Building Brains Through Play

Recently I spent an evening talking with some people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They were reminiscing about how they used to “play”. There were no devices, no screens. Just a ton of fun outdoors. They played in ponds, swamps, lakes, junk yards, cranberry bogs, at the creek - basically wherever we could find some combination of mud, plants, and interesting things. That’s where we played. It was just plain fun!

One of the people told a story of how he and his friends found a jackpot in the form of a spool of electrical wire that usually was mounted on a telephone pole. He and his friends decided to make a zip-line. They tied it to two trees on a hill. One on the top and one on the bottom. The first attempt where they put a pipe around the wire and grabbed it to ride failed miserably. Friction deterred them. Then another of the kids remembered that his dad had electrical lubricant so they coated the entire wire, and tried again. Brave kid number three grabbed the pipe, and zipped 40 mph or so down the hill until he slammed into the tree with feet slapping around the tree and his near-lifeless body dropping to the ground.

The other kids gasped. Then ran down the hill and poked him with a stick (yeah - we used to do that when one of us screwed up). The zip-liner woke up in a blur, and popped back to life.

THIS was our childhood. No screens. Just play and roughhousing - a combination of body movement, scientific thinking, and creativity that caused these kids to build the zip line in the first place and try it out. Were there consequences? Yeah - some of us did not survive childhood - but most of us did.

Did we all turn into Polymaths? Nope. But those of us that were fed a steady diet of activity, creativity, curiosity, and language skills sure did! At age four, with candy being thrown at me to eat when I got it right, I learned that “bicycle” was “la bicyclette” in French. Must have helped my Neural networks somehow!

Sensibly Build Your Neural Network

Hadear’s guidance is honestly saying that we need to engage all of our senses in order to build a functioning neural network. We are born with a programmable memory and our network-building instructions come, in part, from our interactions with the outside world. So paying attention to how we engage our sensors to sense, and our bodies to learn to react can set us up well for either later success or failure in life. The Bauhaus movement combining arts and crafts, and the Waldorf school combining handiwork with brain work are 100% accurate for our biological neural network development.

Sports

Physical sports in a set routine can increase the energy flow in your body

Meditation

Through meditation or other techniques to focus, you can deepen your experience of being in your body rather than being your mind. Treat events from a detached platform of observation. Try to create/widen the gap between events that are occurring and your response to it.

This helps you control your negative habits and responses to triggers. We want to increase our ability to use productive habits for efficiency, and decrease our automatic reaction to triggers that cause a negative habitual response. Meditation creates this detachment.

Art & Language Skills

*** Incorporate Boundary-less learning and info from language masterss…

Science

“The secret to teaching kids to be polymaths comes from 4 things: train the body by doing sports, the creative mind thought art, scientific thinking through logic and problem solving and finally learn languages! This creates a very strong Neural-network in the brain that can be used for anything ”

— Hadear Marzooque

T.B.D.