PERSONALITY PLAY TYPES

Researchers: Stuart Brown Key Constructs: The Joker The Kinesthete The Explorer The Competitor The Director The Collector The Artist/Creator The Storyteller Primary References: Brown, Stuart with Christopher Vaughan (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery: New York. Elaboration: The Joker

A jokers play always revolves around some kind of nonsense (Brown, 2009). Nonsens is the first type of human play we engage in: all baby talk begins with nonsense. Parents make infants laugh by making silly sounds, blowing raspberries, and generally being foolish (Brown, 2009). Later, the class clown finds social acceptance by making other people laugh (Brown, 2009). Adult jokers carry on that social strategy by telling jokes and playing practical jokes (Brown, 2009).

The Kinesthete

Kinesthetes are people who like to move, who need to move in order to think (Brown, 2009). This category includes athletes, but also those who find themselves happiest moving as part of dance, swimming, or walking (Brown, 2009). While kinesthetes may play games, competition is not the main focus- it is only a forum for engaging in their favorite activity (Brown, 2009).

The Explorer

Exploration becomes their preferred avenue into the alternative universe of play- their way of remaining creative and provoking the imagination (Brown, 2009). Exploring can be physical- literally going to new places (Brown, 2009). Exploring can be emotional- searching for a new feeling or deepening of the familiar through music, movement, or flirtation (Brown, 2009). Exploring can be mental- researching a new subject or discovering new experiences and points of view while remaining in your armchair (Brown, 2009).

The Competitor

The competitor is a person who breaks through into the euphoria and creativity of play by enjoying a competitive game with specific rules, and enjoys playing to win (Brown, 2009). The competitor loves fighting to be number one (Brown, 2009). The games can be solitary or social- either a solitary video game or a team game like baseball- and they may be actively participated in or observed as a fan (Brown, 2009). Competitors make themselves known in social groups, where the fun comes from being the top person in the group, or in business, in which money or perks serve to keep score (Brown, 2009).

The Director

Directors enjoy planning and executing scenes and events (Brown, 2009). Many directors are unconscious of their motives and style of operating, but they love the power, even when theyre playing in the B-movie league (Brown, 2009). They are born organizers (Brown, 2009). At their best, they are the party givers, the instigators of great excursions to the beach, the dynamic center of the social world (Brown, 2009). At their worst, they are manipulators (Brown, 2009).

The Collector

The thrill of play for the collector is to have and to hold the most, the best, the most interesting collection of objects or experiences (Brown, 2009). Collectors may enjoy collecting as a solitary activity, or they may find it the focus of an intense social connection with others who have similar obsessions (Brown, 2009).

The Artist/Creator

For the artist/creator, joy is found in making things (Brown, 2009). Artist/creators may end up showing their creations to the world and even selling them for millions, or may never show anyone what they make (Brown, 2009). The point is to make something- to make something beautiful, something functional, something goofy. Or just to make something work (Brown, 2009).

The Storyteller

For the storyteller, the imagination is the key to the kingdom of play (Brown, 2009). Storytellers are, of course, novelists, playwrights, cartoonists, and screenwriters, but they are also those whose greatest joy is reading those novels and watching those movies, people who make themselves part of the story, who experience the thought sand emotions of characters in the story (Brown, 2009). Performers of all sorts are storytellers, creating an imaginative world through dance, acting, magic tricks, or lectures (Brown, 2009).

PLAY AT THE BEGINNING OF LIFE Attunement

When a mother and baby lock eyes, both mother and child are synchronizing the neural activity in the right cortex of each brain. If we wired Mom and baby and took an electroencephalogram (EEG), you would see their brain currents are actually in sync. This is called attunement (Brown, 2009). Their brain rhythms are getting in tune, performing a kind of mind-meld that is a very pure form of intimacy (Brown, 2009). When attunement occurs, both parent and child experience a joyful union (Brown, 2009).

Body and Movement Play

Infants begin to play to make sense of their bodies very early (Brown, 2009). This play program really starts in the womb. However, once the baby is born, the urge to squire and wave arms continues, as soon as they can get up on their hands and knees at three to nine months they learn to rock and then crawl (Brown, 2009). They stick things in their mouths and gnaw with their gums. They roll food around with their tongues, sucking it in and spitting it out, enjoying the process immensely (Brown, 2009). Later, with spoon in hand, they may catapult or fling a glob of food across the room (Brown, 2009). Movement is primal and accompanies all the elements of play we are examining, even word or image movement in imaginative play (Brown, 2009). The play-driven pleasures associated with exploratory body movements, rhythmic early speech, locomotor and rotational activity are done for their own sake; they are pleasurable and intrinsically playful. Yet they also help sculpt the brain (Brown, 2009).

Object Play

Curiosity about and manipulation of objects is a pervasive, innately fun pattern or play, and represents its own state of playfulness (Brown, 2009). Early on, spoons, teething rings, or foods become objects of play (Brown, 2009). After a toddler is age fifteen months of so, his or her toys take on highly personalized characteristics (Brown, 2009). As skills in manipulating objects develop, the richer the circuits in the brain become (Brown, 2009).

We find pleasure in the physical part of object play, in putting together a puzzle, kicking a ball through the goal, or simply tossing a paper wad in the wastebasket (Brown, 2009). Object play with the hands creates a brain that is better suited for understanding and solving problems of all sorts (Brown, 2009).

Imaginative Play

Imagination is perhaps the most powerful human ability. It allows us to create simulated realities that we can explore without giving up access to the real world (Brown, 2009). The earliest evidence of imaginative play comes at about the age of two in the form of fragmentary stories (Brown, 2009). The imperative to create narrative occurs worldwide in children and is an integral aspect of their play (Brown, 2009). But whatever the age level or degree of completeness of the story, there is a gleeful verbal experience as the storymaker spins out the story line (Brown, 2009). After this, children engage in imaginative play often, naturally and energetically moving freely back and forth between reality and pretend. Determining what is pretend and what is real is usually more important to the adults listening or watching than to the child engaged in the make-believe adventures (Brown, 2009). As kids grow older, the line between what is pretend and what is real becomes more solid, but imaginative play continues to nourish the spirit (Brown, 2009). Throughout life, imagination remains a key to emotional resilience and creativity (Brown, 2009).

Social Play

Humans are social animals, and play is the gas that drives the engine of social competence (Brown, 2009). Play allows society to function and individual relationships among many to flourish (Brown, 2009). Below are a few identifiable subtypes of social play (Brown, 2009): o Friendship and Belonging Kids begin social play with other kids first through parallel play. Two kids may sit next to each other, both playing with sand, water, crayons, or blocks and cognizant of each others presence, but not interacting directly or emotionally with each other (Brown, 2009). By the time kids are four to six years old, mutual play becomes the crucible in which empathy for others is refined (Brown, 2009). This mutual play is the basic state of friendship that operates throughout our lives (Brown, 2009). o Rough-and-Tumble Play Rough-and-tumber play is necessary for the development and maintenance of social awareness, cooperation, fairness, and altruism (Brown, 2009). Lack of experience with rough-and-tumble play hampers the normal giveand-take necessary for social mastery, and has been linked to poor control of violent impulses later in life (Brown, 2009).

Rough-and-tumber play is generally defined as friendly or play-fighting and may be extended more broadly to any active play that includes body contact among children (Brown, 2009). In practice the meaning is also extended to superhero play, typically influenced by television characters (Brown, 2009). Celebratory and Ritual Play Celebratory and ritual play may be a birthday celebration, a dance, a holiday dinner, or a seventh-inning round of Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Brown, 2009). Children dont spontaneously initiate these events, but such ritual social experiences create a reservoir of good memories and help them develop a taste for ritual play as adults (Brown, 2009). Serious adult rituals often are accompanied by a celebratory play, like the reception after a wedding (Brown, 2009). In adults, ritual and celebration is often necessary both to provide an official excuse to play and to keep this play patter under social control (Brown, 2009).

Storytelling and Narrative Play

Storytelling has been identified as the unit of human understanding. It occupies a central place in early development and learning about the world, oneself, and ones place in it (Brown, 2009). A critical function of the dominant left hemisphere of the brain is to continually make up stories about why things are they way they are, which becomes our understanding of the world (Brown, 2009). Stories are a way of putting disparate pieces of information into a unified context. As we grow, the drama of stories enliven us and the narrative structure tells us something about how things are and how things should be (Brown, 2009). Stories remain central to understanding well after childhood. When people make judgments abour right and wrong, even in politics or the jury box, they often do so as a result of a story that they construct about events that have happened (Brown, 2009). Storytelling has the capacity to produce a sense of timelessness, pleasure, and an altered state of vicarious involvement that identifies narrative and storytelling with states of play (Brown, 2009).

Transformative-Integrative and Creative Play

Because play is all about trying on new behaviors and thoughts, it frees us from established patterns (Brown, 2009). For children, who are always in the process of changing and becoming, transformative play is a constant part of their world, and often goes unnoticed (Brown, 2009). Sometimes, though, in kids who are really stuck, play can provide a dramatic and obvious example of transformation (Brown, 2009). When we engage in fantasy play at any age, we bend the reality of our ordinary lives, and in the process germinate new ideas and ways of being (Brown, 2009).

For adults, daydreams may give rise to new ways of doing business. Fantasies may lead to new love. Visualization may lead to a remodeled house or new invention (Brown, 2009). Creative play takes our minds to places we have never been, pioneering new paths that the real world can follow (Brown, 2009). By carriejill at 11/04/2009 - 20:35 Motivations