Let Them Play!

Driving the other day, I heard this story on NPR about Gever Tulley who founded The Tinkering School near San Francisco.  In this ultimate summer camp experience, kids get to stay for a week and build creations of their own design (with some guidance) and test them out. The use of power tools is encouraged, as is creativity, risk-taking, and intuition.  Kids must make real things and try them for real.  No models or look-alikes here.  They build boats and find out whether they'll sink or float when they get in them.  They cross bridges they've designed and drive cars and motorcycles they collaborated on.  They fail and fail again and get hurt and go back to the drawing board and fail again and think on it some more and persist until they succeed.  

Tulley says in the NPR interview that one of the experiences that inspired his camp was observing a mother scold and remind her son about her "no playing with sticks" rule.  I'm with Tulley on this one.  Lord help this next generation if they haven't even been allowed to play with sticks.  Why, when I visited Paraguay, the host family I stayed with had a 3 year old boy who I observed playing in the backyard unsupervised with his father's machete.  Okay, admittedly, that kind of freaked me out.  But, clearly we are overdoing it when we protect our kids from sticks (not to mention denying them a connection to nature and natural objects).   

Tulley is working on an upcoming book, "50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do" and gave a TED talk on 5 of them: 

This reminds me of the recently popular "Dangerous" books by Conn & Hal Iggulden.  Just today I read an article called "How to let kids be kids" in this month's Redbook.  It made the case for the downside of overscheduling our kids and overstructuring their play, quoting experts who explained the value of free play driven by curiosity about the world and how it works.  I remember reading a long time ago the quip that all toddlers start out by dropping and throwing and hitting things with the basic mental attitude of, "what will happen when I do this?" and that scientists are just the people who managed to not get that squashed out of them by their parents and the educational system.  

I'm so glad to see this resurging interest in letting kids be kids and just play and explore their world.  I remember the elaborate games my siblings and I used to invent on rainy days stuck inside and the little inventions I used to make when left with free time and craft supplies to think and tinker.  In elementary school I helped run the filmstrips (god, I'm old!) and the teacher would ask you to "rewind" the filmstrip when it was over, which was a laborious process done by hand. I took a toilet paper tube and an empty jewelry gift box, some scissors and glue, and invented a filmstrip rewinder. You could put the film roll in a tube on one end, feed it through a slot across the empty box into a slot in the tube on the other end and you could quickly rewind it into the second tube with your finger.  Plus, you could view the slides on it against the white background of the box as you did so.  

To this day, obviously, I remember the details of that invention, how it worked, and how proud I was of thinking of it, making it, and trying it out to find that it worked.  If you fill a kid's life with pre-packaged toys meant to be used in pre-thought of ways and guided activities with rules, how will they ever invent something?  or have the self-esteem that comes with that?  

Which reminds me to share with you an astounding article I read some months back called "How children lost the right to roam In four generations". In it, the author interviews one family and shows with maps the diminished range that each succeeding generation was allowed to explore unsupervised. I know that as an elementary aged kid, I regularly hopped on my bike or roller skates and went up to a couple miles out on my own or with friends. And that was sans helmet or cell phone or water bottle or firm deadline for arrival.   Now even though I'm in a sleepy suburban, family friendly neighborhood, I really wonder just how far I'll feel comfortable letting my son go.  Has anything actually changed in terms of the risk?  Or just my perception of it due to scary news stories and such?  It's an important question.  

For much more along these lines, check out Free Range Kids , a website devoted to helping "our kids embrace life!". It's got thought provoking articles and practical ideas on how to get back to the good-old-go-outside-and-play-until-dinnertime days!

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this topic.  How far were you allowed to roam as a kid?  Did you own a pocket knife, try driving a car, play with fire, etc, before you were a teen? 

Underwater Astonishments

I have been meaning to share this for a while. This is just one of the amazing TED talks that I've been enjoying. Be prepared to be wowed by nature!

David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, including a color-shifting cuttlefish, a perfectly camouflaged octopus, and a Times Square's worth of neon light displays from fish who live in the blackest depths of the ocean.

Leaving the Left Brain

Last night Backtire & I sat and watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk. Wow. If you don't know about the TED conference, check it out. All of the talks I've ever watched were fascinating and thought provoking, sustaining me for days or weeks. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who spent her life researching the brain and then experienced a brain hemorrhage that shut down her left brain. She had the unique opportunity to observe her own brain losing function and altering her perceptions and recover from this experience to share it with us. Watch her talk first. My reaction is below.  

It seems clear to me that this woman has something in common with people who have experienced near death experiences, out of body experiences, voodoo rituals, meditative trances, and ceremonial and recreational drugs. All of these things organically alter brain functioning, changing activity patterns in various parts of the brain, and therefore altering the person's sense of "normal" consciousness. It makes sense that people who have had the opportunity to see the world and themselves through a different consciousness would consider it a life changing experience and want to spread the word to others. And isn't that what both seeking enlightenment and taking ritual drugs are all about?

I find it fascinating to think that all of the visions, hallucinations, indescribable feelings, and awarenesses that people attribute to peyote or deep meditation or almost losing your life are really just things that are being unlocked from within your own brain chemistry. All humans must universally have the capacity to feel as if they are floating above their own body or see colors in the air that aren't there if only the right parts of our brains are stimulated or shut down. In fact there is much evidence of this, which I don't have time to find and cite right now, but I've read it here and there over the years.

I'm particularly fascinated by all of this, both as a scientific person who has devoted time to studying the brain and as a person who has never been lucky enough to experience any of it. It remains unreachable to me from my left-brain imprisonment. I haven't taken the drugs and I haven't had the head injuries. I haven't had the patience for meditation, as it just feels like sitting still and doing nothing to me, or worse, listening to the endless chatter of my left brain making lists and reminding me of things, which stresses me out instead of relaxing me.

The closest I ever get to altered consciousness is in the shower, while driving sometimes, or in the hypnogogic/hypnopompic state each morning and night. I feel kind of zone-y and stream of consciousness at those times. Random thoughts occur to me and I automatically synthesize bits and pieces of my experience and memories together and often come up with interesting ideas. It's a nice break from the chatter and it leads me to the creative spark and the satisfaction of self-reflection, but it's still pretty left-brained, I think. I cannot even imagine floating above my body or feeling enormous and expansive and one small part of the energy of the universe. I can intellectualize that concept, but I don't truly "get it".

Think about this- each person on the planet due to their individual make-up and various groups, due to their cultural influences, and in fact each brain possessing animal may indeed be experiencing the world and themselves in slightly or entirely different ways. If I live mostly in my left brain and you live mostly in your right, do we see eye to eye? Can we understand each other? Does a gorilla or squirrel experience the world in more of a right brain enormous and expansive way than I do? When I try to see things from others' point of view, is it an exercise in futility because I am making a gigantic and flawed assumption each time, which is that the other being essentially views themselves and the world and the relationship between them the same way that I do, when in reality I cannot even fathom what their personal universe is like?

I agree with Jill Bolte Taylor's essential message- that we would all benefit if we could all tap into our right brain more and understand our interconnectedness and be at peace with ourselves and each other. We don't want to induce brain injury in everyone. I'm not sure how I feel about passing out the drugs to all. So, how do we get there?