But IT was the also great doctor carlier chats, who is now at stanford and was at berkely and harvard as well, but who is at stanford during school, who coined this term, fire together, wired together. Indeed, that's what happens when children play, when adolescence play.

And when Young adults play, whether not its social play or play with an object when they not, it's a sport or play of any kind, imaginary play, imaginary friend play, there is a strengthening of certain neural connections and a pruning away of up to forty percent, perhaps even more, of connections that are not necessary for certain types of behaviors, emotions and thoughts. What this means is that IT is through the process of play that we become who we are as adults. And as I mentioned earlier, IT is through the process of play that we that we are able to adjust who we are as adults.

Now there are bounds on this process. As far as I know, there's never been a reported case of an individual who had a hyper plastic or I had A A brain that was as plastic in adult od as IT was in childhood. But what this tells us is that what we do in the process of play as children is really how we set up the rules for how we behave as adult in almost all domains, which is really incredible.

And of course, the reassuring thing is that playing as an adult will allow you to expand on those neural circuits. You can literally grow new connections. Some of you maybe say, does IT create new neurons 啊？ For Better, for worse, IT does not seem that many new neurons are added to your brain in adult hood. There are some papers that report a few neurons in certain brain areas, isolated brain areas, but by in large, most of the rewiring of neural connections is the removal of certain connections. This process we're calling, proving.

And the strengthening of the remaining connections that make those kind of google maps roads, in the analogy I laid out before thicker and more robust think about is taking little trails and turning them into roads and paving those roads, then turning those roads in the highways than putting up um more lanes on those highways and eliminating all the small little bat country roads that won could take. And again, this is an an analogy for what is happening at the level of neural circuitry. Now one of the key findings that has emerged from the literature is that children that have been subjected to trauma or immense amounts of stress of any kind have a harder time both engaging in play, but also a harder time accessing neuroplasticity later in life.

The good news is this is not a permanent effect. Talk about some of the ways to overcome that um in a moment but this should make sense to you because earlier we talked about how a high level of a drennan, a penetrant in the brain in body actually inhibits, blocks the circuits in the brain and body that generate play behavior. And when I say that, I mean that in a very concrete way that up an f an in a general can actually suppress the sorts of circuitry that can lead to things like soft eyes or tongue e out or the head tilt or what we called partial posters, are being able to engage in, you know, a rough and tumble play, but not take that to the point of outright aggression and damaging the other person, or them damaging you.

So when I say that, you know, trauma stress can inhibit neal plasticity by way of inhibiting play at a deeper neurobiological level, what i'm really saying is that the high levels of a general that are generated from trauma stress actually shut down the circuits that allow a child or a Young adult to enter the game of play or engage in the game of play in the same way that a child were Young adult who didn't have high levels of a journal in their system could possibly engage in. Now, the good news is that many of the existing traumatic erp ies that are out there now, including things like em D R, exposure therapy, coding, behavioral therapy and on and on, including some of the uh therapies that are more no chemical things like kadee or are more engineering based things like transcranial magnetics stimulation, for instance. Many of those are paired with forms of talk therapy that are really about the same thing that players about, which is expLoring different contingencies.

It's about expLoring different types of emotional experiences as they relate to the same sort of scenario that created the trauma. And we didn't entire episode on fear in trauma. And I recommend you check out that episode.

It's easy to find again a huberman lab dot com. It's on youtube, apple, spotify, IT said that very easy to fine. And there I talk all about trauma treatments um in the various kinds of trauma treatments that are out there, their efficacy in different scenarios and ramas and so on.

But the point I like to make now is that the reason why children who experience a lot of trauma stress have limited plasticity later on is because of the neutral ical substrates that are created from trauma and stress. Because, after all, stress is een ean and ean effort is stress. Those are inseparable. And the way in which is more than shuts down, or at least in hibs, suppresses those play circuits. And again, the reassuring thing is that by engaging in players, adults, we can reactivate some of those circuits and reopen the plasticity.

In fact, one very prominent trauma treatment now, especially for people that have been subjected to very severe traumas in the ongoing sense, meaning traumas that went on for many, many years, is to get them to engage in play and things like dance, in basically getting them to engage their bodily movements in ways that they would otherwise not feel comfortable to engage in. And I find this area is so interesting, because on the face of IT, you could say, oh, that's kind of, you know, that really biomedical treatment and you're taking people traumatizing, having them dance. I mean, IT seems kind of silly on the one hand, depending on your you, your particular orientation, but on the other hand, it's actually quite profound and quite grounded in the mechanisms by which the brain circuits change.

So again, back to the original principle, which is that play isn't just one portal to plasticity. Play is the fundamental portal to plasticity. And that play and dance and exploration of novel movements, exploration of novel athletic movements, are the road by which we access new ways of thinking, new contingencies. And I find IT wonderful that the trauma release and the a psychiatric and psychological community are expLoring things like play and dance and other forms of reopening the circuits because indeed we would all loved for there to be a magic pill by which trauma could be erased in new memories, could be laid down or a device that could do that.

But Frankly, if um you ask me a number of my colleagues whether not that's likely to happen anytime soon in effective weight, I think the the short answer is going to be know that they're going to be chemicals and things that can augment and support that process, but that there is not going to be just a magic pill that will suddenly reverse trauma altogether. That it's always going to be a case whereby shifts in europe, chemical states are going to have to be combined with new ways of thinking and new behaviors. And I find IT wonderful and reassuring that people are looking at play and play behavior as a not just one tiny short of possibility there, but that IT might actually be the main driver and a highly productive leaver by which to rewire the traumatize brain.

So if you're like me, you might be thinking, okay, i'm willing to be more playful. I'm willing to explore play as a porter, the plasticity and that all makes good sense. But what should I play? What should I do? Well, we've always establish that you want to keep your journal in low.

You have to keep the stakes low enough that you're not onna get totally consumed by the outcome. Now for some people who are highly competitive, that's going to be chAllenging. And yet, I don't want to make IT seem as if you can't be competitive during play. There are many forms of competitive play that because your competitive person allow you to drive great joy from that competitive of play. I have a friend who is particularly good at horse es.

I'm not particular good at horse es, but whenever we play horses es, I can tell he's out there to crush me on hore shoes as just one these things where, you know, I ll, he derives a great pleasure from crushing me at a game of horse shoes. I can't say because I haven't actually done the microbial sis, which is a way of extracting chemistry from the brain in real time, nor if I recorded from his brain or image in scanner, whether or not he has high level of eef or low levels of epinephrine during those games, of course, I suspect is low levels of and high level of dopa mean, especially when he wins. And yes, he wins every time.

But the point is that you can be competitive during play, provided that you are enjoying yourself. Okay, you can be competitive provided that you are enjoying yourself. There are all particular forms of play that lend themselves best to neuroplasticity.

And those particular forms apply, again, are not designed to necessarily just engage the plasticity that allows you to perform that behavior, but rather to expand the number of possibilities for your brain to change in general throughout life. And the two major forms of those for which there's a good peer reviewed research, is to engage in novel forms of movement, including different speeds of movement. So let's say, for instance, you're somebody who runs, I happened like running, I trying to run three times a week.

And generally when I run, I run forward. I don't run backward. Although recently, because i've become very excited about the work of so called knees hover toes guy, his name is benn Parker, but he goes by nez over toes guy on instagram.

I've never met him, but we've exchange a few messages back and forth. And some of his practices involve walking backwards or doing sled polls backwards. I found these to be very beneficial for my back and for my interview tibia as and some things that have really helped with my posture and so forth.

But in general, I run, I run forward. I don't tend to run backward that much. And I might do that for a few minutes at the end, but not so much throughout the entire run. Running doesn't lend itself to a lot of novel forms of movement, lateral movement. So so for the new nerds out there, movement in the plain um or angled movements.

But IT does appear that things like dance or sports, where you end up generating a lot of dynamic movements, where there's jumping, where there's movement at different angles, where there's ducking, where there's leaping, that basically involve a lot of dynamic movement and aren't just strictly linear. Those seem to open the portals for plasticity, and that's because they mimic a lot of the brain circuitry that is associated with play. And the reason for that is the way in which those dynamic movements and movements of different speeds engage the a stimulate system, the baLance system, the visibility system, is in the inner year, relate to the cereBellar, which translate the mini brain gallow mini brain, the back of brain IT brings together visual information in a very direct way.

I talk a lot about this in the episode on how to learn faster. So if you want to go in depth on how a stimulate and different types of motor movements can open plasticity, I talk a bit more, or I should say a lot more there, but have to say that engaging in a play that has a lot of dynamic movement or movements of different speeds, things like dance, things like sports, like soccer, were removing in different dimensions. That tends to be very conducive to what we would call play related circuitry, provided you don't take IT too seriously.

You don't get those high levels of up. And f. Now, for those of you that are also interested in non physical or non athletic forms of play that can really expand plasticity, there's some very interesting research about the game of chess.

I don't play the game of chess. I play a few times. I confess I don't know how to move all the pieces or i'm not going to trying to describe that here, but I ve always wants to learn chess. And I think after reading some of the appear reviewed research about chess and play in neurology now I understand why there's a really nice paper that was published in the international journal research in education and science in twenty seventeen. And the title of this paper is, is chest just a game or is that a mirror that reflects a child in a world that's a very, a very intense.

For a biologist like me um but this paper is so interesting because what IT really points to is the fact that in a single game chess, you have at least as I understand, two players and those two players are moving pieces on the chess board for which each peace can do different things where I can move in different ways under different scenario. But they're different rules for different pieces. And so each player actually has to assume multiple identities during the same game and each of those identities has different rules and ways of interacting.

So in a way, we can think of chess is one game, but actually chess is a of a substrate for expLoring multiple roles for different characters. And this is quite a bit different than for instant video games, where somebody has their favorite video game player, where they have an avatar r and they're always in the same role. It's also quite a bit different for when you engage in any kind of play where you are yourself, you're just being you in that game.

And so now I am highly incentivize to explore chess. You see quotes out there, for instance, things like chess is life, or Judith is life. I always assumed that that meant that someone's entire life was chess, or their entire life was jujitsu, for instance.

But in reading over the research about chess in particular, but also certain forms of marsh arts, also certain forms of dance, what one finds is that, indeed, those games are life in the sense that they involve adopting multiple roles and expLoring contingencies in a number of different ways. So there are some games that allow you to explore a much faster landscape of movements, or of mental roles, or of ways of engaging in strategic movement, as is the case with chess. And so when you hear that, you know, activity blank is life, IT often reflects the passion for that activity.

But I think looked at differently. IT also reflects the fact that the activity is a portal through which you can explore life through many, many different, different lenses. And I think that that's especially powerful in terms of thinking about how play can be leverage for plasticity.

So for those of you that are interested in leveraging play for neuroplasticity and expanding your mind, if you will, I highly recommend picking an activity that will allow you to adopt different roles within that activity where it's not rigidly linear. This is actually away in which I started, apart from this modern and important, but somewhat narrow idea that exercise is the only route to plasticity. Yes, it's true.

I have nobel prize winning colleagues that swim for two miles a day and have done that for a long time. And they will tell you, I always think more clearly after my swimming. And I certainly, in my experience, after a good run or a good workout, my mind seems to work best.

Unless, of course, that work out was very, very intense. I've talked about this before. If you to work out very, very hard and whether not a robic or resistance training or support of any kind, your brain won't function as well afterwards, mostly because of the diversion of oxygen to tissues away from your brain, you actually get less oxy and your brain.

But in general, most of us feel that if we exercise regularly, our brain functions Better. But there are activities that extend beyond linear exercise, beyond just generating the same sets of movements over and over again, whether not it's exercise or not. And that's really what play is.

Play is about dynamically expLoring different kinds of movements, dynamically expLoring different kinds of thoughts, dynamically expLoring different kinds of roles that one could adopt. And that is the way that the brain learns new things. So I encourage you to explore chess.

I intend to learn chess this year. I'm very excited to do that. Now, if you already played chess and you are an expert chess player, you actually will derive less benefit in terms of this play induced neuroplasticity. Then you would, for instance, if you went out, and I don't know, play the game of a soccer IT, did something that was very novel for your nervous system.

Because in that novelty and in that exploration of new behaviors, in new ways of thinking, you are opening the portal to plasticity, wherein doing what you already know how to do and trying just to perform Better and Better at IT, you will get Better at chess. But again, that's just chess. You are not expanding the roles in which you can become more plastic, that you are able to learn new things in relationship, in life, in finance and friendship.

eeta. In researching this episode, one of the most interesting areas, as I discovered, was this notion of personal play identity. Personal play identity is a term that, at least to my knowledge, was coined by a turkish researcher by the name.

And forgive me, i'm going to mispronounced. This is john G O K H A N last name G U N E S. And forgive me, go on.

And if we have any turkish speaking members of the audience, please put the correction in the comment section on youtube. Make IT fanatic so I can understand what this is, please. I'd love to correct IT.

And I apologies. Or who knows if I got IT right then I was pure luck goon. Goodness has coin this term, personal play, identity. And the key role that personal play identity establishes in who we see ourselves as being, and not just in the context of play, personal play identity has four well defying dimensions.

And I should say that if you're interested in learning more about this, the the paper that I found particularly informative is published in current psychology. And the title is personal play identity and the fundamental elements in its development process. And the author course is go kon gunness N E S.

Last name, and this is from twenty twenty one. So recent review, there are four components to personal play, identity, how you play your personality, social culture and environment. So that the third one is together, social, cultural environment and economics and technology.

Now that sounds somewhat complex, and this paper is somewhat complex, but basically what IT says is that we bring together certain aspects of ourselves and how we react to different place in areas when we're Younger, and we bring that forward into the world in all context as adults. To illustrate this time, to ask you a question, when you were a child, let's say, ten years old, would you considered yourself competitive? Would you have considered yourself somebody who's CoOperative and realize, of course, that those of not mutually exclusive you could be competitive and CoOperative?

Would you consider yourself somebody that prefer to play alone or prefer to play with one or two close friends? Or were you somebody that really enjoys playing in large groups? Here's a key one where you somebody that enjoyed playing the leader in one moment and was equally OK with being a follower at a later moment, were you okay with having your role switched midway through a game?

Would you get upset or be delighted or not care at all about having a switch teams during the middle game because your team was winning right to even things out? You can imagine how that would play out internally. You would immediately register that you must be a valuable player because you're being moved off the winning team toward the losing team. But then again, you're now being forced to join the losing team.

How did you feel about that? Were you somebody that was comfortable with other people breaking rules, or perhaps in yourself breaking rules, bending rules to be a defined term? Or will you somebody that really need to know all the rules, and if everyone didn't rigidly add here to those rules, was quite disturbed by that? The number of questions goes on, on and on. And I will provide a link to a paper that asks a number of questions that helps you arrive at a sort of score of sorts are an index of what gunness and others have referred to as personal play identity.

The point is that if we look back to our early adolescence, somewhere between ten and fourteen years old, a peak time for social development, a peak time for play of various kinds, a peak time for motor development, a peak time of psychosocial development, where we learn, where we fit into higher keys, as we relate to members of the same sex, of the opposite sex sea, we can start to get a portal into how and why we show up to various activities in work and relationship at sea as adults. In fact, i'll ensure to say that if we go into that process for ourselves for five or ten minutes, you start to see some remarkable parallels between the way you were at that and your tendencies and your preferences. As adults, we tend to look at our early childhood ended and our families, and to some degree, are friends in terms of how we become who we become.

I've talked about the incredible work of Allen shore on previous episode of the podcast. Alan shore is a psychiatrist and has done extensive work on how parent child interactions, in particular baby and mother, but also baby and father, shape the brain and the brain and emotional systems, ability to go from state violation and excitement, the called dopamine epa n type circuitry, to the more warm, soothing types of calm interactions that, in broad terms, could be described as more serious in oxytocin. Things of that sort, that work really points to the key roles that the caregiver and the child you engaged in an early life.

And that is incredible work. I do hope to host a doctor shore on the podcast at some point in the not too distant future. But equally important, of course, are the interactions that we export from that early lying down of biological circuitry and psychological circuitry to the way we play by ourselves and the way we play with others in small numbers or in great numbers.

And of course, I would be the case that how we played as a tender twelve year old would impact how we behave as a sixteen year old and as a twenty old and as a thirty year old, and so on and so on. One of my favourite things about developmental biology and developmental psychology is that IT is grounded in the fact that we don't just have a childhood in an adult od. There isn't just our child self and our adult self.

And even though there are transitions around the mechanisms that underline neuroplasticity at approximately age twenty five, IT is simply the case that development is our entire lifespan, that our life span is one long developmental arc. How long depends on our genetics, our lifestyle, accidents, injury and disease, of course. But IT is one long developmental arc.

And so IT shouted, surprise us at all, that how we learn to play as a ten year old or twelve year old would impact how we play and interact with people as a teenager and a Young adult, and on and on and on in that place. The place in which we explore in which we learn play is the substrate by which our nervous system changes us from this hyperconnected batch of neurons, where everything is connected to everything more or less. To a brain and nervous system whereby certain circuits work with immense proficiency and others are less accessible to us.

But again, the wonderful thing about the human error system is that because IT is plastic for the entire life span, and because these two elements of focus and rest can be deployed again and again and again, just because neural circuits to inform does not mean that they can't form later in life. And today, we've been focusing on how play itself the same substrate that we use during development to become who we are is the porter by which we can change who we are for the Better. So I hope i've convinced you that play is an extremely important, fundamental, homeostatic, ally regulated aspect of our nervous system, which is just a mouthful of nerd.

Speak to say, play can change your brain for the Better, and that is true for every stage of life. The recommendation that I make, and certainly the one that i'm going to direct IT myself as well, is to try and engage in at least one hour of pure play per week. I came to that recommendation because of the literature that says, well, you need to engage in something pretty repetitive.

Ly IT should be novel. So this wouldn't be something that you are exceptionally good at already. If you insist on doing something that you're already exceptionally good at, then you want to really do some free form, low stakes tinkering.

So make IT safe, but make IT free form. So really explore things with that. Some people call this beginners' mind, although I find that a little lab tract. I like the notion of beginner's mind.

But like, how do you know if you're in beginner's mind? And then beginners mind is sort of the expectation that you're not going to do that well yet. But play extends beyond beginner's mind. Play is really about not even worrying if you're going to get good at IT or really professional IT. It's really about expLoring contingencies with truly low stakes.

That's what will allow you to access these neurochemical combinations of elevated endogenous ops low up and after that set that will open up neal plasticity for those of you need that need a little more guidance on how to play. Ah there's a book out. They're actually learned about this from temps blog.

It's called to play IT away, a worker lix cure for anxiety. So that's more focused on anxiety that the author is charlie home, a last name H O E H N will provide a link for IT in the shower notes and caption play IT away, a worker exit for anxiety. But books and other resources aside, I think one hour of play per week is a reasonable amount of time to engage in dedicated play behavior for the purpose of opening up these neural circuits for plasticity.

The key feature, of course, is to not have immense provisions cy, in that giving activity or at least not the way you perform IT. And if you do gain proficiency in that activity well, then IT becomes something else. It's no longer about play, it's about performance.

So in that case, you would then want to adopt a new play behavior. You'll notice that I largely avoided using the word fun throughout this episode. Fun is is somewhat abstract term, and like many emotions and many verbal descriptions of experience, IT falls short in the context of a neurobiological discussion about play.

If you have fun, terrific. Some people might find, however, that engaging in play is kind of uncomfortable. Well, there are. Your goal, then should be to lower your level of discomfort by focusing less on the outcomes and just simply engaging in the behavior because, well, i'm telling you that it's good for you, but hopefully you will tell yourself that is good for you and that you will experience that is good for you.

The literature certainly points to that, and the literature certainly points to the fact that play is the way that we are built. We are built to play. We have brain circuits from back to front and within our body that are there for play.

And they don't disappear. They do not get pruned away as we go from development to adult. So if ever you needed a newbie logical explanation for why play is important throughout the life spin, it's that it's that biology does not waste resources.

It's extremely efficient. And were the circuits for play not to be important in adult, they would have been improved away. But I guarantee you, they are there in your brain, in our system now.

They will be there tomorrow and they will be there going forward. So my suggestion is that you use them one hour per week. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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That's the best way to support this podcast if you're not already following us on twitter and instagram, we are huberman in lab on twitter and also huberman lab on instagram. On instagram, I do short posts that are related to topics covered on the podcast, but also some additional topics. So these would include science based tools for things like focus, for sleep, for learning and many other topics as well.

And as mentioned the beginning of today's episode, we are now partnered with momentous supplements because they make single ingredient formulations that are the absolute highest quality and nerves international. If you go to live momento stock calm slash huberman, you will find many of the supplements that have been discussed on very episode of the huberman lab podcast, and you will find various protocols related to those supplements. Thank you once again for joining me for this discussion about the incredible biology and psychology and power of this thing that we call play. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interesting science.