Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain | Huberman Lab Essentials
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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where past episodes are revisited for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This episode discusses the biology, psychology, and utility of play. Much of childhood development centers around play, whether organized or spontaneous. Adults also need to play.
Play is generated through connectivity of many brain areas, with a key area being the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem area rich with neurons that make endogenous opioids (e.g., enkephalin). These are self-made opioids, not related to the opioid crisis. Play evokes small amounts of opioid release, creating a chemical state that allows the prefrontal cortex—responsible for executive function (predictions, assessing contingencies like "if this, then that")—to get smarter. Normally rigid, the prefrontal cortex works in concert with primitive circuitries. During play, PAG opioids enable it to take on different roles and explore contingencies safely.
Play is exploration of contingencies (if A, what happens? If B, what happens? If someone does C, what do I do?) in low-stakes environments, expanding the catalog of potential outcomes. This enriches emotional, intellectual, and social lives. Tinkerers, creatives, and those building technologies/art maintain strong play elements. Toddlers reveal fundamental rules of brain-world interaction through play. Play allows exploring outcomes in low-stakes settings, assuming uncomfortable roles outside normal life, relating to PAG opioids enabling prefrontal cortex expansion.
Tool for less playful people: Engage in playful mindset by expanding outcomes you're willing to entertain. Put yourself in scenarios where you might not be top performer, like playing games you're not good at. Example: Friends play cards with low-stakes gambling; join to learn about others (cheaters, rigid players) and self-reactions, even if stakes low. Increase willingness to enter unfamiliar rules/low proficiency activities for self/others insights, opening prefrontal cortex circuits to explore possibilities beyond rigid if-then patterns. Play engages neuroplasticity of prefrontal cortex, making it more plastic across all scenarios (one prefrontal cortex for everything).
Play postures signal play in animals/humans. Dogs/wolves lower head, extend paws forward, make eye contact to call play (non-aggressive). Humans use head tilt with eyes open as universal play signal, often with raised eyebrows. Soft eyes (opened eyelids, pursed lips, sometimes smile) contrast aggressive narrowed eyes/vergence. Partial postures mimic threatening ones non-threateningly: animals approach slowly with fur down (no piloerection to look bigger); humans shrink body size unless highly competitive (e.g., football, boxing).
Childhood dirt clod wars (age 10-11): Built dirt mounds, threw clods with rules—no rocks packed in, could run/jump on opponent's mound, stop if hit in head to check damage. One kid raged with rocks/sticks after head hit, violating rules. Illustrates agreed stakes, rule testing/breaking in group play, separate from sports' defined rules (yellow/red cards). All animals/humans do low-stakes contingency testing; groups up stakes, someone breaks rules. Reflect: Did we learn proper play? Do we overreact to playful jabs/sarcasm?
Role play (children/adults assuming distinct roles: leader/follower, solo/group) expands prefrontal algorithms for predictions from new standpoints, teaching brain flexibility. Play tests/experiments, expanding capacity throughout lifespan—not just fun.
Effective play: Explore contingencies low-stakes to expand prefrontal function for flexibility/creativity outside play. PAG releases endogenous opioids (relaxation, soft eyes, head tilts, prefrontal expansion). Requires low adrenaline (epinephrine). Review: "In Search of the Neurobiological Substrates for Social Playfulness in Mammalian Brains" by Jaak Panksepp & Stephen Siviy (Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews). High adrenaline inhibits play; high opioids increase it. Play state: Focus/seriousness (epinephrine + dopamine for motivation), plus liberated opioids from low stakes (not high concern like big bets/Super Bowl).
Playfulness (low adrenaline, exploratory focus) accesses novel behaviors unavailable when outcome-obsessed. Advice: Already playful? Expand to new groups/forms. Top question: Keep brain young/learn better? Use play (evolved for neuroplasticity) at any age—like development. Play learns life rules, tests real-world function. Play is most powerful portal to plasticity: High opioid/low epinephrine opens play; inside, focus deploys brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and growth factors rewiring circuits.
Evidence (emerging data/anecdotal): Playful adults (low-stakes, focused, low adrenaline/not super competitive) sustain plasticity. Example: Physicist Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize, Caltech, Manhattan Project)—lifelong mischievous tinkerer. Books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Picked locks at Los Alamos, spread secret docs in office (not public). Cultivated playfulness to see world differently, make physics discoveries, evolve life relationship.
Not naturally playful, but adopt stance: Explore focused contingencies with low stakes for fun. Particular play forms best for general neuroplasticity: Novel movement (different speeds/angles). Runners (sagittal plane) should add dance/sports with dynamic movements (jumping, lateral/angled, ducking, leaping).
Dynamic movements that aren't strictly linear open portals for plasticity because they mimic brain circuitry associated with play. These movements engage the vestibular system (balance system in the inner ear), which relates to the cerebellum (mini brain at the back of the brain). The cerebellum integrates visual information directly. For more depth on vestibular system and motor movements for plasticity, refer to the episode on how to learn faster.
Engaging in play with dynamic movements or varying speeds—like dance or soccer (moving in different dimensions)—activates play-related circuitry, provided you don't take it too seriously and avoid high levels of epinephrine.
Chess expands plasticity. A 2017 paper in the International Journal of Research in Education and Science titled "Is chess just a game or is it a mirror that reflects a child's inner world?" shows that in chess, two players move pieces with different rules and movement capabilities, requiring each player to assume multiple identities with different interaction rules during one game. Chess serves as a substrate for exploring multiple roles and characters, unlike video games where players stick to one avatar or role.
Recommendation: Pick activities allowing adoption of different roles within the activity, avoiding rigidly linear structures. This departs from the narrow view that exercise is the only route to plasticity. Play involves dynamically exploring movements, thoughts, and roles, which is how the brain learns new things.
Personal play identity has four components: how you play, your personality, socioculture and environment, and economics and technology. These bring together aspects of how we react to play scenarios in youth into adult contexts.
Reflect on childhood at age 10:
- Were you competitive or cooperative (not mutually exclusive)?
- Did you prefer playing alone, with one or two close friends, or in large groups?
- Did you enjoy being the leader one moment and a follower the next?
- Were you okay with role switches midway through a game?
- How did you feel about switching teams mid-game (e.g., from winning to losing team to even things out)? Being moved off a winning team signals value as a player, but joining the losing team could evoke different feelings.
Early adolescence (10-14 years old) is a peak for social, play, motor, and psychosocial development, including learning hierarchies with same/opposite sex peers. Reflecting here provides insight into adult behavior in activities, work, relationships.
Developmental biology and psychology show no strict child-adult divide; transitions occur around age 25 in neuroplasticity mechanisms, but development spans the entire lifespan as one long arc influenced by genetics, lifestyle, accidents, injury, disease.
How we learn to play at 10-12 impacts play and interactions through teenage years and adulthood. Play is the substrate for nervous system changes: from hyperconnected neurons to proficient circuits with others less accessible.
Play explores contingencies with low stakes, accessing neurochemicals like elevated endogenous opioids and low epinephrine to open neuroplasticity.
Brain circuits for play (back to front and within the body) persist from development into adulthood; they are not pruned away. Biology is efficient and does not waste resources—if play circuits weren't important in adulthood, they would be gone. They remain available now and ongoing.
Suggestion: Use these play circuits.
Thank you for joining this discussion on the biology, psychology, and power of play, and for your interest in science.
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