Pity poor Stuart Brown, who runs the National Institute for Play.  His job – and his passion – is to study play seriously.  That means he has to take an inherently fun subject and make it, well, god-awful serious, so that the NIH will fund him. 

His talk on TED is enlightening on the subject of play, and enlightening on the subject of public speaking, at the same time:  http://tinyurl.com/bgat4c.  In spite of the flaws, this is must-see video. 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first, and then get to the good – and fascinating – news second.  The bad news is that Stuart Brown is a very serious scientist who takes a fun and funny subject and analyzes it way too thoroughly – to the detriment of his humanity and the topic’s.  Like all the talks on humor I’ve ever seen, he kills the subject, and not in a good way.  He goes into a head posture from the start, which makes sense, since he’s intellectualizing fun, and tells us some very serious things about play in a slightly pompous way that makes the whole thing not at all playful.  He barely looks at the audience, his delivery is slow and slightly ponderous, and he sounds more like a bank manager refusing a mortgage than someone talking about play.

And that’s the important public speaking point to take away from the talk.  Your subject and your delivery have to be consistent.  That’s so important that I’ll say it again:  your subject and your delivery have to be consistent.  If you can’t be consistent, your audience is going to reject you at some level as hypocritical, even if you’re just trying to be really, really helpful. 

That’s why people who present to children can’t be adult in the bad sense of the word.  It’s why business people who talk about putting the customer first can’t give a slapdash, under-rehearsed speech.  (The audience is the customer!  Hello!)  And, it’s why people who talk about humor have to be funny. 

OK, so the talk on play is not playful.  Inconsistency.  That’s bad.  But there is so much that is good in the talk that redeems Mr. Brown that overall the presentation does succeed.  The main reason is Brown’s evident passion for the subject.  He replaces the lightness of play with devotion to the subject, some beautiful pictures (of animals playing, for example) and even a slightly ponderous joke or two. 

Brown cares because his work began with a murderer who didn’t play as a child, and Brown saw the connection to the evil that came later.  In many ways, playing as children prepares us for life.  Did you know that people who don’t engage in building, carving, constructing, and so on with their hands as children don’t make good problem-solvers as adults?  And that the lack of play leads to depression?  The opposite of play is not seriousness, but – depression. 

Play improves memory, makes more of the brain more active, and helps with creativity and critical thinking.  And that’s throughout life – humans are unusual animals in the sense that most play during a specific time in their childhood and then don’t play (at least as much) when they become adults.  Humans play – should play, need to play – all their lives. 

Brown describes a fascinating study in which a group of rats were prevented from playing during their childhood.  Another group was left alone.  Both groups, now adult, were presented with a cat collar smelling of cat.  All the rats ran and hid.  The control group who had played eventually came out of hiding and resumed normal life.  The play-deprived group never came out and in fact starved to death. 

So get playing.  We need all kinds of play as humans – body play, object play, social play, fantasy play, transformational play.  Brown has categorized them all.  But don’t let his seriousness about the subject prevent you from taking away some wonderful and wonderfully important lessons from this video.  The play’s the thing.  So get playing.