Taking Play Seriously By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG Published: February
17, 2008 On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people
came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play --
not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all
people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture
featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging
playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown,
president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at
the New York Public Library's main branch on 42nd Street. He
created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of
psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous
long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk
at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio
program ''Speaking of Faith,'' discussed the biological and
spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the
''developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you
look at what pr