Reflections on learning, playfulness, boosting creativity, collaboration, and a motivational mindset

“In the quest to create the ultimate learning environment to enable individuals to acquire knowledge and new behaviors, it appears that play has a big role.”

Early-years entrepreneurs

I remember vividly when I was around eight or nine years old, a friend of mine came over to play. After the usual greetings we’d ask the question: “What do you want to play?” It could have been anything from setting up shop in our front garden to exchanging comic books and other magazines with passers by and neighbours. Other activities included playing house or making and selling perfume made from water and petals from my mum’s roses.

I can recall the feelings in those moments; that almost magical, hopeful, and trusting openness mixed with curiosity and a heightened sense of engagement. A naive disregard for any given outcome quite possibly because when we’re in play mode, we tend to be very present, and our attention and focus on the here and now. It felt as though nothing else existed—this was our whole world.

That’s playfulness for me.

Using playfulness to enhance learning

We can all agree that continuous learning is the new competitive advantage, which makes sense because how else would we navigate constantly changing environments? However, there is nothing new about this, human beings have always been learning, right from the beginning of time. That’s how we survived and thrived.

“It’s just that now the learning curve got extremely steep as change accelerated, and we need to become more purposeful, deliberate, and picky in our approach to it.”

In the quest to create the ultimate learning environment to enable individuals to acquire knowledge and new behaviors, it appears that play has a big role.

It’s been a while now since the gaming industry realized that playing accelerates learning, teamwork, and the acquisition of a whole roster of skills, including strategic thinking, creativity, and collaboration amongst other important cognitive and emotional elements that play a fundamental role in the learning process.

Let’s bring in a little neuroscience to help us understand why learning and playfulness are so intimately linked.

What happens in our brain when we want to learn something?

Learning something implies that you’re acquiring the knowledge or the knowhow of something you didn’t know up until that point. It may not be a very ‘comfortable’ place to be in since we usually derive security, confidence, and identity from what we know.

Our brain wants to spend as much time as possible in reflexive mode, doing things that come easy without much energy investment, with our attention acting mostly as a diffused light—not particularly focused on anything specific.

“We always knew that learning wasn’t all fun and games; it includes an element of effort and work. Acknowledging this can help us keep on the lifelong learner pathway rather than lifelong quitters.”

To learn, we need to focus. The thing is that when we decide to focus, our brain switches on a set of circuits that involve the frontal cortex and other elements to try to understand what the neurologist, Andrew Huberman, calls DPO (Duration, Path, Outcome). Ultimately, it's our brain assessing how long the task will take, how you’ll carry it out, and the end result. Take the current COVID-19 pandemic for example, our brains are full-on running DPOs assessing situations to desperately grasp the extent of the work they need to do.

As we work to bring our brain to focus, it runs this assessment, and adrenaline is secreted in the brainstem and body, which brings us into a state of alertness, slight discomfort, anxiety and agitation.

The science behind playful learning

When author Carol Dwek was researching for her book, Mindset, she studied a group of kids that were very good at solving maths and puzzles. These kids were enjoying themselves doing the problem sets that they knew they couldn’t get right. The process of solving them was engaging and fun to them.

It comes much easier to children where play is an important component. As we grow older and activities are less ‘fun’, our adult brains have to work very hard to change the algorithms learned. However, if we manage to bring alertness and focus together, then the neurochemicals converge to mark the synapsis for learning.

“The agitation and stress you feel at the beginning of the process when you are trying to lean into something and cannot focus is a gate you have to pass through to get to the focus component.” 

If you persist, you will feel rewarded and begin feeling joy and low levels of excitement.

Play and learning are intimately connected in the form of circuits of neurotransmitters that are triggered at different points in time, putting in motion processes of neuroplasticity, i.e., changes in our brains in response to experience.

Adrenaline helps you feel good even if you’re making a big effort, as it rewards you for staying on the path you think is the right one. If we persist and manage to stay on the learning path after the agitation and stress phase, the reward pathways involving dopamine step in. Another reason why dopamine is so powerful in this process of neural plasticity is that it has the ability to buffer adrenaline, meaning that its presence avoids adrenaline to reach a certain threshold, at which point the brain will say, “that’s it, I quit”. Dopamine keeps adrenaline at bay and keeps you going.

So, by slogging through the portal of agitation and stress into a state of alertness and focus to acquire the knowledge, you shall be rewarded by a shot of dopamine.

Dopamine evoked through play and humor

Have you ever been part of a team, working like mad, maybe finding yourself in the worst situation and somebody cracks a joke, and all of a sudden, it’s like you have energy now that you didn’t have a second before? A kind of loosening or a lightening up takes place. That’s neural energy—its dopamine.

Dopamine keeps us coming for more; more of this internal reward, and it’s rare that we forget events associated with dopamine because they signal to us that whatever’s happening now is good! In turn, we’ll likely remember what we learn in a playful environment.

We must also bear in mind how fundamental deep sleep and rest are because neuroplasticity (which enables learning) is triggered by intense focus, but it occurs during deep sleep and rest.