Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain

High-Level Overview

In this solo episode, Andrew Huberman makes the case that play is far more than a children's pastime. Drawing on the work of Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist known as "the rat tickler," he describes play as a hardwired, homeostatically regulated drive rooted in ancient brainstem circuits. He explains how it rewires the brain across the lifespan by letting us test roles, rules and outcomes when little is at stake. Along the way he covers play postures in dogs, primates and people, the neurochemistry that separates true play from high-stakes competition, why childhood trauma can shut play circuits down, and a concrete prescription: about one hour of genuinely novel, low-stakes play per week.

Before the main topic, Huberman also shares a newly published study showing that reading on a smartphone suppresses the physiological sigh and hurts comprehension compared with reading on paper. The tone is warm, curious and often personal, with stories about dirt clod wars, a friend who always wins at horseshoes, his sister's imaginary friend, and Richard Feynman's lifelong mischief. The episode moves from neurobiology to anecdote to practical tools and back again.

The Discussion Explores:

• A study linking smartphone reading to fewer physiological sighs, an overworked prefrontal cortex and weaker comprehension
• Play as a homeostatic drive, and Jaak Panksepp's discovery of laughter in tickled rats and other animals
• The periaqueductal gray, endogenous opioids and low adrenaline as the neurochemical signature of real play
• Play as low-stakes contingency testing, from the "toddler's creed" to sharing, cooperation and rule-breaking
• Universal play signals: the play bow, head tilt, soft eyes, partial postures and the tongue-out invitation
• Why tinkerers and playful people, from NASA engineers to Rodney Mullen and Richard Feynman, keep innovating
• How childhood play prunes and strengthens brain circuits, and how trauma and stress block play and plasticity
• Which kinds of adult play best open plasticity (dynamic movement and role-rich games like chess), and the idea of a personal play identity

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

A detour on screens: smartphones, sighs and comprehension

Huberman opens with a study in the journal Scientific Reports (first author Honma) titled Reading on a Smartphone Affects Sigh Generation, Brain Activity, and Comprehension. In 34 healthy people, comprehension was markedly worse when reading on a smartphone than on paper. Overall breathing patterns did not differ, but one feature did: people reading on phones produced fewer physiological sighs. The sigh is the deep double inhale followed by a long exhale that we normally do about every five minutes, awake or asleep. It reinflates the lungs' alveoli and offloads carbon dioxide. The study also found that the prefrontal cortex became hyperactive, in what Huberman calls a kind of desperate attempt to focus.

He connects this to his own lab's interest in how the size of our visual window affects our internal state. Narrowing your gaze onto a small screen seems to suppress the brainstem neurons (the parafacial nucleus, discovered by Jack Feldman) that generate sighs, although the exact mechanism is still unknown. His practical advice is either to deliberately take physiological sighs every five minutes or so while reading or texting on a phone, or to read anything important on a larger screen or, better still, on paper. He notes that this effect is separate from the content we consume: the size of the screen alone seems to affect learning and memory.

Play is a hardwired, homeostatic drive

The first key fact about play is that it is homeostatically regulated, like sleep, thirst and hunger. Panksepp showed that when animals, including children, are deprived of play, they play more once they get the chance. Panksepp also found that rats and many other species laugh when tickled, but at ultrasonic frequencies humans cannot hear, which earned him the nickname "the rat tickler."

That homeostatic quality points to deep, ancient brain circuitry rather than a recent evolutionary add-on. A key region is the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem area rich in neurons that release endogenous opioids such as enkephalin. Play triggers small releases of these self-made opioids, and that chemical state changes how the prefrontal cortex works. In Huberman's words, "the prefrontal cortex doesn't get stupid. It actually gets smarter." Instead of running rigid, goal-directed routines, like taking the same route to work every day, it starts to explore many more possibilities for how we interact with our environment and other people, and which roles we can take on.

Play as low-stakes contingency testing

Huberman traces how play evolves in childhood. Infants learn a first rule: when uncomfortable, look outside yourself for relief. Toddlers then operate by child psychologist Burton White's "toddler's creed," which begins "If I want it, it's mine" and continues through lines like "If it looks just like mine, it's mine." Huberman notes wryly that some adults never grow past this stage. The crucial next step comes when children begin playing together, learning to share, give things up, take on roles they may not want, and accept that the world is not all about them.

His central definition is that "play is contingency testing" under conditions where the stakes are low enough that people feel free to try on unfamiliar roles. Losing a board game or card game might sting, but it is not the end of the world, and that safety is what lets the brain experiment. He admits he is not a naturally playful person and tends to take sport and exercise seriously. His first tool, especially for less playful people, is to deliberately step into low-stakes situations where you are not the best performer, such as a card game with friends, and notice how you and others react to cheating, rigid rule-following or competitiveness. That exploration, he argues, is what drives prefrontal plasticity, and because you have only one prefrontal cortex, the flexibility carries over into work, relationships and everything else.

The body language of play

Animals and humans share recognizable play postures, studied by both Panksepp and Darwin. Dogs and wolves perform the play bow, lowering their head with paws forward, and there are videos of dogs and bears exchanging it. Humans signal play with a slight head tilt, open eyes, sometimes raised eyebrows and a small smile. Soft eyes, with the eyelids open rather than narrowed, contrast with the narrowed, converged eyes of aggression. The most emphatic invitation, seen in primates and some humans, is wide eyes with the tongue out.

Partial postures are playful versions of threatening displays: animals approach for rough-and-tumble play with their fur flat rather than raised, and people tend to make themselves smaller. All of these signals limit power on purpose, saying in effect: let's fight, but not for real. Huberman contrasts this with high-stakes contests like the Super Bowl, where salaries and reputations are on the line and the players show the opposite signals. Play also requires agreeing on how high the stakes are, and breaking those agreements teaches as much as keeping them. His example is the neighborhood dirt clod wars of his childhood, where one boy flew into a rage after being hit in the head, and puppies, which learn a soft bite only because littermates yelp when bitten too hard. Role play, whether leader and follower, dolls and dollhouses, or an imaginary friend, further stretches the number of "algorithms" the prefrontal cortex can run.

The chemistry of real play: high opioids, low adrenaline

What separates true play from simply doing an activity? Citing a review by Siviy and Panksepp in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews ("In search of the neurobiological substrates for social playfulness in mammalian brains"), Huberman explains that drugs or situations that raise adrenaline (epinephrine) too much inhibit play, while those that increase endogenous opioid output increase playfulness. Real play needs some focus and seriousness, which involve epinephrine and dopamine, but the low-stakes element is what frees up the opioids. If you have a lot of money on the table or your identity depends on winning, you are not really playing.

The counterintuitive point is that a playful state often produces the best performance, because it gives access to new behaviors and moves you would never find if you were fixated on the outcome. Huberman describes his college habit of convincing himself that material was fascinating in order to hyperfocus. That works for rote learning, but it blocks flexible thinking. When you hit a plateau in sport or thinking, drilling is not the only answer: low-stakes tinkering, where it does not matter whether the ball goes over the net, can expand your repertoire. You can still be competitive while playing, as with his friend who crushes him at horseshoes every time, as long as you are enjoying yourself.

Tinkerers, creatives and a lifelong playful spirit

Competitive employers, NASA famously among them, have looked for people who were tinkerers as children, the ones who played with things rather than following instructions. Huberman cites skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen, who reinvented the sport partly by endlessly flipping his board to study how it moved, and the street artist Banksy, whose work plays with how cities and art are used. Across the animal kingdom, species that play for the longest part of their lives also have the most neuroplastic brains, and there is emerging, largely anecdotal evidence that adults who stay playful keep more plasticity.

His favorite example is physicist Richard Feynman, a lifelong and mischievous tinkerer who picked the locks at Los Alamos and left classified documents on the floor as a prank, drummed bongos on the roof at Caltech and learned to draw and paint in his 60s. Huberman recommends Feynman's story collections "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" and notes that Feynman wrote about working hard to keep his playful spirit, because it helped him see the world differently. He frames play as "the portal to plasticity," and later as perhaps the most powerful one, pointing to Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey's book Spark on exercise, play and exploring new environments.

How play wires the developing brain, and how trauma blocks it

Neuroplasticity works differently before and after about age 25. Adults change through a two-step process: intense focus, then deep rest and sleep, when the rewiring actually happens. Tools like naps and non-sleep deep rest can help. Children and young people can learn from passive experience because their brains are heavily overconnected. Huberman still remembers a childhood trip to the Smithsonian without ever trying to memorize it. He compares the young brain to a map where every street connects to every other. Through use, some routes become highways while roughly 40% of connections are pruned away by age 25, partly by glial cells that, as Beth Stevens's lab at Harvard has shown, eat unneeded synapses. "Fire together, wire together," a phrase often credited to Donald Hebb but coined by Carla Shatz, describes the strengthening side. Play, he says, is largely how this pruning and strengthening shapes who we become as adults.

Children who live through trauma or chronic stress have a harder time both playing and accessing plasticity later on, because high adrenaline shuts down the circuits for soft eyes, head tilts and safe rough-and-tumble play. The effect is not permanent. Many trauma therapies, including EMDR, exposure therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and even ketamine or transcranial magnetic stimulation paired with talk therapy, work by exploring new contingencies around the same situation, which is exactly what play does. Some treatments for long-term trauma now use play and dance directly. Huberman doubts a magic pill for trauma will arrive soon. He thinks chemical shifts will always need to be paired with new ways of thinking and behaving, and that play may be one of the main levers.

Which kinds of play open plasticity

Two forms of play have good research behind them. The first is novel, dynamic movement at varied speeds and angles, such as dance or sports like soccer with jumping, ducking, lateral and angled movement. Linear activities like forward running do much less. Dynamic movement engages the vestibular system and cerebellum, which mirror the circuitry of play. Huberman mentions adding backward walking and sled pulls from Ben Patrick ("Knees Over Toes Guy) to his own routine. The second is role-rich games like chess, discussed in a 2017 paper titled Is chess just a game, or is it a mirror that reflects a child's inner world?" Each chess piece follows different rules, so players effectively take on many identities in a single game, unlike a video game where you always play the same avatar. That, he suggests, is what people mean by phrases like that chess is life or that jiu-jitsu is life.

Novelty is essential. An expert chess player gains less from chess than from trying something completely new, like soccer, because improving at a familiar skill makes you better at that skill without widening the brain's plasticity more broadly. Huberman also notes that very intense workouts can temporarily impair thinking, while regular exercise generally helps. He argues that play goes beyond linear exercise because it explores new movements, thoughts and roles.

Personal play identity and one hour a week

Huberman closes with the concept of personal play identity, from Turkish researcher Gokhan Gunes, described in a 2021 paper in Current Psychology. It has four components: how you play and your personality, socioculture and environment, and economics and technology. He invites listeners to reflect on who they were at about 10 to 14. Were you competitive or cooperative, a solo player or a group player? Could you switch between leader and follower, handle being moved to the losing team, or tolerate others bending the rules? He suggests that five or ten minutes of this reflection reveals striking parallels with how we show up at work and in relationships as adults. He links this to Allan Schore's work on how early caregiver interactions shape emotional regulation, and stresses that development is one long arc across the lifespan.

His prescription is at least one hour of pure play per week. It should be novel, something you are not already good at, or, if you insist on a familiar activity, done as free-form, low-stakes tinkering. Play goes beyond "beginner's mind, he argues, because it is not about eventually getting good. Once you become proficient, the activity turns into performance and you should find a new form of play. He deliberately avoids the word fun: if play feels uncomfortable, the goal is simply to lower the stakes and keep engaging. For people who want more structure, he mentions Charlie Hoehn's book Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety. His closing argument is biological: We are built to play," and because "biology does not waste resources," the play circuits that survive pruning into adulthood must still matter.

Conclusion

Huberman's message is that play is not a luxury or a childish leftover but a core biological tool for changing the brain. When the stakes are low, adrenaline is low and endogenous opioids are flowing, the prefrontal cortex becomes flexible enough to explore new roles, rules and outcomes, and that flexibility carries into work, relationships and creativity. Childhood play shapes who we become, trauma can shut it down, and adults can reopen those circuits through dance, dynamic movement, role-rich games like chess and deliberately novel activities. The practical takeaways are simple: notice how you played as a child, be willing to lose at something new, keep the stakes low, and give yourself an hour of real play each week, and when you read something important on a phone, remember to sigh.

This is a summary of "Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.