Have we forgotten how to play?

This message comes from IXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/npr. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From Ted and NPR, I'm Manouche Zamorodi. We're going to start in the nineteen fifties in Illinois and a small farming town called Sheldon. Sheldon's fields were filled with rich black soil. On the farms, there were lots of livestock, and out in the wild, plenty of rabbits, squirrels, foxes, and birds. But there was also one species that was not welcome, the Japanese beetle. Japanese beetles were eating crops, and so the county was flying small airplanes across the farmland, spraying the fields with pesticides. This was happening all over the country. The beetles died, but so did blue jays, brown thrashers, cardinals, grackles, and bluebirds. Robins, as a report noted at the time, were almost annihilated. And Sheldon, Illinois became a case study at the heart of a book that came out a few years later, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. She painted a really eerie picture of what would spring be like without the sounds of birds. This is Peter Gray. He was a young man when the book was published, and he remembers how it became a huge hit and had a major influence on American culture. Ultimately, it it led to the environmental movement. The environmental movement led to pesticide bans, land conservation efforts, and a new appreciation for wildlife, especially birds. And we now have birds are back. I happen to be living in a place where I can see, hawks regularly, occasional eagles flying over, lots of birds of all sorts of species in my backyard. It's no longer a silent spring in terms of bird sounds. But Peter Gray, who is now a renowned evolutionary biologist and researcher of child psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, well, he says there is another stunning silence that urgently needs our attention. The lack of children's voices outside playing. We have a different kind of silent spring now. Compare that to when Peter was growing up in the nineteen fifties. If school wasn't in session and it was daylight, there would pretty much always be children outdoors. You could find them in the parks. You could find them playing on sidewalks. You could find them... On school days, they'd be walking to school and …