Why fun is important

Albert Nerenberg, Canwest News Service

The Leafs probably need more of it than most, but it's key to our development, a new branch of science is arguing. Last place. The Toronto Maple Leafs owned it. Bottom of the league. Losers of the world. Embarrassment of the century.

In fact, they had just set a team record for the worst start of any season. They hadn't won a single game. It was inexcusable. They are a rich, privileged hockey corporation, full of talent and inheritors of the Leafs' legacy.

But it was all coming to mud. They sucked. They were the laughing stock of Canada and they knew it. Booed by their own fans, this wasn't about hockey any more. It was about life. This was about failing as human beings in the glare of national TV.

So when the Leafs convened for practice Oct. 15, they expected to be subjected to a gruelling, murderous assault: It would be severe, disciplined and humiliating; the coach would be telling them they are the most useless sacks of you-know-what to ever walk the Earth. It was time for hours of back-breaking drills, pile-driving bodychecking and workout torture.

Not so fast.

Leafs coach Ron Wilson told the players to put away their hockey sticks. Instead, he pulled out tennis balls and threw them at them. For hours, the Leafs played mini-dodge ball on ice. Dodge ball? Yes, dodge ball -- the juvenile game where two teams try to eliminate each other by hitting each other with balls. The players skated around frantically, bopping each other and smiling and laughing and tussling. For a moment, they may have forgotten they were the worst team on Earth.

"It was exactly what the group needed," said Garnet Exelby, a 210-pound defenceman. "Just to let loose a little bit and remember that we're here to have fun as well," he would tell the National Post.

Have fun? What does fun have to do with winning?

Well, three games later, the Leafs would win their first hockey game of the season. Their next four games were all narrow overtime losses. And then they posted back-to-back wins, including a 5-1 shellacking of last year's Stanley Cup contending powerhouse, the Detroit Red Wings.
There may have been other factors, but the Leafs were finally showing some jump. The media, meanwhile, pilloried Wilson's dodge-ball strategy, calling it "unorthodox," "juvenile" and "pathetic." One sports columnist wrote: "What's next? Hide and seek?"

Actually, hide and seek might be a good idea. Coach Wilson was on to something. He had just proved one of the great revelations of the new science of play -- that a good dose of fun can work as a reboot.

"I think the Leafs coach made a really smart move," said author Stuart Brown, probably one of the world's top experts on fun and founder of the U.S. National Institute for Play. Brown has just come out with a book appropriately titled Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul.

Brown said in an interview that the Leafs coach took a page right out of his book.

The Leafs had become chronic losers and were depressed, playing well beneath their abilities. Intensifying their current strategies wasn't working.

"Adding fun and play likely caused mood changes in the players," said Brown. " When they had a fun practice, they enjoyed themselves, changed their tactics, re-bonded and the experience reminded them, after all, it's just a game."

Although it seems counterintuitive, approaching a serious matter like business, or even life itself, as a game can lead to advantage and better outcomes. Why?

"Play gives the appearance of major reality without the major consequences," said Brown. Basically, play allows you to simulate and make a game of a serious situation, rehearsing it, pushing it to extremes and finding potential new solutions.

In the animal world, this is even clearer. The reason mammals rule the world is because our closest rivals, reptiles, aren't really players. Although there is some sparse evidence that some reptiles engage in basic play, crocodiles and lizards are not party animals. Our warm-blooded talent for rehearsing and finessing our behaviours and replaying our conflicts has allowed us to outwit and dominate the legions of funless species out there.

This may explain why dodge ball helped the Leafs. While it's not everyone's cup of tea, dodge ball is a perfect illustration of the advantage play confers.

Dodge ball involves the simulation of classic predatory behaviour, where players target vulnerable players and try to hit them with the ball. If you're hit, you go to limbo and try to hit your way back. Catch the ball and, in a flash, you become the predator. If your team loses, you die. How-ever, that death is simulated; you may return to stage a comeback. The fast-paced mayhem of the sport likely drives stunning neurological response.

The Hollywood film Dodgeball -- The Movie, showed two competing fitness centres in a satirical high-stakes dodge-ball game. The fun-loving "regular Joes" would defeat the funless, well-financed team -- the "Toronto Maple Leafs" of the competition -- led by an overcoiffed, ball-whipping villain played by Ben Stiller.

The infamous dodge-ball game may have helped because it allowed the Leafs to reboot. Until then, they'd been subjected to routines. Studies show, changing things up improves outcomes.
"Pleasure and novelty improves performance," says Brown, giving the example of basketball players. Studies have shown players who endlessly shoot baskets from the exact same point, do experience some performance gain. However, players who practise by shooting at different distances and different angles, show better overall improvement.

But the best argument for fun and play happens when you take it away.

Deny play to young mammals and the consequences are colossal. This has been demonstrated powerfully in rats, with some of the most significant new science coming out of Canada.
"What's been shown repeatedly," said University of Lethbridge neuroscientist Sergio Pellis, author of The Playful Brain, "if you prevent juvenile rats from engaging in rough-and-tumble play, you get animals who have cognitive problems, emotional problems and they're socially incompetent."

In short, stop rats from horsing around and you get socially awkward, troubled, Dumbo rats. Worse still, male rats who never play become bad lovers. Pellis said there is a distinct difference between rats who grow up sharing a cage with a playful companion and ones that don't. When they reach sexual maturity, the playless rats turn into sexual nincompoops.

"He won't correctly mount the female," said Pellis. "That rat is just as likely to mount the head as the rump."

Pellis refused to speculate on whether this research could be applied directly to humans.
Pellis says one of the stunning findings in play science suggests the sportsmanlike qualities of rough-and-tumble play produce critical neurological growth. Rough-and-tumble play is the fall-on-the-ground, seemingly violent tussling or mock fighting that is common in many mammals and humans, and now banned in many school playgrounds.

"The funnest battles are where you win some of the time and you lose some of the time," said Pellis. Mammals carefully tune their behaviour to avoid hurting their playmates, otherwise no one would play with them. Both humans and animals don't enjoy playing with animals that hurt them or are too easy to vanquish.

New research, says Pellis, shows that this careful "tuning" process "stimulates the frontal circuits to precisely make better and better decisions." That process grows brains like crazy. Maybe it's not civics classes that turn people into good citizens -- it's rolling around in the dirt at recess.

Amazingly, some North American schools are now eliminating recess and many have banned rough-and-tumble play for fear of injured children and lawsuits. It's hard to argue with safety.
"If you look at countries with the lowest amount of recess time, and scholastic achievement, there's almost an exact correlation," says Pellis. "The U.S., which has the lowest recess rates, often does the worst" in scholastic achievement.

It might even be that the brains of children grow more at recess than in the classroom.
But while play and fun may offer advantages, they do present dangers as well.

Unchecked fun can lead to car accidents and human tragedies. One person's fun might be another person's nightmare. Studies of wild seals show fun-loving seals are more likely to be eaten by predators. Much fun really is pointless, but maybe that's the point. As Brown says, "play provides freedom from time." For whatever reason, fun seems to enrich the game of life.
So it may be that Montrealers have known instinctively about the "fun advantage" for some time. It's not always about winning, it really is about how you play the game, which in turn helps you win. Now there's science to prove it.

Sure, we heavily pressure the Canadiens to go after the Stanley Cup. But as long as they have fun and score goals, we'll still love them. That's one of the enduring legacies of the Canadiens. They make hockey fun and the game beautiful.

When I'm in Montreal and the Canadiens are in the playoffs, I try to remember to turn down the volume if the Canadiens score. You hear something really amazing when the entire city jumps and cheers at the exact same moment. You might even feel the city shake.
That's the sound of a million people having fun.

Montreal Gazette