The Tenth International Conference on Neuroesthetics

May 26th and 27th, 2012
150 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley

‘It is human to have a long childhood’, the psychiatrist Erik Erikson (1902-94) wrote, ‘it is civilized to have an even longer childhood.’

We humans distinguish ourselves as as neotenous – we preserve juvenile characteristics into our adulthood and retain a lifelong capacity for engaging in play, a trait we do not even share with chimpanzees. Yet for many decades, the only research conducted on play behaviour was in relation to animals and children, and adults are rarely understood in terms of play, regarded instead as poets, musicians, dancers, comedians, inventors, athletes, explorers or entrepreneurs.

Play forms the very foundation of our identity – we are ‘only human when at play’, as Friedrich Schiller argues in his Aesthetical Education of Man (1794). Play motivates interaction and exploration with our physical and social worlds, unleashes the creative imagination, facilitates life-long cognitive and behavioural flexibility, and has enabled humans to succeed in times of change and uncertainty for millions of years. Play is not an aspect of culture; rather, as Johan Huizinga points out in Homo Ludens (1938), culture itself is an expression of play.

Play behavior is not only the origin of our cultural ingenuity, but is intimately linked to the shape and function of that most ingenious feature of our biology, our brain. According to the social brain hypothesis, our large human brains have evolved to deal with the increasing complexity that characterizes the social life of primates. It is not only our ability to maintain different relationships with large numbers of people that makes unprecedented cognitive demands, but the sophisticated forms of play behaviour that facilitate such bonds – ritual, dancing, singing and laughter. Neuroscientists have begun to unravel how play affects brain maturation, social competency, impulse control and stress reduction, how it engenders positive emotions by stimulating endorphins and dopamine, the role of mirror neurons in collective enactments of joy, or the effect of rough-and-tumble play in increasing dendritic arborization in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is involved with cooperation and social competency.

We aim to highlight the importance of play as a fundamental expression of humanity, chart its ontological significance and stake out the role of play in the 21st century, while indulging in some play ourselves!