Thursday, December 2, 2010

CHAPTER 5 PLAY

This part of the six senses gets hands-on or rather gets the laugh on. Madan Kataria introduced the idea of laughing just to laugh, and through laughter he wanted to change the world. One of our more famous sayings is that laughter is the best medicine and that it can do anything from limiting wrinkles to reducing stress causing illnesses.

Dr. Kataria came up with the laughing clubs. The purpose of these clubs is to be able to be playful and to activate the right side of the brain because the left is limited to logic and there is a growing need to tone down the seriousness in places such as business or school and to replace it with play. The example given was about a man being fired at the Ford Rouge River plant for smiling. Ford thought that people needed to be serious at work in order to be productive otherwise problems would arise.

However, in the Conceptual Age the combination of work and play seem to enhance productivity and creativeness. For eaxample, South Western Airlines mission statement is "People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it".

Play is coming forward from the background into the sunlight and showing itself off in 3 ways: games, humor, and joyfulness. Starting with games, Pink talks about how video games are definitely part of the future of learning. Role playing video games will be able to show students/people how to think critically, problem solve, and work on creating new and innovative ideas to accomplish their goals, all within the supportive atmosphere of the game. The only word of caution about this was a possible link between the games and agression. On the other hand, games can help reduce stress and where is one of the most stressful places...the workplace. Play can "strengthen and ennoble the work ethic". Games are also teaching new whole-minded lessons to a new generations.

Humor is next in the area of laughter. This is the brain reconciling a situation (joke) in which the right brain is used to make an incongruant story make sense. Drs. Shammi and Stuss conducted and experiment where they had 2 groups, one a control group with intact brains; the second had damage to their right hemispheres. The groups were given a "pick-the-punch line joke to complete and the data demonstrated that where the control group picked the correct
punch line; those with damage to the right side of the brain picked one of the other answers. The humor concept, with its ability to reconcile incongruences, was lost on the second group. Shammi and Stuss also held the belief that humor represents one of the highest forms of human intelligence which makes sense if you are looking at the whole picture. Even as a child grows and developes we can see how their mind develops and grows from learning to speak to learning to solve puzzles and jokes.

Humor can go either way, it can either be a volatile force that is cruel and destruct ue or it can be a cohesive force unifying and creaeting a bond between coworkers.

Lastly, we come to joyfulness and the phrase that stands out the most for this portion is a quote from Kataria: "Happiness is conditional; joyfulness is unconditional." At the beginning of this blog, I started out describing Kataria and his laughing clubs. The idea behind the laughing clubs is to be able to laugh and take joy in nothing or rather, we shouldn't need to depend on anything to make us laugh; if we do then we don't own the joy. In the laugh clubs, they do a series of laughing exercises, it does not require humor. Pink also talks about how children can laugh for no reason and lets us know how the laughing clubs can teach us to do just that.

In the last section, Pink discusses ways that we can try to make our workplaces a little more playful such as the cartoon captions game.

When we incorporate play into something that we are doing it makes us happier and more likely to do a better job and to continue doing a better job on whatever we are working on. Play and laughter have also been said to lengthen one's life span. Should we see if it works? Ha, Ha,

3 comments:

  1. I enjoyed this chapter and saw so much truth to it! I remember going to a leadership conference in college and one of the presentations was about integrating play/fun/laughter into the work place and about how much more successful the people who do this are.

    I like the quote you mentioned that happiness is conditional, joyfulness unconditional. One of our most popular teachers (by students, parents, other staff, community...) is a joyful person. He is not always happy, but his outlook on life is positive and he is fun! We had an inservice before school this year where we all had to create igoogle pages. One of his links is a joke of the day. He starts his class with a laugh and the students seem to have a special connection with him and are generally successful in his classes. Students respect this teacher, but are also comfortable with him. I think this supports the South Western mission statement you used, "People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it."

    ReplyDelete
  2. I enjoyed this section. We always need a more laughter and joy in our life. Humor has always made challenges easier to face.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I thought it was quite interesting that the military got more recruits by producing army video games. Quite powerful. I was also surprised that surgeons who played video games made less mistakes when doing surgery. Makes me want to interview doctors before surgery and get video game players. I also wonder how acceptable laughter is in the workplace...Research says it is beneficial as far as production etc. Maybe more supervisors should read this book. Also, nice job on the summary. Seems like you covered it all. I loved what the Dala Lama said about happiness being the goal in life. I decided that when I was 20.

    ReplyDelete