We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play.

Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more “playful culture” in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.

- Alvaro

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Can We Play?

– By Dr. David Elkind

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children’s time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Hofferth has also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure, not including watching television, has increased from 30 minutes to more than three hours. It is no surprise, then, that childhood obesity is now considered an epidemic.

But the problem goes well beyond obesity. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

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Today we have a number of industry announcements:

1) New editions of these Blog Carnivals (collections of blog posts around specific topics)

• Encephalon (neuroscience)
• Grand Rounds (medicine)
• Education (guess!)
• Happiness

2) The Neurotechnology Industry Organization has launched a Neurotech Job Board dedicated to commercial neuroscience (mostly focused on clinical applications, like drugs and devices, not so much on prevention, health & wellness). And the Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center is looking for a Research Project Manager.

3) The American Association for the Advancement of Science has finally released a report of the human enhancement workshop that took place in June 2006. Read more about it at Zack’s blog.

4) Stephanie West Allen and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz announce the Schedule of Events for their Brains On Purpose™ Seminars (”looking at conflict and the process of conflict resolution through the lens of neuroscience”): Colorado in October and Portland in November.

5) Registration is now open for my class on The Science of Brain Health and Brain Fitness (more here), October 9–30, at UC Berkeley Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

6) A couple of great Read the rest of this entry »