Rod’s Reviews > Playing With Movement: How to Explore the Many Dimensions of Physical Health and Performance > Status Update

A crowd of agents

Investors in a market, neurons in the brain the individuals have a role to play. These indo isles join together to create a mind of their own as a whole.

We need to understand what they want, how they think. No point in forcing a muscle to stretch, we would be better off teaching the nervous system that the range is safe and strong.

Reductionist approach is used in science to break down a complex system into smaller parts, This can be an effective tool to understand the system as a whole. It’s not easy to do this with the human body for example as the borders are fuzzy. In a complex system the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts

Play is intrinsically motivating

Mark Twain - “work consists of whatever a body is obligated to do, play consists of what a body is not obligated to do”

Play doesn’t serve any obvious short term goal related to survival or reproduction,

So if you see two chetah chasing each other and they are not trying to mate or trying to eat each other, they are playing

Evolutionary mismatch which occurs when animals are Exposed to an environment radically different from ours. Animals in a zoo tend to be sick, stressed etc.

This is similar to the environment humans live in today, we live and work in boxes. It’s too easy for us to attain food without any load on our physical structure. Metabolic cost is low

Play!

The smartest animals play, humans play the most

Builds resilience in our bodies, physical fitness, movement and social skills, allowing us to become more adaptive and creative in general.

Physical wellness is a multidimensional construct