The Ball Read online

  Chapter One

  Play Ball

  Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

  Heraclitus, fifth century BC

  Play is a funny thing to get serious about. When you think about it, asking why we play ball or any other game violates the most basic rule of all—what could be called the rule of Nike: just do it. When a child is invited by a friend to pretend she’s a penguin or under attack by aliens from outer space, she doesn’t ask why. She happily begins to waddle and flap her wings or dives in a panic behind the couch to avoid enemy phaser guns. We even have a term for the kid or adult who breaks the rules of play and ruins it for everyone else: spoilsport, which the psychologist William James famously traces back to the shah of Persia visiting England and stuffily declining an invitation to the Epsom Derby, reasoning, “It is already known to me that one horse can run faster than another.”

  Though they exist on different ends of the play spectrum, both the shah-spoilsport and the girl-penguin under alien attack would probably agree on one thing: play is silly. Or in the academic phrasing of evolutionary psychologist Gordon Burghardt, play is “of limited immediate function.” Over the years, scholars of play (yes, there are such people) have tried to outdo each other in articulating the pointlessness of this essential human activity. Carl Diem described it as “purposeless activity, for its own sake.” The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga characterized play as being “not serious” and an activity “connected with no material interest.” But the hands-down winner was Roger Caillois, a French intellectual who defined it as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money,” before proceeding to waste another 200 pages writing about it.

  Anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and ethologists have all taken a turn at defining play. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, even Tom took a pass at it. After managing to trade the pleasure of whitewashing his Aunt Polly’s 30-yard-long front fence for an apple, a kite, a dead rat on a string, a tin soldier, and a dozen other treasures—all by making fence painting look like the most fun a boy could ever have on a summer’s afternoon—he mused that “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

  The psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, admits that defining play is as bad as explaining a joke, but dissects the punch line nevertheless. In his schema, play tends to be characterized by seven properties—none of which will shock the nonscientific community:

  1. It’s voluntary (something you’re “not obliged to do”).

  2. It’s got what he calls “inherent attraction.” In other words, it’s “fun.” (Try defining that!)

  3. It gives us “freedom from time.” When we play, we’re in a state of flow and time flies.

  4. We experience “diminished consciousness of self.” That is, we lose ourselves in the moment.

  5. It’s all about improvisation, make-believe, invention.

  6. It sparks a “continuation desire” in us. As every parent knows, we never want to stop playing.

  7. It’s “apparently purposeless.”

  Yet we all play. People in every culture and through all recorded time have played. It’s at the core of creativity and innovation and the source of some of our greatest joy and pleasure. It’s an essential part of what makes us human. But as anyone who’s ever watched kittens wrestle a ball of yarn or spent time in a dog park knows well, the innate drive to play—even the attraction to playing with balls—runs deep in the animal kingdom. Animals, as Huizinga pointed out, “have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”

  Dogs, like most other mammals, have their own language of play that scientists have only begun to decode. My puppy will approach another dog with a ceremonial bow, crouching on his forelegs and raising his hind end in the air while barking and wagging his tail. According to Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who’s studied dogs and their wild counterparts for 30 years, these are fixed communication signals that dogs use to establish what he calls a “play mood”—their way of saying, “Hey! I’m here to play.” What follows looks an awful lot like fighting, as dogs bite each other, growl, bare teeth, and tussle on the ground in mock combat. But, says Bekoff, dogs use bows and other signals continuously throughout these bouts to reassure their playmates, as if to say, I’m sorry I just bit you hard, but it was all in good fun.

  So play is on the one hand frivolous and on the other hand universal. Out in the wild, play also consumes vital energy and puts animals at seemingly pointless risk of predation or injury. Studies of young mammals have shown that they expend up to 15 percent of their calories playing—calories they might otherwise use to further their growth and development. Other research and anecdotes of animal injury and even death in the course of play give biological credence to our mothers’ classic warning that as kids we all rolled our eyes at: “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.”

  One of the most dramatic recorded incidents of “death by play” involved seal pups frolicking off the coast of Peru in 1988. Robert Harcourt, a zoologist at Macquarie University in Australia, observed an attack by southern sea lions on more than 100 seal pups. As Harcourt reported, 22 of the 26 pups killed were caught up in playing in the shallow tidal pools right before the attack and didn’t seem to notice they were under attack until it was too late.

  What seems at first blush to be a simple question turns out to be one that has dogged biologists since Darwin. The neuroscientist Melvin Konner has called play “a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” How can humans and other mammals have evolved, over millions of years, a set of shared behaviors that squander valuable energy, make them vulnerable to injury or attack, and yet produce no obvious material benefit? I decided to go straight to the source to find the answer: the human brain . . . by way of Florida.

  The main strip in Panama City Beach has seen more than its share of “apparently purposeless behavior” leading to “diminished consciousness of self” over the years. Thankfully, on the September afternoon when I arrived the only traces left of spring break bacchanalia were the half-price beer bongs in the Purple Haze Emporium. Hurricane Fred, the sixth of the season, had just swept through, and a steady rain was foiling the few budget travelers hoping to lounge on the beach.

  I found Gulf World Marine Park just past life-size plastic statues of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, next to the Steak ’n Shake. Gulf World, a seaside attraction since 1969, is an old-school marine park that features penguins, sea otters, sharks, and a ragtag cast of performing animals, including Russell the Crow. As the regional hub for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, the park serves as a long-term rehab center for dolphins and small whales that have been beached by storms or illness. And the marine park is home to the only group of rough-toothed dolphins under human care in North America. Rough-toothed dolphins, or Steno bredanensis, are smaller and have longer beaks than the more common bottlenose dolphins. They are also more playful, which has brought scientist Stan Kuczaj back to Gulf World regularly for the past six years. Stan is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he runs the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory. Specializing in both childhood development and dolphin cognition, he is one of a small but growing group of scientists working to unravel the paradox of play. Through a wide variety of studies across disciplines, from neuroscience to behavioral psychology, these researchers are finding evidence to suggest that play not only has a purpose but may serve a critical role in cognitive development and adaptation in humans and other mammals.

  I figured if I was going to answer Aidan’s question about ball play, I needed to start at the source, or as close to the source as I could reasonably get. I needed to understand why play exists in the first place.

  I met up with Stan by the pukka necklace display in Gulf World’s gift shop. Thin and tan wit
h wire-rimmed glasses and a nervous smile, the 59-year-old self-described “dolphin nerd” presents the perfect blend of beach bum and lab scientist that you might expect from a guy who studies dolphin cognition for a living. Waving the marine park equivalent of a backstage pass, he whisked me through the employees entrance and around the back of the small stadium, where a dolphin show had just ended. The backstage pool was roiling with energy, water lapping over the sides and washing over our feet.

  “I just love these guys,” said Stan, clearly delighted to be back with his fun-loving subjects.

  The seven dolphins chased each other full tilt around the pool. A funny way to relax after a performance, I thought. Having experienced the classic dolphin show myself, complete with hoop jumping and synchronized breaching, I had always assumed that they stopped playing the minute the spectators left the stands and the buckets of herring ran empty. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Stan zeroed in on this group of rough-toothed dolphins for his research because they play more often, longer, and with more vigor than other dolphins (and most other mammals for that matter). Kevin Walsh, the owner of Gulf World, refers to them affectionately as “Tursiops on crack” (Tursiops being the Latin name for the bottlenose dolphin). The young trainers who spend the most time with the animals and know each one’s idiosyncrasies intimately shared their own tales of dolphin hijinks. Quite often, when they’ve divided the dolphins into separate pools, the trainers report, they’ll return the next morning to find them all in one pool again, having leapt out and shimmied 30 feet across the pool deck to reunite with their friends.

  Then there’s the inexplicable behavior. “I’ve come by at night and seen all seven floating upright and looking up at the sky,” said one trainer. “We don’t know what they’re doing, but we like to say they’re communing with the mother ship.”

  Stan has been studying the animals both in the wild and in captivity for nearly 20 years. He began his career studying child language use but got hooked on dolphins while assisting a colleague’s research in Hawaii. He never looked back. Stan’s unique, cross-species experience has allowed him to look at the phenomenon of play from a broad evolutionary perspective. In conversation, he toggles seamlessly between discussions of controlled experiments conducted in dolphin tanks and Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which addresses the four stages children pass through in acquiring and using knowledge.

  Over the years, Stan and his fellow researchers have documented elaborate play behaviors among dolphins. As with humans, dolphin play can be solitary or social. Both in the wild and in captivity, they’ll play with their own or another dolphin’s bubbles. In the ocean they’ll play chasing games together or one will dislodge a sponge and play with it alone for 15 or 20 minutes.

  They’ve watched young dolphins taking turns pushing each other along the surface of the water, one on his side and the other nosing him sideways through the water, sometimes at rapid speeds. Then they’ll switch places so one of the pushers gets to be the “pushee,” a move that requires a high degree of social cooperation.

  While snorkeling, Stan once watched two adult dolphins and one young dolphin playing together with a plastic six-pack holder. One swam toward the others with the plastic trailing from his pectoral fin. Within minutes, the three were voluntarily passing the plastic back and forth without any attempt to grab or steal it. Then the game changed. One dolphin swam ahead of the others with the plastic on his fin and let it go in the water. The second swam up, caught the plastic, and swam forward before releasing it to the third.

  Stan is particularly interested in evidence such as this, which suggests cooperation and communication as well as shared “rules” of engagement, the kind of advanced behavior that dolphins depend upon for foraging and defending against predators. What his research tells him is that play is anything but trivial and purposeless, but may in fact be essential to adaptation and survival.

  Research on nonhuman animals suggests that play is not only critical to our health and socialization but also affects the growth and development of our brains. In one study, rats isolated during the period of juvenile development when they play the most were far less socially adept than their nonisolated peers well into adulthood. In another study, researchers allowed 13 rats to play freely together while 14 other rats were kept in isolation. After three and a half days, the brains of the playful rats were found to contain much higher levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that stimulates nerve growth in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, areas associated with emotions and decision making. Animals that play are, in other words, smarter and more socially intelligent than those that don’t.

  A recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that playing also helps humans develop adaptive cognitive skills. They recruited 36 students, male and female, half of whom were varsity athletes across a variety of sports and half of whom were healthy nonathletes. For the experiment, each student was put on a treadmill surrounded by large video screens. Goggles gave the video images real-world dimensions and feel. They found themselves navigating a busy cityscape and were charged with walking, not running, across a busy intersection without getting mowed down by cars passing at 40 to 55 miles per hour. The athletes completed more crossings than the nonathletes by a significant margin, and not because they were quicker or more physically agile. “They didn’t move faster,” said the study leader. “But it looks like they thought faster.” Athletes, the study suggests, have a cognitive advantage when it comes to processing visual and other information quickly enough to respond rapidly. A running back in football trying to make his way through the other team’s defense needs to make lightning-quick decisions while responding in real time to the cues of every other player on the field. That not only takes physical agility; it takes mental agility as well.

  Neuroscientist Sergio Pellis of the University of Lethbridge in Canada and his colleagues have found that there’s a direct correlation between brain size and playfulness in mammals. They measured brain size and recorded play behaviors in 15 species of mammals and found that the species with relatively large brains played a lot more than their small-brained counterparts.

  The evolutionary lines that eventually led to dolphins and humans diverged in the Mesozoic Age, more than 95 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs still roamed Earth. Despite being virtually unrelated to humans, dolphins are by every measure among the most playful of animals, second only to humans in this department. And it’s almost certainly no coincidence that they are also second only to humans when it comes to their brain-to-body size, or encephalization quotient. EQ is defined by neuroscientist and behavioral biologist Lori Marino as “a measure of observed brain size relative to the expected brain size derived from a regression of brain weight on body weight for a sample of species.” The EQ value for modern humans is 7.0. Dolphins have EQ levels close to 4.5, while our closest relatives, the great apes, have levels of only 1.5 to 3. Scientists have found some correlation between EQ value and the degree to which animals are inclined to play. Dolphins and humans, Marino says, “share a psychology.” You could say we’re both uniquely hardwired to play hard.

  At poolside, Stan made some quick introductions. Vixen, he pointed out, can be identified by the perpetual rash on her neck caused by laying her head on the edge of the pool. Astro’s tail is crooked from scoliosis. Noah has pink freckles on his chest. And so on. Once I’d been told who was who, Stan walked up to a rack filled with a random array of objects—buoys of various shapes and colors, plastic pool fencing, sections of Styrofoam mats, orange traffic cones, plastic rings, and a small blue and white basketball.

  “Let’s give them some toys to play with,” he said, grabbing a noodle. “These guys are crazy about their toys.”

  We began grabbing objects and throwing them in. The pool erupted with energy. Vixen darted off with the chain of pool fencing wrapped around her fin. Largo started pushing a mat through the
water, then jumping on top of it to make a slapping sound, then pushing it to the pool’s bottom. I threw in a blue and white ball that Ivan and Noah instantly began pushing around the pool with their noses, dodging, faking, and reversing direction to keep the ball from their opponent. They then took turns diving to the bottom and then rocketing to the surface to knock the ball high in the air, breaching behind it before slapping back down on the water.

  Dolphins are extraordinary athletes. Along with having high EQs and a relentless urge to play, they are built to perform. They can achieve speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. They can dive as deep as 1,000 feet and stay down for 30 minutes at a stretch. They navigate and locate each other, along with predators and prey, through echolocation—producing sound waves that bounce off objects and bring back detailed information on distance, location, and shape. Dolphins, Stan says, can locate and retrieve an object the size of a golf ball at a football field’s distance. With that lethal combination of speed, spatial prowess, and hunger to play, I thought, the Miami Dolphins would not only sail into the Super Bowl but would finally live up to the promise of their name.

  After a few minutes of playing with the ball, Ivan managed to flip it out of the pool right where I was standing. I picked it up and threw it back in. Ivan chased it down and then initiated the dolphin equivalent of a game of fetch. He’d push it all the way back to me, I’d reach into the pool, pick it up, and throw it back in. After doing this repeatedly for nearly five minutes, I got distracted by another dolphin and turned away. So this time he not only brought the ball back but then smacked it out of the water with his nose, sending it whizzing past my head. Clearly he meant business.

  The game had gone from just chasing, to playing fetch, to knocking the ball out of the water back to the thrower with line drives that became more precise each time. Largo soon abandoned his mat and joined the game, adding a competitive dimension. In just ten minutes, what had begun as a frenzy of free play had evolved into a disciplined and competitive interspecies ball game with an unspoken but mutually understood set of rules.