The Importance of Play

Photo by Varun Kulkarni 

Play is important for not only children, but for adults as well. Play boosts brain power and helps with problem-solving skills. Play supports social skills development by providing opportunities to practice cooperation and communication. Play can reduce stress levels and promote relaxation. Play can improve physical health by increasing activity levels and promoting coordination.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

The following shares a fun video along with transcript sharing the importance of play from John Cohn. Enjoy!

I have an admission to make to all of you today. I am a nerd. I’m a real nerd. Are any other nerds out there? Well, I mean, I’m a real nerd. Like — I knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer when I was eight years old. I picked the nerdiest college to go to. I found the nerdiest, biggest — what can I say about my company? I love my company, but 32 years ago, I found a job up in Vermont, working for a very big engineering company, and I still have that same job. That company was so nerdy that they even issued me an engineer for a wife. Which was pretty good. She’s lovely. But I love my company. I love my wife. I love my wife more. But I love my industry, and what I really love, is, I love science. I love being able to spark that interest in kids, using just normal stuff, like steel wool.

And, I think, in the spirit of ‘Do try this at home’, we are going to do a couple of things like this today. I was thinking about –having worked in this industry for almost forty years -32 years and then college before. I was trying to figure out, what would I say about this, and then an opportunity came to me.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to do something really scary –much scarier than this. I was asked to talk at my kid’s high school. And do you remember being in one of those graduation kind of lectures, and there was some old guy up there, going, “When I was your age…”
I was that old guy now, and I was like, “Oh my god, what am I gonna say?”, ’cause if you’re gonna suck, you can suck here, but not in front of your kids. And I was thinking, “Well, God, what am I gonna say?” I was really agonizing over it. Because I’m kind of a worrier, but I’m also “Have fun!”

It came to me in a flash, that when I looked back over 40 years, what had I learned and what had I wished that somebody had told me more about? It was about the importance of playing. Really playing. I don’t mean like going out fishing or playing football or something like that.

It’s about having a playful spirit in your work. And why do I say that? ‘Cause when I look back over 32 years of my career, the times that I actually was the most creative, the most productive, the most influential and certainly the most happy, was the time I was playing and bringing play into my life.

And it’s interesting because just last week I was in our headquarters with the most senior technical peers and I kind of checked them out. I did a kind of mental checklist. And most of them, not all of them, but most of them, had preserved that kind of playful spirit in that. I look out into my colleagues in the industry, in other fields.

For me play means goofing around with science, for you maybe it’s origami, or haiku, or woodworking, or whatever it is, but the people who actually keep that, are really, really lucky. And it’s hard. But why is it important to keep that playful spirit? Because play actually leads to creativity. There’s a really good study that I read, out of North Dakota State, that basically took a couple of hundred students and put them in 2 rooms. One, they said, “Do this creative task, and we’ll measure your output.” And the other one, they said, “Do this creative task, and pretend you’re a 7-year-old kid.” They had about 30 percent more creative output.

Why is that? Because when you’re playing, you’re in it. You’re actually exploring. You’re not worrying about the outcome. You’re bold. My three boys, Max, Sam, and Gabe, have always been my leaders there. I was stressing about — I always stress, but I was stressing about some talk I was going to give and I couldn’t come up with an idea.

So my son Gabe said, “I have a great idea, dad.” So we went down the road. This bridge is about 15 meters above a very shallow river. And he said, “This will help your creativity.” And I was like, “Ggg!” So, I took a picture of him and luckily handed my phone to someone else, and there I went. You know what? I’d like to tell you that I had that great insight on the way down, but that’s not how it happened. I didn’t think about anything as I was going down. But it did come to me later, but I was, like, totally blissed out.

Now, how do you bring that into your work? Sometimes, you just got to really be bold. And this happened a couple of months ago. I was in a meeting, and, let’s say, it wasn’t going that well. It was a dinner meeting and the juices just weren’t flowing. I was like — what do I do?

Well, I’m a vegetarian, and all these guys are getting this really delicious chicken kind of thing with al this fanfare stuff, and they bring me a plate with carrots and parsnips. And I’m going, “Oh my God!” So, I did the only thing I could. It’s like holding the emergency switch. I took my laptop cord and I took two of the forks. I happened to have some wire. I took that parsnip, said a few prayers and stuck it on here. We have a 110 volts, but let me tell you — This pickle is playing the part of the parsnip. Maybe we can lower the lights a little bit. But I will tell you — that once the smoke cleared, the conversation got completely different. So not only were we talking about –we were like, okay!

Actually, this works really well. It works with pickle beets and stuff. In the holidays, you can have this crazy winter thing. Oh my god, that smells really bad. But sometimes, you just have to go for it. And it’s interesting, because — why am I saying this to you? Sure, fun is good, play is good. Because the lesson I have learned, and you probably have too, is that life has a way of kind of wringing that out of you.

When you are a kid, play, sure. But I know, in my own company, that it’s tight times. We sort of squeeze the fun out of things and we forget to play. We forget to be creative. We forget to be into that kind of blissed-out, bold kind of move. And then, when you squeeze the play out of work, it just becomes work, which is, I guess, why they call it work.

It’s really — the harder that happens, the more you have to play. I’m about to tell you something very sad. I had to think about whether I was going to do this or not. But — sometimes things just happen that you can’t control.

In 2006, my beautiful middle son, Sam, was walking across the street, on vacation, and was hit by a car. He died instantly and his organs went on to save four other people. His life changed those 4 people that he passed on, were able to move on, and we had to move on. So it was a very — I can’t even begin to tell you how that affects your life. When I look back at it now, play was an incredibly important part of our grieving process, and more than our grieving process, our moving forward.

You don’t move on, but you move forward. One of the things that we did, is that we all came together to make these little stones with his name on it, Sam Stones. It said ‘samstones.org’. We first started — we made these out of clay, we would cook them, and give them to our friends. They would take them places and occasionally tell us where they put them. People started asking us for them. This was almost 7 years ago. We are still making them. I think at last count maybe we have 40,000 of them out there. This is, by the way, a hell of a way to learn php. I actually created an application. Can I give you permission? It’s okay to laugh. Because life goes on. These things have ended up in amazing places. We only hear about it occasionally, where somebody puts them. Each one of these things has stories. People have done with them — people have found them — crazy things! People have made these out of steel, glass, chocolate, atoms, — we actually printed them with atoms –3D printers. Oh, actually, do I have that one? I have one — This one actually had gone into space! My friend David actually put this on a rocket. It went 62 miles into space and was fished out of the Atlantic Ocean because it had a radio thing on it. So — I think this is play even at the saddest, saddest moment.

The harder it gets, the harder you have to play. It’s kind of hard to change gears and move on, but I am going to move on. So I’m back in the world, I’m inventing and doing my day job and everything, but occasionally, you just need to get out of your zone and you need to break with the past.

And so, one day, I went in and – I love my family, and I went to my beautiful hippie wife and I said, “Beautiful hippie wife, how do I get my mojo back?” Because as you go away from play, you have to come back in. And she goes, “Scruffy old husband, how do I know? I’m cooking dinner. Go ask the cosmos!” So I said — (Laughter) (Applause) Wow, wait! So I walked out and I said, “Okay, cosmos, what do you have for me?” It was snowing. No giant voice. So I went, “Well, that didn’t work.” But the next morning, something very strange happened. I got a call from a Hollywood casting agent who said, “Do you want to be a scientist on a reality TV show? And I heard everything but the reality. Actually the Dutch invented reality TV, isn’t that true? You invented Big Brother? Audience: Yes.

JC: Yeah, I think I’d rather be remembered for wooden shoes and windmills. So basically, I– ended up going out to California, expecting — I went through some trial process. They tested me. The only thing that I ever figured out, is that they liked me because I have bad hair.

That’s the only thing. They met me at the airport, and I was going to stand there and shake their hands, and instead, they put a blindfold on me, threw me into a ride, asked me questions. “Aliens control your thoughts, true or false?”

It’s harder than you think, because if they did, who’d control your thoughts… But basically, here is what it was. There were nine strangers, ten strangers. And I don’t want to give too much away, because it is available on Netflix and so on. That happens to be my charming wife. It’s the only wife I have, actually, so she’s charming. But basically, this is what happened.

Voice: Infrastructure breaks down.
Chaos reigns.
John Cohn – My Facebook friend.
Voice: This is the setting of The Colony.
John Cohn – Yeah, take that!
Voice: The Colony is a controlled experiment to see if 10 strangers can rebuild society in the wake of a global catastrophe.
John Cohn – Yeah, whatever.

So — it was an amazing experience. Especially because I am one of the more senior technical people at my –let’s just say it’s a very stable company, and I was not prepared. But we were 10 people, sleeping on the floor, and 2 beds, 3 toothbrushes between us, not a lot of water to wash…

I’m a vegetarian, remember? My first red meat was rat. Ate a lot of cat food, lot of dog food, but the main thing was that we were building stuff.

It was Discovery Channel and we had all sorts of stuff around that we could find and build things together. So we spent the hours that we weren’t being tormented, making things.

It was so great. It was like the toaster project. It was so wonderful. We were making stuff. And then, like here: just everyday objects you need after the apocalypse, like a flame thrower.

But the interesting thing is, it always had this
“Don’t try this at home!”
You know what?
That is the best way to get somebody to try something. The cool thing is, I was able to watch this out in the blogosphere, on Twitter and stuff like that, and get to say, “Wooh, man, look, I almost fried my eyebrows!” — Whatever!

So, I was able to watch this, and since then have been able to use this to talk to kids, a lot. Now the cool thing about it, is it was a total playful spirit. The weird thing is that, part of our play is making mistakes.

So for example, we didn’t have a lot of water for cleaning, but one day, it started raining. This is in LA. My nine industrious colleagues ran out and tried to catch every raindrop. And I said — I can’t tell you what I said ’cause it was reality TV, I went ‘beep, beep’ (Laughter) and I ran out the back and I threw my clothes on the ground. The rain was pouring down and the stink and dirt is coming off me and I turn around, and there’s a guy with a 100,000 dollar camera.

I’m like, “Dude, you wouldn’t!” He goes, “I’d pick up that sheet!” So, fade forward. I’m back at my work, trying to re-establish life as a serious technical person, and I get a call that I’m supposed to go down to headquarters, to talk to the communications people, because they wanted to know, “Tell us about this educational show you are on!”

So I drove — (Laughter) — 500 kilometers down there. I went in with the big boss. We were talking. Was supposed to be 20 minutes. Hour and 20 minutes. Okay. I’m driving home. I’m kind of a neurotic guy, so I call one of the other guys who was in there and ask,
“How do you think that went?”
“Oh, they loved it, it was awesome, they totally can’t wait to see it!” I was thinking about the kind of language, you know, “beep, beep, beep”. He said, “Don’t worry. As long as you kept your clothes on.” (Laughter)

So a couple of weeks later, I’m there in front of 160 people. This is after I picked up the sheet. I was pixellated, thank God.
But I’m going, “Oh, my kids are seeing this. My parents are seeing this. Oh my God, my bosses are seeing this!” The next time I saw that communications guy, his only comment was, “Dude, you should get more sun!” (Laughter)

And I was like — So you really don’t need to worry so much. Here is an interesting thing, though. I got really tuned in to social media and the ability to be able to project stuff out there. It was pretty amazing to be able to watch how this stuff magnified.

I got the first taste of that — How does this thing work, anyway?
This is a little bit of a strange point. I learned how to use social media for play from a 15 year old neighbor.

He said, “Hey, John, do you know anything about microwave plasma?” I went, “What?” He’d put a video out on YouTube that basically he was making plasma in a microwave. Have you ever done this? I’m using steel wool, because I couldn’t get his experiment to work here, so I’m improvising. That guy, Tom, in the sky, who is — the toaster project? I’m about to melt iron in a microwave. Isn’t that stranger than fact? But let’s see if we can get this to work. Let’s see if that —

Isn’t that just gorgeous?

I would suggest you do it in somebody else’s microwave. (Laughter) There is a whole subculture of bad microwave tricks.

This is a way of actually engaging your scientific mind and having fun. An interesting story — at least, I think it’s interesting — is about this headband. This is a funny thing about how things can be magnified on the internet, how your play can go out and affect other people.

Several years ago, 2007, I was in Shangai. On a building I saw these really garish lights and I made the only decision I could. I said, “I need to make a hat out of that!”

So I got some of the stuff and I went back to my lab and I was oscilloscoping this stuff and I figured out about 80 percent of it. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out about some of the cool kind of fades. So I put it out ont the internet. I put it out on one of these weird techie blogs.

A kid who was half my age, twice as smart figured that out. He made the code for something called the Arduino. That went out. A woman in New York picked that up, and had no idea who I was, but she did manage to take the picture of my son and put it on her web page.

I’m really delighted about it, and I’m using it in this.

Now, a strange kind of coincidence is, the reason I’m here with you today, has to do with this. I started experimenting with microcontrollers at my work. I started to see something about the internet of things. I got involved in a project with TU Delft called the Digital Delta, and they paid for my trip. That’s why I’m here. So I guess, what I would say, is, in the spirit of this, kind of in leaving, do try this at home.

I want to tell you, one interesting thing about this, is that this title of my talk, “Do try this at home”, this is a talk I’ve been giving for several years. I had no idea that was the name of this conference. So, I think that that is pretty interesting. What I would suggest that you do, is just find — how’s my hair? — find what it is that actually turns you on and indulge that passion, try some stuff, and do try this at home!

Thank you very much!

John Cohn

For a great guide about the Science of Play – Click Here

Author: Bliss

Dedicated to making a positive difference for people, animals, and this beautiful planet!