Yes, we need a neuroscience of play

ABSTRACT

Ethnology, the cross-cultural comparative approach of cultural anthropology, has long recognized that people and animals play at all stages of their lives; that human play is culturally universal; that play is therapeutic; and that play very likely is rooted in the evolutionary neurobiology of our species. The advisability of a neuroscience approach was implied in 1938 by Johann Huizinga in his classic work, Homo Ludens, who first suggested that we are dealing with a separate state of consciousness. The long delay in the application of neuroscience to the study of play is at least partly due to ignorance of the pioneering work of TAASP in the 1970s, the failure of scholars to agree on a definition, and the preoccupation with functionalist approaches by all disciplines. Today neuroscience is burgeoning, exploring many aspects of human emotion and behavior, and many of the early suggestions of anthropology are being verified.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• neuroscience
• anthropology
• TAASP
• TASP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributors

Phillips Stevens, Jr., is Associate Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at The University at Buffalo, SUNY; [email protected]. Significant portions of this article first appeared in his 2014 Keynote Address presented at the 40th Anniversary Conference of TASP, Rochester NY, April 25; published in 2016 as ‘Forty Years at Play: What Have We Achieved?’ (Michael M. Patte and John A Sutterby, eds., Celebrating 40 Years of Play Research: Connecting our Past, Present, and Future. Play and Culture Studies, Vol. 13, pp. 3–18. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books). Permission to reprint was graciously granted by Rowman and Littlefield, March 12, 2019. Copyright Rowman and Littefield, all rights reserved.

Notes

1 The anthropology of religion has been one of my areas of interest, and I was attracted to Persinger’s work because he was a pioneer in a field of study which wanted to use principles and methods of neuroscience to advance various parapsychological claims, especially that religious belief is rooted in evolutionary neurobiology. His career was, in my opinion, fascinating; but his premises and methodology made him quite controversial, both in his field and at Laurentian University. He died in 2018.

2 And, it really doesn’t go near ‘the limits of neuroscience.’

3 Brown & Vaughan’s, 2009 work is a personal memoir in conversational tone; I cite it here as an overview of his multi-faceted career.

4 The author and a companion casually observe the apparently playful antics of an inch-worm, and refer to studies of ants and other insects. Gordon Burghardt referred me to his 2012 study of spiders (Pruitt, Burghardt, & Riechert, 2012)

5 http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/04/13/302189232/could-playfulness-be-embedded-in-the-universe

6 The others were: immune function: referring to a 2003 study by Mary Payne Bennet and others, in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine; pain tolerance: a 2011 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B; Biological Sciences, by Robin Dunbar; cardiovascular health: referring to uncited ‘recent studies’ by Michael Miller, MD, of Center for Preventive Cardiology, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore.

7 In September 2015 Gordon Burghardt referred me to the January 2015 issue of Current Biology, the 25th Anniversary issue of that important journal, with a special section devoted to ‘the biology of fun’!