Essentials: Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain

Andrew Huberman opens this Essentials episode by moving play out of the category of leisure and into the category of cognition. Much of childhood development centers around play, he notes, but the adult nervous system does not outgrow the underlying circuitry; adults "also need to play" [s00001]. The episode's central reframing is that play is not a list of activities — sports, board games, word games — but a mode of engagement. What he calls "the power of play" [s00001] is really the power of a particular kind of information gathering: play is "an exploration in contingencies" [s00003], the repeated testing of if-then relationships such as "if I do A, what happens? If I do B, what happens?" [s00004]. That reframing is what licenses the episode's later claims about brain change: the value of play is located in the kind of learning it supports, not in the specific game being played.

The payoff of this framing is that play enriches a catalog. Play is described as the place where we "expand our catalog of potential outcomes" [s00004], and Huberman connects that catalog to creative and intellectual life: "the tinkerers of the world, the true creatives, the people that build incredible technologies and art" are said to share "a strong element of play" [s00004]. The argument is deliberately developmental rather than recreational — how toddlers play "reveals the fundamental rules by which the toddler brain interacts with the world" [s00004] — so the same logic can be extended, as the episode later does, to adults.

The mechanism Huberman proposes runs from an ancient brainstem structure to the front of the brain. Play "is generated through the connectivity of many brain areas", but he singles out one key node: the periaqueductal gray, or PAG [s00001]. He situates it anatomically — "The periaqueductal gray is a brain stem area" positioned "pretty far back as the brain kind of transitions into the spinal cord" — and describes it as "rich with neurons that make endogenous opioids" [s00002]. He is careful to separate these from the opioids behind the public health crisis: these neurons "release endogenous, meaning self-made or biologically made opioids", and they "go by names like enkephalin and things of that sort" [s00002].

Play evokes small amounts of opioid release into the system.

Note the qualifier "small amounts" — the claim is not a flood of neurochemical reward but a modest shift in chemical state. The claimed consequence is a change in how the prefrontal cortex operates. Rather than viewing that region as "a kind of rigid executive of the whole brain", Huberman argues it "works in concert with these other more primitive circuitries" [s00003]. During play, the prefrontal cortex "doesn't get stupid. It actually gets smarter" — it "develops the ability to take on different roles and explore different contingencies" [s00003]. In mechanistic terms, PAG opioids are said to allow the prefrontal cortex to "expand the number of operations that it can run" [s00005], a phrase he treats as roughly synonymous with exploring more if-then possibilities.

The generalization claim matters for the episode's practical pitch: the plasticity is not compartmentalized. Play makes the prefrontal cortex more plastic "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" [s00010]. On this account, whatever flexibility is trained in a game is available to commuting decisions, relationships, and work — a strong claim that the episode asserts more than it demonstrates in this section.