Movement is primal and accompanies all the elements of play we are examining, even word or image movement in imaginative play. If you don’t understand and appreciate human movement, you won’t really understand yourself or play. Learning about self-movement creates a structure for an individual’s knowledge of the world—it is a way of knowing. Through movement play, we think in motion. Movement structures our knowledge of the world, space, time, and our relationship to others. We’ve internalized movement, space, and time so completely that we need to take a step back (a movement metaphor) to realize how much we think in these terms. Our knowledge of the physical world, based in movement, explains why we describe emotions with terms like “close,” “distant,” “open,” “closed.” We say we “grasp” ideas, or “wrestle” with them, or “stumble” upon them.

Movement play lights up the brain and fosters learning, innovation, flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. These central aspects of human nature require movement to be fully realized. This is why, when someone is having a hard time getting into a play state, I have them do something that involves movement: because body play is universal. As Bob Fagen says, “Movement fills an empty heart.”

//Stuart Brown, Christopher Vaughan, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul