When I was in grade school and high school, I loved to build things.
I loved to experiment. Most of my experiments I conducted in a little laboratory I created in a large closet off my second-floor bedroom. In my homemade alchemist’s den, I hoarded resistors and capacitors, coils of wire of various thicknesses and grades, batteries, switches, photoelectric cells, magnets, dangerous chemicals that I had secretly ordered from unsuspecting supply stores, test tubes and petri dishes, lovely glass flasks, Bunsen burners, scales. I delighted in my equipment. I remember building a “carbide cannon.” To make it, I welded a spark plug into one end of a tennis ball can, with wires leading from the contacts of the spark plug to my battery a safe distance away. After which I put some calcium carbide and water in the open end of the can and corked it. An explosive gas formed. Then, I fired the spark plug. The cannon made a monstrously loud bang, which could be heard all over the neighborhood.
Another project was a rocket, with a lizard passenger. I mixed my own rocket fuel. A fuel that burns too fast will explode like a bomb; a fuel that burns too slowly will fizzle like a barbecue grill. What I wanted was the right proportions of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate (all harmless individually but not in combination). At apogee, the capsule containing the lizard astronaut was ejected by a small charge of gunpowder, ignited by a mercury switch of my design. The capsule then floated back to earth attached to a parachute.
On some of my adventures, I had a school friend named John, a year older than me. Weekends, we would lie around his room or mine, bored, listening to Bob Dylan records and occasionally thinking of things to excite our imaginations. Sometimes we walked to Clark and Faye’s on Poplar Avenue, the best-stocked supply store in Memphis. There, we squandered whole Saturdays, adrift in the aisles of copper wire, socket wrenches, diodes and batteries, oddly shaped metallic brackets that we had no immediate use for but purchased anyway.
Our most successful collaboration was a light-borne communication device. The heart of the thing was a mouthpiece made out of the lid of a shoe polish can, with a section of a balloon stretched tightly across it. Onto this rubber membrane we attached a tiny piece of silvered glass, which acted as a mirror. A light beam was focused on the tiny mirror and reflected off it. When a person talked into the mouthpiece, the rubber vibrated. In turn, the tiny mirror quivered, and those quiverings produced a shimmering in the reflected beam, like the shimmering of sunlight reflected off a trembling lake. In that way, the information in the speaker’s voice was precisely encoded onto light, each rise and dip of uttered sound translating itself into a brightening or dimming of light. When reflected, the fluttering beam traveled across John’s cluttered bedroom to our receiver, which was built from largely off-the-shelf stuff: a photocell to convert varying intensities of light into varying intensities of electrical current, an amplifier, and a microphone. Finally, the original voice was reproduced on the other end.
There were many other creations. None of these projects were assigned in school. They were just things I did for fun in the long afternoons after school when I wasn’t wandering about Cornfield Pond. In fact, it was often the case that I didn’t have any definite project in mind. I just liked to mix chemicals and see what would happen. Or tinker with batteries and switches and wires. Many of my mixings and tinkerings didn’t lead to anything. They were merely explorations of the world and the hidden paths in my mind. I was at play.
Looking back on these projects and non-projects now, I can see that they were part of the development of my imagination. They were part of the secret world I inhabited—not the world of my teachers, not the world of my parents, not the world of houses and customs and laws, but a world of my own. In fact, I think there was something slightly rebellious and even subversive about these projects—for the very reason that they were not assigned or required by any of the authorities in the world. (John and I never saved the directions that came with new parts. We much preferred to figure things out on our own by trial and error.) Unconsciously, I was distancing myself from the world of structure, rules, and scheduled activities and giving free rein to my thoughts. I was scientifically inclined, and the various projects I’ve described were projects of science, but other young people with different inclinations and time on their hands might create poems or songs or papier-mâché animals.
In various ways, the escape from structure and schedule, the indulgence in space without time, the development of one’s inner world, and the full release of the imagination are all interconnected. The prominent New Zealand educator Brian Sutton-Smith, who spent his life studying play, believed that “the benefit play accords each child, who gains confidence in a variety of . . . pretense forms and thereby develops an inner, subjective life, [is] a life that becomes the child’s own relatively private possession . . . . [T]he earliest pretend play . . . serves as the basis for their development of the duality of private and public that we adults take for granted.”
In play, we live in a private world of our own creation. In play, rules are questioned, revised, or dispensed with altogether. Danish researcher Signe Juhl Møller and others have found that when children are playing, the meaning of a particular toy or object can change, leading to novel uses of the toy. “These perceptions and uses may violate the rules and norms outside or inside the play activity,” says Møller. When we play, we are free. We are free of authority. We are free of the grid. We are free of time. And we are left to roam through the halls of our minds. Canadian educator Sister Valerie Van Cauwenberghe says: “Play is the total of all the spontaneous, creative activities in which children freely choose to engage. The urge to teach must not conflict with the desire to learn.”
Our time-driven existence is diminishing the space for play and damaging our children. In a clinical report for the American Academy of Pediatrics, physician Kenneth R. Ginsburg writes that “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength.” Yet “[m]any . . . children are being raised in an increasingly hurried and pressured style that may limit the protective benefits they would gain from child-driven play.” A similar conclusion has been reached by psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and others, who have found that the amount of time for free play in children’s lives has decreased over the last few decades.
Sutton-Smith believed in the value of play for adults as well as for children. Activities just for fun and amusement. Time to let the mind rest. Time for daydreaming. Sometimes downright procrastination. A few years ago, Jihae Shin, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the business school of the University of Wisconsin (Madison), performed a simple experiment to test the impact of play and procrastination on creativity. Professor Shin asked people to come up with new business ideas. The participants were divided into three groups. The first group started throwing out ideas immediately. The second group, before throwing out ideas, was asked to first spend a few minutes playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, two popular video games from the 1990s. An independent group of business people rated the ideas and found that those in the second group, who had “procrastinated” for a few minutes, were noticeably more creative. Furthermore, Shin determined that another group, asked to play the games before being given the assignment, was no more creative than the first group. Evidently, the decisive factor in increasing creativity seems to have been allowing a period of time to ponder a given problem at a leisurely and subconscious level, exploring possibilities while at play. Seeding the mind with a particular problem before play may be crucial. In such a case, what appears as procrastination or avoidance of the problem might in fact be a beneficial use of the mind. (I will have more to say about what one might call the “prepared” mind in the next chapter.) As Einstein said, a lot of good thinking and problem solving occurs at the unconscious level. For which we need space and time.
Animal researchers have long noted that all of the more intelligent animals engage in some form of play. Monkeys play. Kittens chase each other and paw at a hanging string. Sea lions will toss sticks to each other. Dolphins will stop what they are doing when a large boat approaches and ride in its bow wave. I was once in the ocean in a small sailboat when a dolphin not only swam alongside us but catapulted itself over the stern. A hilarious video on YouTube shows a few minutes in the lives of some young crows. At first, the birds appear bored. Then one of them spots a low-hanging branch on a tree, flies up and grabs the branch, and swings back and forth on it. Nothing accomplished. But . . . The other crows notice how much fun their friend is having and join in, taking turns swinging on the branch. Psychologist Anthony Pellegrini and others have concluded that play, in animals as well as humans, allows individuals to focus on means rather than ends. In play, an individual can try out new things, revise, modify, explore. Pass time pleasantly and, in subtle ways, develop the inner self. These researchers argue that the non-goal-oriented activities we call play have been a critical part of the development of problem-solving skills and emotional awareness in animals with more advanced cognitive abilities.
Pellegrini, who is also an educator, argues for more recess time in American schools. He notes that in most East Asian primary schools, for example, children are given a ten-minute break every forty minutes or so; in middle school they receive a ten-minute break every forty-five minutes; and in high school a ten-minute break every fifty minutes. According to various studies, when children come back from these breaks, they are more relaxed, more attentive, and more productive. Pellegrini notes that the trend in America has been a decrease in recess time.
My MIT colleague Woodie Flowers found a wonderful way to bring play into the classroom. Way back in the early 1970s, while a grad student, Flowers created a course at MIT called Introduction to Design. A central element of that course, which continues to this day, is to divide the students into teams and ask the teams to build a machine or robot that can accomplish a designated task. Over the years, the tasks have been such things as putting a round peg in a square hole; picking up a bunch of small items one at a time and carrying them from A to B; climbing up a steep ramp, and so on. Each team is given a box of identical supplies to work with: cardboard tubes, metal strips and cages, cords, motors, sprockets, rubber bands, wheels, gears and linkages, wires and batteries, diodes, silicon chips (in the later years), and photocells. The students have a few months to build their machines. At the end of the semester, there’s a grand competition.