Andrew Huberman· PhD
And the reason this is so important is because it starts to move us away from what some people call hacks. I define hacks as using one thing for a different purpose to kind of get a shortcut. I don't really like the term, frankly, and I don't like it because it's not grounded in any biological mechanism. But when we look at play, we can say, play is the portal to plastic. Play at every stage of life is the way in which we learned the rules for that stage of life. And play is the way in which we were able to test how we might function in the real world context. So play is powerful. And we could even say that play is the most powerful portal to plasticity. The reason for that is that yes, this high opioid, low epinephrine or adrenaline state is what opens up play. But then inside of the arena of play, when the prefrontal cortex is running all these different possibilities in this low stakes way. But with some degree of focus, there are a number of other chemicals that are deployed. Things like Brain-derived neurotrophic factor and other growth factors that actually trigger the rewiring of brain circuits that allow for it to expand. And indeed that's what is neuroplasticity.