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Natalie Vokes delves into the world of scientists at play.
Great scientists are often said to have something a bit childlike about them. Writers have described Albert Einstein as such, along with James Watson of DNA discoverers, Watson and Crick. A study of scientific and artistic innovations found ‘a childlike component in each’, and Sir Isaac Newton himself declared, “I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore.” Such statements present a startling contrast to the complexities of their scientific discoveries, and provoke the question: What exactly is the childlike characteristic that these great scientists have supposedly retained? Or considered from another angle, one might wonder, are children in some ways like scientists? The answer, I think, lies in play.
Consider a child playing with a new and intricate toy, studded with levers and brightly coloured knobs. Most children will sit with that toy for some time, face furrowed, tongue sticking out, attention rapt, turning it around, pulling at this, pushing at that. Each part will be investigated thoroughly and carefully. If such exploration yields an unexpected outcome – say a bell’s clang or a moveable part – the child will repeat the steps that produced the noise, over and over, delighted at having done so. Or consider another childhood game: designing and carrying out a project. Children will spend hours planning an activity, assembling equipment, developing the rules, gathering information, and rehearsing the objectives. Often, this planning stage takes so long that very little time is spent on the actual activity. More important, and more exciting, is the design process of developing new ideas.
Most scientists will recognise aspects of themselves in such play. Developmental psychologists, aware of such similarities, have identified some commonalities between how scientists and children interact with the world. One such commonality can be described by Piaget’s theories. Jean Piaget, the famous developmental theorist, identified two types of intellectual development: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation involves incorporating experiences and data into existing mental frameworks. As very young children and as adults, our experiences are mostly assimilation; we learn new words, new colours, and new facts, which we incorporate neatly into our already-constructed representation of the world. Accommodation, on the other hand, alters such representations. Science, at its best and most innovative, is accommodative; Newton’s laws of motion changed how we understand the world, as did atomic theory and the discovery of DNA. Trumbull, another psychologist, summarises well the accommodative nature of scientific thought, declaring that scientists are “people who play with ideas in order to change the complex into the simple.” Children’s play too can be accommodative. They might use imagination or experiment to explore different ways of thinking about the world. Testing out their ideas – moving one lever, pressing another button – allows them to develop and change their understanding and representations.
Research from cognitive scientists supports the view that children learn about the world through science-like play. The book The Scientist in the Crib explicitly makes the connection, stating that children “think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments. Scientists and children belong together because they are the best learners in the universe.” The book’s argument is that children learn like scientists, forming ideas about the world, doing experiments, and altering or preserving their ideas in light of their findings. Children practise this method through play, hitting objects to see what sound they make, or playing with water and sand to discover their physical properties.
Others highlight the naïveté and open-mindedness of juvenile inquiry. Rather than drawing on outside resources and others’ ideas, children approach play with only their own curiosity and eagerness. Scientific biographers and writers emphasise this open-mindedness in their subjects. One, writing on the physicist Richard Feynman, declared, “When Richard Feynman faced a problem he was unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks and saying, ‘Now, what have we got here?’”
Such theories highlight similarities between a child’s playful discovery and the work of a mature scientist. They illustrate how a child’s play can serve different functions, helping children learn about the world in a seemingly scientific way while developing the host of skills necessary to be a successful adult (and scientist). Play, bolstered by such work, has now become the target of advocacy groups concerned that children no longer get enough opportunities for unstructured play. They fear that without play, children will become slugs glued to the computer screen, never having learned trust, empathy, how to interact with others, how to make up a story, or to think creatively. The fantastic sales of the Iggulden brothers’ The Dangerous Book for Boys suggests the widespread yearning for play, at least among the adults buying the book.
Theories of development and cognition focus on the utilitarian aspects play: what it is good for. Even definitions of play – which, like all definitions, are both elusive and controversial – are subjective. Some define play as an act of ‘limited immediate function’; for others, play activities ‘are internally motivated, self-directed, spirited, and characterised by some degree of divergent ‘as-if’ thinking’. Such definitions capture important features of play, and important arguments for promoting play. They do not, however, capture the feeling of actually playing, as descriptions of experiments do not capture the excitement of scientific discovery. For a child playing, the most salient feature of play is that it is fun. Not necessarily roll-on-the-floor-laughing fun, but the kind of intense focus that makes one return over and over to the playroom.
This feeling – an intense but somehow uplifting concentration – is called ‘flow’. Developed by Csikszentmihalyi, a famous psychologist with an unpronounceable name, flow describes the feeling of ‘being in the zone’, that is, being so absorbed in a task that feelings of distraction, discomfort, tiredness, and hunger simply disappear. For adults, this state is elusive. We can spend hours practising a sport but emerge as all elbows and feet on the field, or study but only feel slower and more stupid. Yet, under the right circumstances, in moments of attention and motivation, when our skills and the task at hand align, we can achieve flow. Scientists are among those who often describe ‘flow-like’ states when working. Accounts of scientific discoveries often describe an intense focus on answering a question, feelings of absorbed concentration and excitement before being struck with a great idea. For children, particularly children absorbed in play, flow is even easier to achieve. Some theorists think that this kind of absorption as a child may motivate children to become scientists, or may even be a necessary prerequisite for experiencing flow as an adult.
I wonder if it might be this sense of fun that unites a child’s playful exploration of the world with the work of great scientists. The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ is a silly proverb. ‘Necessity is the mother of futile dodges’ is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.” Perhaps in this respect we can learn from our knee-high companions, and temper the scientific method with some good old-fashioned play. |
