Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

by | Aug 9, 2020 | Art, Biology, Creativity, Evolution, Games, Identity, Learning, Philosophy, Psychology, Research, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading

As a part of our ongoing series on creativity we recently spoke with Dr. Peter Gray, professor of Psychology at Boston College. Dr. Gray’s interest in creativity emerges as a consequence of his background in evolutionary psychology and interest in how humans (and other mammals) learn. Learning, he argues, is a key evolutionary need that helps humans and other mammals survive and succeed in a complex and dynamic world. Dr. Gray sees an important role for curiosity, play and sociability—which he defines as natural drives or impulses that help children learn and direct their own learning. By playing together and being curious, children pick up language, learn and hone new skills, acquire knowledge, and gain confidence to be in the world by interacting directly with it. The drive to play is not unique to humans. As he said:

Children are playful. All young mammals are playful and that’s how they learn. They’re curious about the world. As soon as they come into the world, they’re looking around…They’re moving to get their hands on things, to explore things, to figure out what they can do with these things in the world out there. They’re especially interested in other people. They want to know, they’re watching and listening to other people and figuring out what it is that people in this world do.

As always, our conversation with Dr. Gray covered a wide range of topics such as curiosity and play as being natural paths to creative learning; the negative role of evaluation, high-performance culture and standardized testing on creativity; the relationship between creativity, play and mental health; and possible role of technology in enhancing creativity. Complete reference, and link to article below:

Mehta, R., Henriksen, D., & Mishra, P. (2020). “Let Children Play!”: Connecting Evolutionary Psychology and Creativity with Peter Gray. TechTrends. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00535-y

A few randomly selected blog posts…

ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of the web

ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of the web

Ted Chiang is one of the greatest, insightful writers working today. I had written previously about one his short stories in a post titled: Truth of fact and feeling: Unpacking McLuhan (2/3) about his short story The truth of fact and the truth of feeling. (If you...

Good Evil Ambigram

Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of...

Crayons are the future: New article on technology & creativity

 Over the past year or so I have moved my line of research into teacher creativity particularly focusing on ideas related to trans-disciplinary creativity and what that means for teaching and learning in the 21st century. In this effort I am joined by an awesome group...

Interesting TPACK related discussion

Russ Goerend over at Learning is Life has initiated a fascinating discussion on the TPACK framework on his blog. It all revolves around a blog post he titled The force is strong with the shiny one. I shall not seek to summarize the discussion here (please go read it...

The TPACK framework in the Handbook of Ed Comm & Tech (4th Ed.)

Hot off the press: The Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, edited by Spector, Merrill, Elen & Bishop. And we have a chapter in it... Complete reference and abstract below:  Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P., Kereluik, K., Shin, T.S., &...

TPACK & More: Presentation at RemoteK12 summit

TPACK & More: Presentation at RemoteK12 summit

REMOTE K12: The Connected Teacher Summit, was a one-day virtual summit hosted by ASU, designed for K-12 teachers and those that support and enable teachers in district public, charter and private schools.  I presented a talk titled: Technology in teaching &...

Thank you, Chile!

Rotate I spent the past seven days in Chile, six days in Santiago and one in Valpariso. It was absolutely wonderful. My trip was sponsored by the Faculty of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC is one of the nation's premier universities), as...

7 tools… one big job: Video Explore II

A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas. I...

On performing one’s identity: A thought inspired by Jonathan Miller

It is difficult, in a world buffeted by change, to know what to hold on to. I often wonder about this when thinking of teaching and learning, when thinking of the speed at which technology is changing the world we live in... What do we hold on to? What do we let go?...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *