Brandi Burke's List: psyc additional items

• • module 1 - article - value of play
• Play in our species serves many valuable purposes. It is a means by which children develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities. It is a means of creating and preserving friendships. It also provides a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors.
• The first point is that the characteristics of play all have to do with motivation and mental attitude, not with the overt form of the behavior.
• The second point, toward definition, is that play is not necessarily all-or-none.
• The third point is that play is not neatly defined in terms of some single identifying characteristic. Rather, it is defined in terms of a confluence of several characteristics
• boiled down, I think, to the following five: (1) Play is self-chosen and self-directed; (2) Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; (3) Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; (4) Play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and (5) Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.
• 1. Play is self-chosen and self-directed; players are always free to quit.
• 2. Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends.
• 3. Play is guided by mental rules.
• 4. Play is non-literal, imaginative, marked off in some way from reality.
• 5. Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.
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• • module 1 - article - chron. higher edu.
• The message is this: The emphasis on standardized testing, on attempting to constantly monitor, measure, and quantify what students learn, has forced teachers to spend more of the school day engaged in so-called direct instruction and has substantially reduced or eliminated opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and learning on their own. Recess has, in many districts, vanished from the schedule entirely. After school, parents shuttle their kids from activity to activity, depriving them of unstructured time alone or with friends.
• That matters, according to researchers, not just because play reduces stress and makes children more socially competent—which evidence suggests that it does. It matters also because play supposedly improves working memory and self-regulation; in other words, it makes kids sharper and better-behaved. So, ironically, by shortchanging them on play in favor of academics, we may actually be inhibiting their development.
• Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional classroom instruction.
• While much of the research on play focuses on young children, the implications go well beyond third grade. In junior high, play is more likely to be called "discovery learning." When professors try to get college students to look up from their iPhones, it's probably referred to as "active engagement." But the principles are the same. Stuart Brown, one of the authors of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, has reviewed thousands of life histories and concluded that play is essential for children and adults.
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• • module 1 - article - 6 types of play
• Through play children learn and practice many basic social skills. They develop a sense of self, learn to interact with other children, how to make friends, how to lie and how to role-play.
• The thing to notice is that the first four categories of play don’t involve much interaction with others, while the last two do. While children shift between the types of play, what Parten noticed was that as they grew up, children participated less in the first four types and more in the last two – those which involved greater interaction.
• • Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. A relatively infrequent style of play.
   
  • Solitary play: the child is are completely engrossed in playing and does not seem to notice other children. Most often seen in children between 2 and 3 years-old.
   
  • Onlooker play: child takes an interest in other children’s play but does not join in. May ask questions or just talk to other children, but the main activity is simply to watch.
   
  • Parallel play: the child mimics other children’s play but doesn’t actively engage with them. For example they may use the same toy.
   
  • Associative play: now more interested in each other than the toys they are using. This is the first category that involves strong social interaction between the children while they play.
   
  • Cooperative play: some organisation enters children’s play, for example the playing has some goal and children often adopt roles and act as a group.

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• • module 1 - article - nat. inst. for play
• Attunement play
• When an infant makes eye contact with her mother, each experiences a spontaneous surge of emotion (joy). The baby responds with a radiant smile, the mother with her own smile and rhythmic vocalizations (baby talk).  This is the grounding base of the state-of-play. It is known, through EEG and other imaging technologies, that the right cerebral cortex, which organizes emotional control is “attuned” in both infant and mother.
• Body Play & Movement
• If you don’t understand human movement, you won’t really understand yourself or play. If you do, you will reap the benefits of play in your body, personal life and work situations.  Learning about self movement structures an individual’s knowledge of the world - it is a way of knowing, and we actually, through movement and play, think in motion. For example the play-driven movement of leaping upward is a lesson about gravity as well as one’s body. And it lights up the brain and fosters learning. Innovation, flexibility, adaptability, resilience, have their roots in movement. The play driven pleasures associated with exploratory body movements, rhythmic early speech (moving vocal cords), locomotor and rotational activity - are done for their own sake; pleasurable, and intrinsically playful. They sculpt the brain, and ready the player for the unexpected and unusual.
• Object Play       

  Along with other special patterns of play, the curiosity about and playing  with “objects” is a pervasive innately fun pattern of play, and creates its own “states” of playfulness.  Early on, toys take on highly personalized characteristics, and as skills in manipulating objects (i.e., banging on pans, skipping rocks, etc.) develop, the richer become the circuits in the brain. Hands playing with all types of objects help brains develop beyond strictly manipulative skills, with play as the driver of this development.   The correlation of effective adult problem solving and earlier encouragement of and facility in manipulating objects has been established. The science of progressively more complex object play and its relation to overall competency has sparked research interest in corporate “work readiness”, in that a deficiency in fixing things by hand during one's youth may well mean deficiencies in complex problem solving in challenging work settings as an adult. To be a good research engineer, for example may mean that the times spent in high school fixing cars or building airplane models are as important as getting an advanced degree, particularly if the engineer is also expected to function as an innovative problem solver.
• Social Play
• The science of social play is complex, but can be studied selectively. The NIFP has a particular interest in early parent infant play, better understanding of the signals that herald and maintain social play, ( Such as the play face, various play body languages, as, in domestic dogs,  the play-bow with wagging tail)
• Imaginative and pretend play
• The ability of the young child to create their own sense of their mind, and that of others, takes place through pretend play, which continues to nourish the spirit throughout life, and remains key to innovation and creativity. Deprivation studies uphold the importance of this pattern of play, as understanding and trusting others and developing coping skills depends on its presence.
• Storytelling-Narrative play

• Storytelling, the way most kids love to learn, is, when under the play microscope, identified as the unit of human intelligibility.

   

  Making sense of the world, its parts and one’s particular place in it is a central aspect of early development. And as we grow, the constancy of stories that enliven and help us understand ourselves and others, from a parent’s telling how it was when they were young, to media-driven stories like Big Bird’s rants to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon yarns; all involve us in a never ending fun-giving experience.
• Transformative-Integrative and Creative play
• We can access fantasy-play to transcend the reality of our ordinary lives, and in the process germinate new ideas, and shape and re-shape them. Given enriched circumstances, and access to novelty, our play drive takes us into these realms spontaneously

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• • module 1 - article - personality type

• Where do you fit in these eight personalities?

  1. The Joker -- makes people laugh, plays practical jokes.

  2. The Kinesthete -- loves to move, dance, swim, play sports.

  3. The Explorer -- goes to new places, meets new people, seeks out new experiences (physically or mentally).

  4. The Competitor -- loves all forms of competition, has fun keeping score.

  5. The Director -- enjoys planning and executing events and experiences, like throwing parties, organizing outings, and leading.

  6. The Collector -- loves the thrill of collecting, whether objects or experiences.

  7. The Artist/Creator -- finds joy in making things, fixing things, decorating, working with his or her hands.

  8. The Storyteller -- loves to use imagination to create and absorb stories, in novels, movies, plays, performances.

• • module 2 - pop wk2
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people find genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness called Flow. In this state they are completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity which involves their creative abilities. During this “optimal experience” they feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” In the footsteps of Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi insists that happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for ones abilities.
• If it is not skiing, you may have had similar experiences in other activities—some other challenging exercise, working on a difficult project, or even to a certain degree in simpler exercises like reading or conversation with a friend. These are moments in which your mind becomes entirely absorbed in the activity so that you “forget yourself” and begin to act effortlessly, with a heightened sense of awareness of the here and now (athletes often describe this as “being in the zone”). You may be surprised to learn, however, that this experience has become the focus of much research in recent years by positive psychologists. Indeed, the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has even given it a name for an objective condition—“flow.”
• http://sketchnotesbook.com/
• The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.3)
• “If you are pained by external things it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that power now.” (Cskiszentmihalyi, 1990, p.20) The key to happiness consists in how we invest our psychic energy. When we focus our attention on a consciously chosen goal, our psychic energy literally “flows” in the direction of that goal, resulting in a re-ordering and harmony within consciousness.
• • There are clear goals every step of the way.
   
  • There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
   
  • There is a balance between challenges and skills.
   
  • Action and awareness are merged.
   
  • Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
   
  • There is no worry of failure.
   
  • Self-consciousness disappears.
   
  • The sense of time becomes distorted.
   
  • The activity becomes an end in itself.
• He even concludes that there are people who have developed their flow to such an extent that they are able to translate every potential threat into an enjoyable challenge, and thereby maintain an inner tranquility as a continuous state of mind. He calls such a person an “autotelic self,” someone who “is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on and in flow most of the time.”

• From this example and many others, Csikszentmihalyi points to five ways through which one is able to cultivate one’s self into an autotelic person:

   
   
  1. Setting goals that have clear and immediate feedback
   
  2. Becoming immersed in the particular activity
   
  3. Paying attention to what is happening in the moment
   
  4. Learning to enjoy immediate experience
   
  5. Proportioning one’s skills to the challenge at hand
• The similarities between Yoga and flow are extremely strong; in fact it makes sense to think of Yoga as a very thoroughly planned flow activity. Both try to achieve a joyous, self-forgetful involvement through concentration, which in turn is made possible by a discipline of the body.
• According to Freud, the self is composed of three different parts: 1) the “Id” which represents instinctual drives or our “nature;” 2) the “Superego” which represents values or expectations imposed on us by society, our “nurture,” and 3) the “Ego,” which is the part of consciousness we are aware of and which can take control over the other parts
• Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos…when we are left alone, with no demands on attention, the basic order of the mind reveals itself…Entropy is the normal state of consciousness—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.119)
• While a pleasurable experience is typically a passive state, like watching television, enjoying a massage, or ingesting a pill, the flow experience is an active state that is completely within the control of the person. The effortlessness that is achieved during the experience is only arrived at after engaged focus and goal-directed behavior

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• • module 2 - pop wk2
• The limbic brain  emerged in the first mammals. It can record memories of behaviours  that produced agreeable and disagreeable experiences, so it  is responsible for what are called emotions in human beings.  The main structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus,  the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The limbic brain is the  seat of the value judgments that we make, often unconsciously,  that exert such a strong influence on our behaviour.
• The neocortex first  assumed importance in primates and culminated in the human  brain with its two large cerebral hemispheres that play such  a dominant role. These hemispheres have been responsible for  the development of human language, abstract thought, imagination,  and consciousness. The neocortex is flexible and has almost  infinite learning  abilities. The neocortex is also what has enabled human cultures to  develop.
• The reptilian brain,  the oldest of the three, controls the body's vital functions  such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature and balance.  Our reptilian brain includes the main structures found in a  reptile's brain: the brainstem and the cerebellum. The reptilian  brain is reliable but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive.

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• • module 2 - pop wk2
• Play opportunities improve memory and stimulate the growth of the cerebral cortex
• Play and exploration trigger the secretion of BDNF, a substance essential for the growth of brain cells
• Kids pay more attention to academic tasks when they are given frequent, brief opportunities for free play

• Language and the benefits of play

   

  Studies reveal a link between play--particularly symbolic, pretend play--and the development of language skills.

• Play promotes creative problem solving

   

  Psychologists distinguish two types of problem—-convergent and divergent. A convergent problem has a single correct solution or answer. A divergent problem yields itself to multiple solutions.
• Math skills and the benefits of play

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• • week 3 - module 3 artile
• For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new   study by IBM. The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations   and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their companies in today's world.
• Steven Tomasco, a manager at IBM Global Business Services, expressed surprise at this key finding, saying that it is "very interesting that coming off the   worst economic conditions they'd ever seen, [CEOs] didn't fall back on management discipline, existing best practices, rigor, or operations. In fact, they   [did] just the opposite."

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• • week 3 - module 3 - all 5, no point in marking entire page with the highlighter

• • week 3 - module 3

• • modeul 4, extra to read
• When life is busy, or all your energy is focused on a special project, it's all too easy to find yourself off  balance, not paying enough attention to important areas of your life. While you need to have drive and focus if you're going to get things done, taking this too far can lead to frustration and intense stress.

• Figure 1 – Wheel of Life Example

   

  

• Using the Tool

   

   

  There are two ways you can use this tool. One is to use our interactive Wheel of Life tool below (click on the diagram to activate it).

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• • modeul 4, extra to read

• I wondered:

    

  How do I balance client service with working on my own ideas?

    

  How do I avoid interruptions that mess with my creative flow?

    

  How do I stop putting off the stuff I hate but still have to do?
• 1. Set priorities on Sunday.
   Every Sunday, I sit down and map out my week. Instead of defining the hour-by-hour of each day, I outline my weekly priorities and what I want to have accomplished by the following Sunday.

• 2. Map out work, play, fit, and push.
   Work: For each day, I outline my "Top 3," meaning the three most important things I will have accomplished by the end of the day. Sometimes I'll map out the entire week on Sunday because my priorities are super clear. Other times, I'll decide on my Top 3 on a day-by-day basis.

    

  Play: I've found that play enables me to self-express, reflect, and give my ideas space, which shows up positively in my work. Making time to create art, get into nature, go on photo walks, read poetry, skip down sidewalks and the like puts me in a constant state of curiosity and flow.

    

  Fit: Movement keeps ideas moving forward so I aim to move my body for at least 30 minutes each day.

    

  Push: Since learning and growth is important to me, I do something that scares me (almost) every day. This may be asking someone whom I deeply respect for an interview or writing about a topic that makes me feel vulnerable.
• 3. Batch your days.
   Batching actions into specific days and creating time for creativity has been a huge gamechanger for me. Here's how I break down my schedule.

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