play

A pioneer in research on play, Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults — and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age. (Recorded at Serious Play in May 2008, in Pasadena, California. Duration: 26:42.)  source: http://www.ted.com/speakers/stuart_brown

Dr. Stuart Brown's research shows play is not just joyful and energizing — it's deeply involved with human development and intelligence. Through the National Institute for Play, he's working to better understand its significance.

The National Institute for Play is a  non-profit public benefit corporation committed to bringing the unrealized knowledge, practices and benefits of play into public life. It is gathering research from diverse play scientists and practitioners, initiating projects to expand the clinical scientific knowledge of human play and translating this emerging body of knowledge into programs and resources which deliver the transformative power of play to all segments of society.

They envision a near term future where all existing scientific research related to human play — currently scattered across a range of scientific disciplines and only partially identified as human-play-related — is integrated and the field of Human Play is a credentialed discipline in the scientific community.

source: http://www.nifplay.org/