The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
So play is powerful at making your prefrontal cortex more plastic, more able to change in response to experience, but not just during the period of play, but in all scenarios, because you get one prefrontal cortex, you don't get a prefrontal cortex just for play.
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
The way to actually expand your practice is to engage in this kind of low stakes thinking, the idea that, well, I'm just going to kind of play and tinker. I'm going to explore in a way that it doesn't really matter if the ball goes back over the net, doesn't really matter if the ball goes in the hole and it's counterintuitive because you think, no, the thing that we need to do is drill and drill and drill and drill. But this mode of play with modest levels of endogenous opioids being released in our system, plus low levels of adrenaline, right? Epinephrine low levels of epinephrine and adrenaline are possible only when the stakes are low enough that we're not stressed. Well that combination really allows the prefrontal cortex to explore different possibilities in ways that can truly expand our capabilities over time.