The Ball (3 page)

Neuroscientist Sergio Pellis of the University of Lethbridge in Canada and his colleagues have found that there's a direct correlation between brain size and playfulness in mammals. They measured brain size and recorded play behaviors in 15 species of mammals and found that the species with relatively large brains played a lot more than their small-brained counterparts.

The evolutionary lines that eventually led to dolphins and humans diverged in the Mesozoic Age, more than 95 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs still roamed Earth. Despite being virtually unrelated to humans, dolphins are by every measure among the most playful of animals, second only to humans in this department. And it's almost certainly no coincidence that they are also second only to humans when it comes to their brain-to-body size, or encephalization quotient. EQ is defined by neuroscientist and behavioral biologist Lori Marino as “a measure of observed brain size relative to the expected brain size derived from a regression of brain weight on body weight for a sample of species.” The EQ value for modern humans is 7.0. Dolphins have EQ levels close to 4.5, while our closest relatives, the great apes, have levels of only 1.5 to 3. Scientists have found some correlation between EQ value and the degree to which animals are inclined to play. Dolphins and humans, Marino says, “share a psychology.” You could say we're both uniquely hardwired to play hard.

At poolside, Stan made some quick introductions. Vixen, he pointed out, can be identified by the perpetual rash on her neck caused by laying her head on the edge of the pool. Astro's tail is crooked from scoliosis. Noah has pink freckles on his chest. And so on. Once I'd been told who was who, Stan walked up to a rack filled with a random array of objects—buoys of various shapes and colors, plastic pool fencing, sections of Styrofoam mats, orange traffic cones, plastic rings, and a small blue and white basketball.

“Let's give them some toys to play with,” he said, grabbing a noodle. “These guys are crazy about their toys.”

We began grabbing objects and throwing them in. The pool erupted with energy. Vixen darted off with the chain of pool fencing wrapped around her fin. Largo started pushing a mat through the water, then jumping on top of it to make a slapping sound, then pushing it to the pool's bottom. I threw in a blue and white ball that Ivan and Noah instantly began pushing around the pool with their noses, dodging, faking, and reversing direction to keep the ball from their opponent. They then took turns diving to the bottom and then rocketing to the surface to knock the ball high in the air, breaching behind it before slapping back down on the water.

Dolphins are extraordinary athletes. Along with having high EQs and a relentless urge to play, they are built to perform. They can achieve speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. They can dive as deep as 1,000 feet and stay down for 30 minutes at a stretch. They navigate and locate each other, along with predators and prey, through echolocation—producing sound waves that bounce off objects and bring back detailed information on distance, location, and shape. Dolphins, Stan says, can locate and retrieve an object the size of a golf ball at a football field's distance. With that lethal combination of speed, spatial prowess, and hunger to play, I thought, the Miami Dolphins would not only sail into the Super Bowl but would finally live up to the promise of their name.

After a few minutes of playing with the ball, Ivan managed to flip it out of the pool right where I was standing. I picked it up and threw it back in. Ivan chased it down and then initiated the dolphin equivalent of a game of fetch. He'd push it all the way back to me, I'd reach into the pool, pick it up, and throw it back in. After doing this repeatedly for nearly five minutes, I got distracted by another dolphin and turned away. So this time he not only brought the ball back but then smacked it out of the water with his nose, sending it whizzing past my head. Clearly he meant business.

The game had gone from just chasing, to playing fetch, to knocking the ball out of the water back to the thrower with line drives that became more precise each time. Largo soon abandoned his mat and joined the game, adding a competitive dimension. In just ten minutes, what had begun as a frenzy of free play had evolved into a disciplined and competitive interspecies ball game with an unspoken but mutually understood set of rules.

Where I saw the rudimentary foundations of sport, Stan sees the development and maintenance of flexible problem-solving skills that dolphins depend on in the wild. His observations of Ivan, Largo, and other captive dolphins lead him to believe that they use play to continuously test and challenge themselves, constantly tweaking the “rules” to sharpen their cognitive skills. He uses Piaget's concept of “moderately discrepant events” to describe this phenomenon. Dolphins, like Piaget's child subjects, learn about their world and expand their physical and cognitive abilities by slightly modifying the rules of their play to make them incrementally more stimulating. This is how both dolphins and humans play and learn.

The evolving poolside ball game was serving as what Marc Bekoff calls “brain food” for Ivan, Largo, and their friends. The dolphins, responding to my cues and initiating variations in play themselves, were flexing their cognitive muscles, perfecting motor skills, and manipulating their watery environment in ways that could eventually be put to the test in the wild.

It's hardly a coincidence that the object at the center of all the pool action was a ball. According to Stan, balls are the hands-down favorite toy of dolphins, as they so often are for people. In a controlled study of the play behaviors of 16 captive dolphins conducted over a five-year period, he found that they were far more likely to initiate spontaneous play with balls than with other objects, with bubbles, or even with each other. Why balls?

Well, if play is brain food, then ball play is like a high-protein, calorie-packed energy bar. The ball may be one of the most animate of inanimate objects in our material world. As I watched Largo and Ivan laugh and splash and leap after their colorful ball while the other dolphins dragged mats and ropes around the pool, I coined my own term to describe balls as objects: kinetically interesting. Balls can bounce, roll, be struck, thrown and caught fairly easily at a wide range of speeds. They are highly aerodynamic and yet unpredictable in their trajectory, capable in the hands of a deft knuckleball pitcher of appearing to defy the laws of physics.

Balls are also by nature social tools. They draw animals and humans together, inviting either cooperation or competition or, as in most sports, some dynamic combination of the two. “I throw or kick to you, you throw or kick it back” is very different than “you grab the ball and try to keep it from me.” But both involve tacit agreement around the rules of fair play. Vanessa Woods, a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, spent time playing with bonobo chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and experienced both responses.

“We were looking at the social dimensions of bonobo tool use,” she told me. “We had this bright pink ball that the chimps just loved. The question we asked was, were they just going to steal it and run away? Or would they get the idea that this is a shared experience and now we're going to play together. So the big test was if we threw the ball to them, would they throw it back?”

Some of the bonobos just ran off with the prized possession and didn't get the social part of it at all. “For them, it was the equivalent of throwing a Wii to a group of kids,” Vanessa said. “They'd fight over it and whoever got it first would run off with it.” I paused to contemplate such a scene with Aidan and his friends and instantly got the distinction.

Two of the bonobos in the research group took to the game right away. One chimp threw the ball back with his hands, then with his feet, and then experimented with other throws. He'd then clap his hands and wait for it to be thrown back.

“When the experiment was done,” Vanessa said, “he'd throw a tantrum like a kid would do: he'd tug at your arm, make all kinds of noise, and would try slapping the ball out of your hands even.”

Animals that depend on learning for survival all play. It's how knowledge and experience are passed from parent to child, enabling a safe space where limits can be tested and new ideas and innovations can get a dry run. “In a dangerous world,” wrote Diane Ackerman, “where dramas change daily, survival belongs to the agile, not the idle.”

At the pool, the head trainer reluctantly interrupted our game. Vixen, Largo, and friends had a performance coming up and needed a break from the action. We gathered up all the toys and assembled them back on the rack. The dolphins got agitated, slapping the water with their fins, as though disappointed at the fun ending—“continuation desire” at work. Vixen rested her head sullenly on the side of the pool and looked instantly bored as we headed out front to find seats in the rapidly filling stadium. Ten minutes later, throbbing rock music signaled the start of the show. The dolphins swam in and were soon jumping through hoops, doing synchronized tail slaps, leaping and landing in unison, sending huge waves of water into the front row and soaking delighted audience members. Their eyes were then covered to show off their ability to use echolocation to find and retrieve several tossed rings. After each trick, the trainers shoveled a handful of herring into the dolphins' mouths. They seemed to be enjoying themselves as they hungrily devoured the fish and showed off their skills to the cheering audience. It was a great show, and exhilarating to watch. Yes, it was regimented, rehearsed, rewarded, and therefore entirely different than our backstage games. The equivalent, you might say, of a Little League championship versus a pickup game with friends.

As they did their tricks and earned their dinner, their secret was safe with me: herring or no, they'd be playing just as hard.

S
o when did we put it all together? Who first spoke those magical words “Play ball”? In what language were they uttered? Or were balls kicked and rolled and thrown for fun and competition long before there were even words to describe the rules or capture the play-by-play?

Since the drive to play and even to invent rudimentary games is undeniably pre-human, it is almost certain that our earliest hominid ancestors were capable of it on some level. It is also likely that it was in part through play, through testing our limits and innovating solutions, that we adapted to changing environments and evolved into our modern form. For this reason, Huizinga believed that
Homo ludens
, Man the Player, deserves his due alongside
Homo sapiens
, Man the Thinker. We play, therefore we are.

Until recently, however, the common wisdom was that play was purely an act of leisure (leisure being the opposite of work) and therefore an invention of civilization. The lives of our earliest ancestors and, by extension, of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes were seen as an all-out grind from sunrise to sunset. Every ounce of expendable energy went into bagging the next deer, or gathering wild vegetables, or defending against predators, leaving no reserves for anything as frivolous as the playing of games (or, for that matter, arts, science, etc.). This is a compelling story that makes our great march toward civilization feel satisfyingly linear, virtuous, and inevitable. As we evolved, we not only got smarter but also had more fun. But it turns out not to be true.

In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Lee spent time among the !Kung bushmen of Africa's Kalahari Desert and found that their hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn't the “precarious and arduous struggle for existence” we all imagined it to be. !Kung women, who—big shocker—worked harder than the men, could gather enough food in one day to feed their families for three, spending the rest of their time resting, visiting neighbors, entertaining—enjoying some measure of leisure, in other words. Their husbands, meanwhile, had it even better. It turns out that hunters, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously put it, “keep bankers' hours.”

The Australian Aborigines present the perfect example of a leisure-rich hunter-gatherer culture that historically played a wide variety of sports, including ball games. A diverse collection of groups that once spoke as many as 300 distinct languages, the Aborigines have traditionally been hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, had no agriculture, and employed simple stone tool technology that remained largely unchanged over their 40,000-year history. But they played ball.

The Aborigines of western Victoria played a football-like game called
marn grook
that involved upward of 50 men playing across a large open stretch of land. Accounts from the 1920s and earlier describe a contest between clans or totem groups (the “white cockatoos” versus the “black cockatoos,” for example) that involved punting and catching a stuffed ball made from grass and beeswax, opossum pelt, or, in some cases, the scrotum of a kangaroo.