A section from Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An argument for the Utopian Spirit

Witnessing a murmuration can be startling and pleasurable. Starlings, an otherwise unremarkable little bird, when amassed in the hundreds, create a fantastic airborne display of agility and coordination that seems to defy the limits of natural phenomenon. Though ornithologist puzzled over murmuration for years, they now believe the birds take flight en masse to avoid a predator. And it is true that they do take flight if startled. A loud noise, as we all know, can cause a field of birds feeding and hidden in tall grass to erupt and rise like a cloud.

However, what keeps the starlings in the air creating intricate patterns for many minutes? They may be creating a diversionary tactic—a sort of One-for-All, All-for-One ploy—to confuse a predatory bird, but is it too absurd to say that their choreography gives them pleasure? At the beach we watch seagulls floating on wind currents and diving and rising off cliffs with no obvious intent at evading a predator. Do seagulls get off on demonstrating their airborne calisthenics?¹

The urban pigeon is a lowly, pedestrian bird often defamed as a rat with wings. It doesn’t evoke sympathy as it pecks along sidewalks, only to slowly waddle away as foot traffic approaches. Maybe the pigeons’ relentless search for food arouses hostility in us as an avoidance mechanism, after all these birds appear to be working very hard for minuscule scraps. Nonetheless, there are places in each city where the roosting pigeons take on an acrobatic aerial performance. Lifting together, climbing to a height to catch an updraft and then, remarkably, all swooshing downward only to rise in unison to the right or the left and circle around to do their pattern all over again. Each pass performed somewhat more cumbersomely compared to their tiny cousins the starlings, yet they still maintain a tighter coordination than we would expect from these potbellied scavengers.

In the park near my home a family of Cooper’s Hawks established a nest. One evening while walking through the park I saw an adult hawk performing a feat of avian aeronautics—swooping down repeatedly behind an off-leash dog and then shooting straight up narrowly missing the backside of the dog. During these feats of avian skill, the dog’s owner was some distance away, with his back to his dog, and deeply engrossed in a conversation with a neighbor and unaware of the hawk’s shenanigans. The dog was oblivious too, all the while pushing its nose studiously through the field of grass during the several minutes that the hawk was dive bombing him. At first, I thought the bird was trying to chase the dog away, but that didn’t seem its intent. Was the hawk practicing its technique of hunting as if the dog was a convenient target for the bird’s prey? Maybe. Or was the dog the target of play?

Researchers of animal behavior resist anthropomorphic characterizations of their behavior, so while animal offspring cavort when young this behavior is considered muscle motor development and faux attacks among the young are simply rehearsals for adult life. What’s discounted, if not ignored completely, are those exaggerated motions that result in tumbling and leaping. Dog owners recognize this behavior extending beyond their canine’s formative period into adulthood.

We may hesitate to refer to this behavior as play since it seems spontaneous and instinctual, and much removed from our notion of play as peculiarly a human endeavor. It may be human hubris for us to believe our mental agility, as evident with chess, or any competitive sport, is a prime characteristic of play due to our unique frontal cortex.

But what to make of the fact that rats laugh when two of them are tumbling around? Recent neuroscience discoveries have replaced the early emphasis on cognition for emotion and place the origins of play impulses in the ancient brainstem of animals (including us!) not the more recent neocortex of the brain.

Further study of rats demonstrated that they played with added intensity when introduced to their cellmates after of a period of isolation. And, most disturbingly, when young rats are deprived of play, they grow up paranoid and sexually awkward, displaying the identical well-documented anti-social behavior in humans. The recent shift in neuroscientific inquiry, away from what could be broadly characterized as disruptive, anti-social behavior (which is plentifully funded) to affective states of behavior, recognizes in animals that their pleasurable exercise of muscle, of skillful balance, and timing resonates with human activity, especially the young, as play. The research into the pleasure sensing areas of the cerebral cortex, has moved on to discovering, through more refined scanning, that the evolution of the mammalian cerebellum, that part of the brain that sits below and behind the right and left brain, the cerebral cortex, plays a significant role in mental development. The cerebellum, the “little brain,” until recently, was discounted as merely the automatic nervous system responder, that sent signals to the muscles, as a switching station, receiving and sending information to the cerebral cortex.

But with 69 billion neurons, the cerebellum dwarfs the size of the cerebral cortex with 16 billion neurons. The human cerebellum is much larger in comparison to our next of kin primates and therefore evolved to foster cognitive advances. Some scientists speculate that the pre-human cerebellum increased three – to fourfold – in the last million years.

What has been discovered in the last decade, or so, is that the cerebellum controls more than motor functions; it continuously updates its perceptions to refine its predictions and anticipations of changed circumstances to the cerebral cortex. It creates in this process models, which are memory. These updated prediction formations, unique to it, govern not only the muscular structure of the body, but also the cognitive functions. The cerebellum’s models pertain to social interactions, the behavior of others, and forms the basis for the mental, social, and emotional processes of experience. Here lies the foundation for the cognitive processes in the prefrontal area of the cerebral cortex. And here we have the beginnings of early human culture creation as our large “little brain” is responsible for language, sophisticated hunting gear, decorations of the body and material culture, and complex sociality.

In other words, the older part of the mammalian brain evolved to feed the newest portion of the brain, the one we are so proud of. It’s not poetic license to say our animal brain formed our human brain.

The human baby first registers its environment through its senses via the cerebral cortex then onto the cerebellum, which plays the predominant role in establishing the foundation of cause-and-effect relationships. That knowledge is then transferred back to the cerebral cortex. The cerebellum consists of a right and left hemisphere duplicating in structure what is popularly called the right and left brain. As the baby grows, so too does the working memory located in the cerebellum, which grows many times in the first year of life suggesting that it precedes and initiates the development of the cerebral cortex.

Even before babies gain control of their motor skills, they are absorbing the vocal signals and facial expressions of their primary care figure. Researchers call this a right-brain-to-right-brain communication, which refers to the fact that signals received in the frontal cortex are transmitted to the cerebellum that processes the raw material and sends in back so that the body reacts. Adults play with babies to evince their laughter, joy, excitement, and surprise. In the first two years of the child’s life the right brain absorbs non-verbal communication like these play episodes that increases neural connectivity, in the cerebellum, which, in turn, enhances cerebral plasticity. Play as right-brain-to-right-brain communication, is vital for these early months of brain development when the right brain is dominant. The quality of all forms of future play depend on a rich experience in these early months. The stimulation to interact through the release of dopamine motivates the baby to explore its environment and this continues until the development of the reasoning, analytical left brain begins socialization.

And for the baby, neuroscientists have been able to document that play is the means to inform the cerebellum and is pivotal for the healthy development of the brain’s functions. The lack of social interaction is detectable in the cerebellum. Whether the child was raised in a restrictive environment, like an orphanage, or becomes dependent upon screen time for entertainment, the cerebellum doesn’t register interaction and the child grows up to be a bystander to life.

[First paragraphs of the section on Play]