From the Vault: Pretend Play, Part 4

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of pretend play in childhood development and human consciousness. (part 4 of 5) (originally published 1/21/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's
Saturday Fault episode coming at you. Pretend Play Part four.
It's that simple. This was part four of five and
it originally published one one, twenty twenty five. Let's have it.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we returned the
fourth installment in our discussion of pretend play, play that
involves non literal action and understanding. So when I pretend
my fingers are worms crawling up the side of the couch,
that's going on in our house this week, by the way,
fingers are worms. Or when I pretend a cardboard box

(00:58):
becomes the castle grace skull, or when I change the
diaper on a stuffed velociraptor, or if I go on
adventures in the backyard with an imaginary friend. These are
all forms of pretend play play that takes place within
a pretend frame and treats anything in the world or
in the situation as other than what it literally is. Now,

(01:19):
if you haven't heard the previous parts in this series,
I think This is one where we really would recommend
listening in order. We're going to be building on some
conversations we had in previous episodes today, but in those
previous installments to refresh, we talked about ways that researchers
define and subdivide pretend play into activities like object substitution.

(01:39):
So one of our favorite examples is banana is a telephone.
They talk about that a lot in the research enactment
play where you Might be. You know, I am cooking
dinner in my play Kitchen replica, play where you have
my toy Triceratops is cooking dinner in the dollhouse, imaginary companions,
and other things. We talked about possible links explored in

(02:03):
the research between pretend play and the development of advanced
cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind,
addressing the question of whether pretending might help children develop
some of those important faculties, or at least whether pretending
in those faculties might draw on the same underlying neural structures.

(02:26):
In Part two, we talked in more depth about research
on imaginary friends and imaginary companions, how often they manifest
within and across different cultures, what forms they take, what
children believe they know, and things like that. In the
most recent episode, we looked more at the question of
how adult culture influences pretend play among children, noting that

(02:48):
while pretending does appear to be basically universal, there is
pretty wide variation in how much children play pretend and
in the themes of the pretend play in some particular cases,
in the framing of whether pretend entities are understood as
real in some important way or not. And then last

(03:09):
time we also examined the fascinating phenomenon of paracosms, essentially
extending the concept of an imaginary friend to where it
is not only a single character or playmate, but an
entire imaginary world, maybe with its own geography, culture, populations,
and rules. And we discussed links between a childhood tendency

(03:31):
to generate paracosms and things like creativity in later life.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah. Yeah, and I have a paracosm update here. Oh really, yeah,
because after we'd record this, I realized, well, my child
is twelve and almost thirteen, which places them toward the
end of what is broadly considered the paracosm period for kids.
So I asked them the next morning over breakfast. I
was like, I know, you had some pretend worlds and

(03:57):
or have pretend worlds that you sometimes in Gaine with
other friends. Tell me about them, and so they laid
it all out for me. They said, there are two
pretend worlds, both of them social in nature, that they
shared with one particular other friend. So one of these
with one friend is essentially an extrapolation of Star Wars.

(04:21):
They said. It's different planets set in the Old Republic
era on which Jedis have adventures. Okay, which I think
that's a pretty good example because it's like, clearly it's
built upon the Star Wars universe, but a universe like
the Star Wars universe is kind of limitless, so yeah,
you can build out other things that draw on the
existing Star Wars lore but generate new ideas as well.

(04:45):
And then the other one, I think this was earlier,
was a really wild take on Pokemon that they had
with another friend that was super into Pokemon at the time,
and they would describe these epic wars between Pokemon factions
and like an e Pikachu. It was really wild and
at the time it was like it at times it
was a little much. I was like, this is Pikachu's

(05:06):
at an ally, guys, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Is evil Pikachu already a thing? Or is that that's
purely original?

Speaker 1 (05:14):
I mean, Pikachu's been around long enough. I imagine all
variations possible have been drummed off. Pikachu, I'm sure has
played a role in various paracosms.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
I am Pikachu, I contain multitudes.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah, for some reason, these kids didn't like Pikachu. I
think they didn't like Pikachu's fame, like Pikachu being the
most famous of the Pokemon, but they love Piachu, the
Pokemon that evolves into Pikachu. So there you go.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Gotta take Pikachu down a pig I guess so well. Obviously,
Pretend to Play is a really rich subject where we
just keep finding new angles to examine and things to
talk about. I don't know exactly how many parts we're
going to go to here. This will be part four.
We may actually make it to part five in this series.
But there was something I wanted to address in today's episode.

(06:00):
One reason is that one of the big overviews of
Pretend to Play research addressing like the links with other
cognitive capacities and stuff like that. One of the big
overviews we talked about. It's about ten years old at
this point, so I was looking around for some more
recent research on pretend to play to see if there
are kind of updates to any of the stuff we've
already talked about. Obviously there's new stuff coming out all

(06:22):
the time. But one thing that caught my attention was
when I came across an interesting write up in Nautilus
by Elena Rankin from September twenty twenty four, which was
reporting on a paper published in the journal Cognitive Development
the same year. And that paper was by a pair
of researchers named Elena Hoyka who is affiliated with the

(06:43):
University of Bristol, and Eloise Prutin, who at the time
I believe was a trainee clinical psychologist at Oxford. And
this paper is called the Early Pretending Survey or EPs,
A Reliable Parent Report Measure of pretense type development for
four to forty seven month olds. Now, we've already talked

(07:05):
about a few different kinds of pretend play and how
they don't all emerge at once, but rather come online
at different times as a child grows up. As the
children develop different mental and physical capabilities. Something interesting that
this twenty twenty four paper did was get really granular

(07:25):
in that specific regard breaking pretend play down into lots
of different categories, in fact, into nineteen different categories of activity.
And then they did a large survey of the parents
of about nine hundred kids between the ages of four
months old to forty seven months, which is just shy
four years old, to try to get fine detail on

(07:46):
when parents observed all these different types of pretend play
first manifesting. Now you might think nineteen different types of pretending,
like how do you get to that? Like beyond the
banana phone, I don't know what else is there? You
gotta imagine andary friends, banana phone, I'm a lion. What's left?
And it's true that some of these categories they explore

(08:07):
are kind of overlapping or are kind of subdivisions of
activities we've already talked about into two different subtypes, but
I still thought it was really interesting, and this brought
up stuff that I had actually observed with my own
daughter but had sort of forgotten about in our earlier
discussions of pretend play from this series. So I want
to look through this list of play activities from the paper.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Okay, all right, this will be fun because yeah, I
think we can compare notes in multiple ways here.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
So we're going to start with some we haven't really
talked about before. One category is pretending to be in
another state. Now that's not a state, like a geographic region,
a state, another state of being, like pretending to be asleep,
or pretending to sneeze when you don't actually have to sneeze.
Somewhat similar but a little bit different, is pretending to cry.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Okay, there are different dynamics to all of these, because
you know, you can pretend to cry and work yourself
up to a real cry. Oh sure, I don't know
if you can do that with a sneeze. Maybe there's
been research into this. Likewise, you can pretend to be
asleep and fall asleep.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
But yeah, okay, here's another one. Pretending to do everyday
adult activities like cooking or driving. We could think of
this as a kind of enactment play. So we've already
talked about versions of this. Pretending that this is apparently
really big. It sounds very specific, but it's a very
very commonly observed thing. Pretending empty vessels are full, so

(09:39):
drinking from an actually empty cup or pouring One example
I thought of is pouring invisible cereal out of an
empty cereal box into a bowl. And this one can
actually split up into three subtypes. So there is pretending
empty vessels are full in relation to serving the self,
like I drink from a literally cup. Then there is

(10:01):
pretending empty vessels are full. On another, I feed my
doll from this empty cup, or I try to make
Dad drink from the empty cup, and then finally pretending
empty vessels are full on many others. So I'm feeding
many different toys or people in this manner.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, looking back that I remember doing a lot of
sampling of various food, imaginary food, or drinks that my
kid had prepared you.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
Another one is what the authors call gesturing an object.
This would not be external object substitution, but instead things
like my finger is a toothbrush, essentially mentally extending or
substituting parts of the body as a pretend external object.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Okay, finger guns wouldnt imagine.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Okay, Yeah, then after that you got one that will
be more familiar to us, pretending to be an object
like I am a tree. There is pretend what.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
I'm so sorry, I'm just imagining that pretend gang.

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah, it's very Yeah, I don't know, it's more complex
than you might think.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, for the quiet kids.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
There's pretending to be an animal, like I am a
bunny rabbit.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
This was huge with my child until really very recently.
There would often be requested to play zookeeper at playgrounds
where I would have to be a zookeeper doing a
British accent, like a like an Attenborough type accent, describing
nature documentary style what the animal is doing while they
did animal pretend play.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
That's beautiful. There is classical object substitution, which we've already
talked about, but they actually break this down into multiple categories.
There is object substitution with non descript props, so this
might be when the literal prop is somewhat generic and versatile,
like toy block is a phone. And then there is

(11:51):
object substitution with more specific props that are very different
from the thing they're mimicking, so like toy car is
a telephone?

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Interesting, all right, and so this is casual optic substitution,
So imagine this is different. This differs from something that
I saw later on with my child, where they would
craft a pretend telephone or a pretend computer, or a
pretend Nintendo switch out of like cardboard and stuff like that.
That seems more specific than what we're talking about here.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Yeah, that does seem like a different thing. If you're
building it, that's like a like the play, if the
play is centered around the fabrication process.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah. Yeah, And I guess you get into the example
that I already brought up about the lightsabers building a
lightsaber help.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
Yeah, Okay. After this, there is pretending to be another person.
This would be a really existing person like I am
Grandpa or I am Mom.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Okay, I don't think we did that one.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
And then there are further distinctions about the social context.
There's pretending alone versus pretending with somebody else. And I
guess those two categories could apply to any of the
above categories you mentioned. Beyond this, there is what the
authors call socio dramatic pretending. This means creating not just

(13:08):
a single action in pretense, but creating a more elaborate
pretend story. So maybe not just like I am Grandpa,
I pour tea like Grandpa. Instead it's like I am
Grandpa and I want to go to the store to
buy candy for my doggie. But on the way to
the store, I get attacked by pirates and my doggie

(13:29):
gets hurt and I have to put a band aid
on my doggie so he can feel better, and then
we all go swimming in the lake, and you know,
so forth after that. There is pretending to be fantasy
characters already existing in culture, like you know, I am
Princess Leiah, I am Batman, I am Santa Claus, that
sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
And obviously we encourage that across the board, yes, you know,
and for a children and adults, you know, certainly get
into that dressing up as these various characters. So yeah,
I think I think a lot of us very very
much encouraged this sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
There is, of course, pretending to have an imaginary friend
or companion. We've already talked about that a lot. There is.
I thought this was an interesting distinction. There is pretending
to do real activities that are not available to most
people most of the time, So real activities, but not
everyday activities. And examples of this might be I am

(14:22):
a rocket ship commander. That's a real thing, but most
people don't do that I am a pop singer and
I'm on TV in front of millions. That's a real thing.
Most people don't do it, So that's distinct from both
fantasy activities and from everyday activities like driving or cooking.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
One of my kids friends would pretend to open their
own bank.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
That's sort of in the category.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, they'd make their own money. I think I still
have some of their pretend bills around here somewhere in
one of my books. It's a bookmark called them Darryl Bucks.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
That is curious. And then finally you've got acting out
completely made up fantasy scenarios. I ride a dragon through
the sky and I use magic to transform people into
cats and that sort of thing.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
So I really liked this granular attention to detail and
the different ways that pretend to play can manifest. And
this paper actually developed a new tool for asking participant
parents questions to track the emergence of these different pretend activities.
So the tool the authors developed was called the Early
Pretending Survey or EPs, and the authors tested the EPs

(15:44):
for internal reliability, stability over time, inter observer agreement, and
they found it performed pretty well, which they leveraged to
argue that the EPs could be quote useful for researchers
to better understand how pretending relates to other areas of development, eg.
Cognition and language. Now, I can imagine we've already talked

(16:05):
in some ways about difficulties with relying on parental reports
for understanding childhood play, and those things are here as well.
But I can imagine that one advantage of using parental
reports in a survey as opposed to directly observing children
play in a lab is that the lab setting for
one thing might change what the children do, and so

(16:29):
relying on parental observations gives you access to how children
behave in settings that are normal for them, you know,
like what they do at home or at school, and
in places where they normally are. I think we can
all relate to the fact that when we go to
an unfamiliar and maybe even uncomfortable place, we act different.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah yeah, And on top of that, this reminds me
of an example from some studies we're talking about with
imaginary friends, where it was pointed out that a you
want to talk to the kid and the adult, but
when you ask the kid about their imaginary friends, they
might just create one right there on the spot.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
So that's a great example where it's also good to
chat with the parent and they'll be like, I've never
heard of mister Bongoes. I think they made mister Bongoes
up like literally just now for fun.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah, because you brought up the idea.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah, you let mister bong goes.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
In, right. So the laboratory observation setting might be a
conjuring Captain Howdy kind of thing with the Ouiji aboard.
Another big thing is that obviously having to have researchers
directly observe children playing over time in a laboratory setting
or any kind of whatever the controlled setting is is

(17:47):
just cumbersome, you know, It's like time consuming, and so
a survey format allows you to gather much larger sample
sizes than direct observation in a controlled setting. It's because
that the latter is costly and time consuming. So the
author has administered this survey to parents primarily in the US, UK, Canada,
and Australia in across the years twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen,

(18:09):
and I was interested what did they find. I can't
discuss everything mentioned in the paper, but some of the
highlights we've been talking. Here's one thing that's kind of
surprising based on our previous discussion. We've been talking about
a prevailing belief that object substitution like you know, banana
is a phone, is usually one of the first types
of pretend play observed, most often emerging at one and

(18:32):
a half years of age or so. But this survey found,
and this agrees with some previous research, that actually there
are some other types of pretend play that come even earlier,
come before object substitution, and these would be some of
the more specific ones that we were talking about at
the beginning of the list. The list I read earlier

(18:52):
was roughly roughly in the chronological order of observance. So
remember the empty pretend play. The EPs found that this
happens early, with like half of kids doing it by
around thirteen months of age, and then the other thing
before object substitution is by around fifteen months. Half of

(19:16):
kids have shown some signs of pretending with their own body,
such as pretending to be in a different state, like
pretending to sleep or pretending to sneeze, or pretending to
be something else with their body like I am a tiger,
I'm growling, roar, and then it's by seventeen months of
age or so that half had shown signs of object substitution.

(19:38):
So this does agree in part with the schedule we've
been talking about before, where object substitution shows up on
average about one and a half years old, but finds
that some types of pretend play tend to happen even
earlier than object substitution. And though I didn't really think
much about either of these earlier examples, now that I
reflect on it, I have to yes myself, because you know,

(20:01):
my memory is involved, and who knows what I'm being
primed to misremember here, But I think this squares exactly
with my own experience as the parent of a toddler,
Like I have a two year old right now, and
my memory may be gein correct, but I think before
my daughter ever pretended one object was another, she would
pretend to sneeze and pretend to be asleep, and also

(20:23):
pretend to eat or drink things that were not really there,
and she thought it was hilarious with most of these.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, I don't remember how this shook out with my
own kit, but in general this does seem accurate.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Yeah, Now, from here, the story based socio dramatic play
that we were talking about that starts to happen more
when kids are around two years old usually, and then
complex make believe fantasy concepts tend to take hold when
children are around three. And of course it may be
that these later play types are dependent on the development

(20:57):
of language skills, so as children get better at using
manipulating language, that also sort of helps them construct these
abstract or counterfactual scenarios. Now, what about other general findings
in this paper. Well, one thing is that within the
survey range like four months to four years, kids pretending
scores steadily increased with age, which actually made me wonder, okay,

(21:22):
in this early period is just basically going straight up,
when do we actually see reductions in pretend play? That
actually came up in the Nautilus article that I shouted
out for pointing me to this research, because the author
of that Nautilus article cited some commentary by a researcher
named Sandra Russ at Case Western and Russ says that

(21:45):
it is most often around the age of nine or
ten that children start to kind of relinquish their pretend play.
But of course that can vary, and you could argue
with most people, it never completely goes away. Some people
continue to show similar imag imaginative behavior into adulthood, even
if it's not exactly play like when they were a child.

(22:07):
They might have creative hobbies like writing or art or acting,
which could be in some ways analogous. And of course
some kids continue pretending into older ages. I think we
talked about how, you know, with kids that start building paracosms,
those it's I think fairly common for those to continue
from ages like eight to twelve or so.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, yeah, like twelve or thirteen, Yeah, somewhere in that range. So,
and I guess that makes sense if you're looking at
this as like a general progression of one's use of imagination,
that that would continue a little bit, a little bit
further into your development.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Any other broad differences within the children in the survey,
One was that girls, on average had a somewhat higher
EPs score than boys, though it was a small difference.
The gender difference was not huge, but it was statistically significant.
And also I thought this was interesting. Children of younger
parents had higher EPs scores than children of older parents. Now,

(23:09):
again these differences are not huge, but that's interesting. Why
would pretending be happening a little bit more, a little
bit earlier in girls and in children of younger parents.
In both cases, it's not known with high confidence what
explains it, but the authors offer a couple of informed
guesses in their discussion section as to the gender distinction.

(23:29):
They relate this possibly to the fact that at both well.
First of all, they say that this sort of correlates
to previous findings in other studies that both in the
toddler age and in the primary school age, girls have
been found to engage in a little bit more fantasy
play on average than boys do, and that they're also

(23:50):
a little bit more likely to create imaginary companions. They
cite several papers to that regard, and so like, what
would be the explanation, Well, it's possible, again not known
for sure, that this could be related to language skills.
In some cases, girls acquire language skills on a slightly
accelerated timeline, and it could be that language development is

(24:11):
related to pretending. But again the differences are not huge,
and it's not known for sure why this would be.
Similar question with the thing about younger parents having slightly
more pretending happening earlier. The author's right quote perhaps younger
parents spend more time pretending with their children, allowing more
opportunities for parents to observe or even scaffold pretending. So

(24:34):
that could make sense, Like if there's more co pretending
between the parent and child happening, that could affect the
survey results in multiple ways. It could mean that the
child is actually doing more pretending because they're getting more
practice with an adult present. Or it could mean that
the children are pretending the same amount, but the parents
are observing it happen more and thus they're reporting it

(24:55):
more on the surveys.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
But I guess I'm still kind of foggy as to
how this would share out between younger and older parents,
not just because I was am was and was an
older parent, but but I'm just wondering, like, what's what
would be the broad difference there.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
That's a good question. I don't actually know. They didn't
mention it this part, but maybe maybe there was somewhere
in there that got lost for me. But they could
have some data indicating that, on average, younger parents spend
more time pretending with kids, But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I guess the most obvious
possible explanation for that. One might think I would be
like work responsibilities, but I can just you know, just
shooting from the hip here, I can think of various
scenarios in which younger parents would be working more, but
then also examples where maybe younger parents have more free

(25:48):
time to spend with the kid. Like, I don't know
it just I guess. I'm I'm not sure how the
generalities that they're dealing with here would really pan out,
But I mean, I'm sure it's based on based on
some findings and some statistical information.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, so it's the slight correlation having to do with
the age of the parents is just what they observed
in the sample. I guess the part about that having
anything to do with parents spending time pretending with the
kids is just an informed gus, so who knows what
the real reason was.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
I guess the other possibility would be older parents have
already had additional children, and then therefore there's less attention
to go around.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Possibly. So, as I said, none of these differences were huge,
and I guess we don't really know for sure why
they manifest in this fairly large sample. But one thing
I thought was interesting about the study was just coming
back to the kind of granular detail tracking these different
types of play emergence with a finer attention to the

(26:50):
variations in the style of play.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Like.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
I don't think otherwise I would have noticed that it's
so common to pretend to cup has something in it
like that that feels like such a specific thing. But
it's interesting that it's observed so often they had to
give it its own category. I mean, you could just
think of that as a kind of like invisible object play,
but I guess it's so common that it is different

(27:16):
than like I'm using an invisible toothbrush. Like it seems like,
you know, tons of kids. Maybe maybe most kids are
pretending there's something in a cup when there actually isn't.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
I'll occasionally do that as a grown up, pretended there's
something in a cup and pretend to drink it, mainly
if I'm at some sort of like a social function,
you know. Yeah, and the cup is not clear to
be to be clear, the cup has to cannot be
made of translucent plastic. But you know, I've consumed everything
in the cup, and I want to continue to have

(27:48):
like the gesture of drinking it. Yeah, to do something
with my hand. I may engage in that level of
play slash deception.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Sipping from a cup is part of the rhythm of
conversation party.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
And if you're out of a beverage, I mean you're
out of options, right, Yeah, so sometimes you got to pretend.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
Well, So anyway, I thought that was an interesting study,
but I was thinking more about the fact that they say,
you know, most often the real height of childhood style
pretend to play. It starts to fade around the age
of nine or ten. However, of course, as we know,
different types of pretending can go on for a lifetime,
and I think that's something that's related to what you

(28:38):
wanted to talk about today, isn't it, Rob Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah. I got interested in the angle of pretend play
and play and creativity in adults and other ages in
addition to childhood and early adolescents. And part of this
was my wife's suggestion. She was like, well, that would
be an interesting aga. So it's like, yeah, yeah, that

(29:01):
sounds that sounds sounds fascinating, and so I'm not really
going to get into a lot of like specific studies.
Maybe that'll be something I can get into in the
next episode. But I ended up looking at material that's
really tackling the idea of pretend play and adults more broadly.

(29:21):
So obviously we've been discussing the idea of pretend play
as a manifestation of developing creativity, and I think that's
perfectly valid. That's often how it is understood. Childhood psychologist
lev Vygotsky, who lived eighteen ninety six through nineteen thirty four,
outlined a three step creativity development process creative imagination in childhood,

(29:44):
imagination and thought coming together in adolescence, and finally the
individual enters into adulthood quote where experience creativity is directed
and used with purpose. I was reading about this in
an article by at All twenty twenties, playing with Creativity
across the life span. This was in tech trends linking

(30:05):
research and practice to improve learning. Now, as you can
always already imagine, we'll get into some of the ideas
around this. This is kind of, I think, from our
modern perspective, limiting understanding of creativity, the idea that it's like, okay,
being creative just for the sake of fun. That was
all right when you were younger, But now you're a
grown up, how is it going to produce funds. How

(30:28):
are you going to make money off of that? Or
change the world for the better and so forth, Your
creativity has to be put to work. That horse isn't
wild anymore. You need to strap it to the cart.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
Oh so that is the meaning of used with purpose
here in this quote.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, okay, Yeah, he positive that childhood fantasy and imagination
were essentially catalysts for adult creativity, which would be which
was seen as more purposeful, you know, like, and you know,
I think there are some valid arguments for that as well.
I mean, obviously when we become adults and we engage
in cultures and a society that often puts an emphasis

(31:05):
again on making money, and also legitimately like taking things
you're good at and have a passion for, and finding
professions and callings in life that line up with those.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
You know, it's understandable just solving practical problems that may
or may not have a strong economic component.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
But yeah, this purpose aspect is interesting and something discussed
at length in that paper I just cited. Apparently some
definitions of creativity, stress, usefulness and effectiveness is criteria for creativity,
tying into Vagotsky's take on adult creativity. Other models call
for dual aspects of novelty or originality and usefulness or effectiveness.

(31:48):
And you know, when you start talking about effectiveness and
usefulness as well, especially more recent understandings of it, there's
more room for nuance there.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
Oh yeah, Okay, So I guess this is going to
the question of how do we actually define creativity. If
we're trying to study it scientifically, you need a very
clear and strict definition. And instead, it's one of those
things that we kind of we feel it out, we
know what we see it. Some activity is just seems
creative or doesn't. Like, writing a story is creative, But

(32:19):
is writing a memo for work creative?

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Not? Usually it could be usually that's your creativity challenge
for the day, make it a creative exercise.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
I mean, I guess there's something. Yeah, Like, these definitions
mentioned something about novelty. So creativity is something that's kind
of different or unexpected. It's not just kind of going
through the motions or engaging in habits. It's doing something
different and novel. But the other half of this in
these definitions is kind of stressing that it's not just

(32:50):
novelty in a kind of random sense. It's novelty that
is useful or effective in some way. It does something right.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, And it's interesting when we get into like what
does that mean for it to do something right, to
do something useful. As discussed in this paper, childhood psychologist
doctor Sandra Russ proposes a slightly different definition for creativity
and with a different emphasis on what some of the
key aspects mean. So she defines it as it needs

(33:21):
to be novel, it needs to be effective, and it
needs to be whole. So she argues that especially with children,
we can't put much weight on the importance or usefulness
of any of this, right, like how useful is a
child's paracosm, how useful is a child's imaginary friend. But
the big thing that she stresses is play is the

(33:42):
product it is. It is an output of how they
think and feel. Multiple aspects of a child's being are
involved in the act of play, and I believe that
is what's meant by wholeness. Here the idea that like that, yes,
with an act of creativity is not just this like
leakage of energy from your psyche, you know. And I

(34:06):
think this holds true for children and adults as well
as Guss like when when you're engaging in created creative
output like that is it's like the output of your being.
You know, it is like not to get too you know,
wax too poetic about it, but I mean, it's like
a light shining out of your soul and your your mind.

(34:26):
It's it's not just this shadow that happens to be
cast by who you are.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
Well that is beautifully put. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I
think you're right. Sorry, but sorry, my mind was just
divided into different places because I just realized while you're
saying that also that you were citing that the work
of Sandra Russ, who was the same person that I
just cited in my section about about most pretend to
play tending to fade around the age of nine or
ten years old.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah, I believe. I believe she's a pretty big name
in this field.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Yeah, but of course with a lot of variation. But
that's an interesting criterion that I don't think I would
have gotten this, this concept of wholeness.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, yeah, and you know, and looking around, I'm not
sure how often she uses the term wholeness, but they
reference whole. They they had kind of some wholeness up
as being an aspect of her definition. Okay, and I
do think that that that plays out with what she's
stressing here. But you know, even in adults, though, the

(35:23):
way we think of usefulness or to you know, to
use Russ's model usefulness or effectiveness, Uh, it varies from
field to field. In this paper, they broadly address different
forms of creativity, invoking the four C creative creativity model
by James C. Kaufman and doctor Ronald Baghetto. Have we
talked about this before? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
We've been doing the show a long time, so I
can't always recall.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
But yeah, I forget whole episodes sometimes.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
But I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, it feels fresh to my mind. So basically, the
way the four C creativity model plays out is that
you have four different modes of creativity. First of all,
you have big C creativity. This is landmark work that
changes a field or changes the world. So like big

(36:13):
C creativity would be like I have invented the steam engine,
or I have I present you with a new religious
model and spiritual model for your way of life, something
like that.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Huge impact general theory of relativity or something.

Speaker 4 (36:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, Then you have little C creativity. And this is
still this is work that has strong interpersonal value. It's additive,
it's cumulative. And we can think of various examples of
this as well. I mean, I think, like a great book,
but not a book so great that it changes the
world might fit under little C creativity if I'm understanding

(36:50):
the concept correctly, or I would say not even they
don't even think about greatness. But a book you like
has you know, strong personal value, and you know you
share that with others and so forth. Then you have
pro C creativity. This is not game changing, but it's
effective and beneficial within a given field. So you know,
a new means of doing something, some new innovation within

(37:16):
a given field.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Okay, and then you have many.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
C creativity, And this is an interpersonal creativity that is
a part of the learning process. So my understanding on this,
like to draw an example from like our daily work
pretty much is like sometimes when we run across a
new concept, we kind of have to make sense of
it ourselves, and we'll sort of turn to some sort

(37:39):
of a personal novel metaphor for how it works, you know,
like compare it to a Santo movie or what have you.
You know, So we're engaging in many C creativity according
to this model here, you know, it's it's not going
to change the world. It's not trying to change the world.
It's not really innovating anything. But it's helping us in
a learning process, Like it does have value within the

(37:59):
way that our mind is working. It's helping us roll
around various concepts and so forth.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
The kind of creativity we engage in, we all engage
in basically every day, coming up with analogies or ways
of thinking about or explaining things.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, but one an important thing they stress is that
that that any kind of creativity is going to start
out novel and personal. So you know, a mini creates
many C creativity project could become a pro C, could
become a little C, could become a big C, and
so forth. So I think it's a pretty useful idea

(38:35):
for and certainly gives it a little more nuanced to
the idea of like what is the enterprise of creativity
and what role does it play? So applying all of
this to adults, the idea that Russ and the paper
proposes here is that, yes, childhood creativity has an influence
on adult creativity, but we can't just think about creativity

(38:55):
in adults, as you know, just just in terms of
its useful wellness, like in the workplace or for a career. Again,
we can't just think of it as strapping that horse
to a cart. Play in particular, they stress for children
and adults allows us to process challenges and emotions while
also supporting other forms of creativity. So again, a mini

(39:17):
c exercise could transition into a pro se or any
of the other forms of creativity. You know, to quote
Lawrence of Arabia, big things have small beginnings.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
And I think often this is sort of a cliche
at this point, but how often in history you see
people who do I don't know, make big creative leaps
that are often categorized as the useful sort. You know,
people who make big scientific breakthroughs, or people who you know,
do great works of art or something are often also

(39:47):
engaged in what we might think of as a lot
of trivial collaborative outside of work play of a creative sort.
You know, they're just sort of in whatever off hours
they have, kind of talking to other people who are
involved in similar pursuits and engaging and engaging in little

(40:08):
kind of lower stakes games with the ideas that they're
manipulating in their major work.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And one of the big ideas
here is that most of us are not going to
engage in big C creativity. Most of us are not
going to create a new religion, create some sort of
new technology it changes the world. We're not going to,
you know, write the Great American novel or what have you.
But those little C and many C exercises they're still novel,

(40:38):
they're still useful, and they're still whole. So in this
paper they make several observations about adult play during COVID
nineteen lockdowns, you know, taking us back to that time
in which you know, we can I think everyone listening
can probably remember. You know, you had many adults suddenly
dealing with more free time but also expressing themselves through

(40:59):
play and even process emotions and even trauma through that
play in addition to nurturing joy. You know, So suddenly
people who had the ability to do so, you know,
they might suddenly they're playing more Dudgeons and Dragons than usual,
or they're they're turning back to an old hobby. And yeah,
part of that is like maybe they had some extra

(41:22):
time they were trapped in their home and so forth.
But additionally, like the creative process, gave them a way
to work through what they were feeling. So in this
paper from sin at All, they write the following quote.
As human beings, we are programmed to use play in
creative expression to connect and work through the difficulties. Creativity

(41:44):
is not just about finding solutions to problems. It is
about expressing emotion and processing change. Now does it involve
pretend play? Coming back to the overarching theme of these episodes? Subjectively,
my argument was yes, you know, I was thinking about
various games. Dungeons and dragons are otherwise various creative endeavors

(42:05):
one might engage in. But I've also found literature that
lines up with this too. Oh okay, I was looking
at a paper this is by Gungku at All published
in Topoi, an international review of philosophy from two thousand
and five, titled Pretend Play as a lifespan Activity, and
the authors here argue that pretend play is an adaptive

(42:28):
human activity of adulthood as well as childhood. They point
out that a lot of the early work in childhood
psychology creative view in which childhood is playful and fanciful,
while adult adulthood is all logical and productive. We touched
on that already. The idea that okay, you're grown up
and now put your creativity to work again. Creativity and
adults was seen as is useful almost always in a

(42:51):
big sea or at least little sea aspiring manner. The
authors here, though, argue the opposite, that pretend play can
be found throughout adult life as well, and they point
to adult improv theater as a key example of this. Now, granted,
not everyone engages in improv theater, but it has been
interesting in recent years to see improv theater and it's
often brought in to say, business spaces and so forth,

(43:13):
realizing that it is a fun and helpful skill set
to bring into some sort of a work environment.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Hmm yeah, okay, So I was thinking of ways that
pretend play can continue into adulthood, and it made me wonder,
does something count as pretend play if you were sort
of trying to hide the fact that you're doing it,
if it's just sort of a private game with yourself,
and maybe you're not really thinking of it as pretend

(43:45):
play and you don't necessarily tell other people about it.
But I don't know. What's coming to mind is that
I think probably a lot of adults go about their
business with this model we've talked about before, where they're
kind of seeing themselves as a character in a narrative.
You know, they're not like I am Luke Skywalker, but

(44:05):
they are framing the events of their life in a
kind of in a modified, not very realistic way that
that paints them as like the hero of an important story.
Does that count as pretend play? I mean it's I
don't I don't know if it's like altering the literal
facts of reality, but it's it's putting their life within

(44:29):
a frame, a frame that is probably not the way
an objective observer would describe what they're doing. Does that
make sense?

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Now there's at least a patina of pretend play involved here. Yeah, yeah,
Whereas in an improv class you might literally be pretending
to be a dump truck. Yes, in a way if
that most most non improf adults are not doing, but
very much in line with the kind of pretend to
play a child might engage in.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
Yeah yeah, And there is some kind of freeing about that,
you know, when you when you watch improv, there's like
a there's a feeling of cutting loose that's very exciting
that you don't see even in a lot of otherwise
creative adults.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Now that this paper does not get into it, But
of course I'm also reminded of various observations about other
forms of acting in which there can be kind of
a contagious aspect to the part one is playing and
one's own thoughts and actions. So, I mean, I guess
you especially when adults. I mean, to a certain extent,

(45:33):
when kids pretend play. You know, sometimes animal simulations can
get a little out of hand, and mom and dad
might get scratched or bit But but on a on
another level, there's always that possibility with adult actors as well. Now,
I think it's an interesting comparison between improv theater and

(45:55):
childhood pretend play. I think kids are sometimes not as
good at the yes and aspect of improv that's central
to the philosophy of improv. But you know, I think
that's on another level that's often one of the big
lessons that they learn when they play with others. I mean,
there's a lot of research on this as well. We

(46:15):
didn't know I haven't really got into this but you
have like parallel play with kids where it's like little
Susie and little Bobby. They are not really playing together.
They are both playing with dump trucks in the sand,
but they're just kind of playing alongside each other. And
thank goodness they both have dump trucks, because otherwise they
would be a fight.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Yeah, and I can see, yes. And as a form
of sharing, I mean it is a way of give
and take and of sharing, not the physical props of
play if you have to share your one dump truck toy,
but of sharing the direction of the play, sharing a narrative.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Yeah. If it's for example, if you're engaging in an
imagine shared world, in a paracosm, Yeah, you have to
share that, like one person can't be just be the
god of this realm. I guess there's there's room for
maybe a you know, forty sixty split there on creative
control of the paraphousm.

Speaker 5 (47:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
But another way that the improv theater example I think
is interesting is that it's an example where adults often
or at least sometimes have to relearn how to engage
in pure imagination play. You know a lot of you
hear plenty of accounts of adults who take an improv
class and it's like they're one over by it, you know,

(47:34):
it transforms them, like they're able to reconnect with this
this creative energy that they hadn't had, perhaps since they
were kids. And this all kind of ties into that
whole idea of creativity as being this expression of the whole.
You know, it's not just this thing you know you
do you know in this one exercise like it is
you know, it is a way that you're able to

(47:55):
process things and let things out. Now, another example that
they bring this one was really fascinating in part because
we already kind of stumbled over this a little bit
when we were talking about imaginary friends. We were talking about, Okay,
what do adults engage in that are akin to imaginary friends?
And we talked about things like speaking to angels and

(48:19):
shouting at the devil and so forth. But the example
brought up in this paper is that you will have
the situation of adults engaging in conversation with the dead
had a grave site. For example, adults essentially engaging in
a conversation with an imagined or simulated mind. And this

(48:41):
was an idea that was apparently discussed in a paper
by I. E. Josephson nineteen ninety eight titled constructing Oneself
in the City of the Silent.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
Oh wow. This is interesting because just last night I
was reading sort of a biographical article about the life
of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and she apparently
had an an extremely important relationship with her with her
mother's grave, essentially with her mother was an important writer

(49:10):
in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft, and she she would
visit her mother's grave and like apparently had a strong,
powerful emotional relationship with her mother's tombstone, would sort of
like talk to and relate to her mother who died
after giving birth to her.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
Wow. Yeah, And I feel like a lot of us
can speak to examples of this the way that ganku
at all sum this up. They say, quote, these conversations
enabled the grieving survivors to reinterpret their joint past with
the deceased, as they also help them prepare for the future,
a finding that is corroborated by other clinical studies.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
So yeah, I feel like a lot of us can
can speak to this on some level. I've certainly engaged
in this before, speaking to the dead, reaching for the dead,
particularly at a great side. Yeah, and I want to
stress again, as we've touched on this many times on
the show, that we as humans are capable of juggling
multiple and even contradicting ideas about say, the persistence of consciousness.

(50:14):
Have you contradicting ideas in your head, multiple of them
at once. So, you know, standing at the grave of
a loved one, you might at once feel as if
you were speaking to a person who is in the past.
You know you're speaking you're a person who only exists
in memory. You may also feel, on another level, like
you are speaking to the ghost of a loved one
that is spiritually present, like in a movie about a ghost,

(50:38):
or someone who is there but invisible, like in other
movies about ghosts. I mean, you really can't discount the
power that say, ghost movies have on these sort of
like almost subconscious ideas about the deceased and the role
that they have in our lives. You might see them
as a spirit of a loved one that is now

(51:00):
residing in another realm of existence. You know, the idea
that will they're looking down on me and so forth.
You also, on some level, maybe even like front loaded,
you might be thinking, well, this is just an empty
corporeal vessel, like there's you know, there's nothing here. I
am just engaging in this idea of the person that
is passed. And then yeah, ultimately you might think of it, Oh,

(51:21):
I'm dealing with a mental simulation of the deceased via
theory of mind. Hmm. Yeah, And for something as deeply
personal and emotional as a grave sided conversation with the dead,
I think it's fair to accept that any number of
these can be in play, and we shouldn't be dismissive
of any of them, at least from an emotional standpoint,
you know. But I think it's a great concept concerning

(51:43):
the power of human imagination and our engagement with simulated
realities as a means of processing and evaluating feelings and
as an expression of wholeness and creativity, you know. So
you know it is it is ultimately a kind of
pretend play, but pretend play that you know has very
high emotional stakes. But at the same time, it's not

(52:05):
useful in the sense that it is going to change
the world or generate income, but it can be highly
useful depending on the individual obviously, in the situation, like
for their their own feelings and for their own sense
of well being.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Well, this actually makes me reframe one of the ways
I was thinking about childhood pretend play. In the first part,
we briefly discussed a definition of play, which is that
it's non instrumental activity. It's activity that is not put
toward any kind of external purpose. It's purely It's often
described as purely for enjoyment, and that makes it sound

(52:44):
like anything that is play, or by extension, pretend play,
should be for fun. But actually, I mean, obviously, I
think it makes sense in a way to call this
kind of interfacing with the dead a form of pretend play,
except the word play sounds wrong because play is supposed
to be fun. But then when I think of the

(53:05):
pretend play games I actually like watch my daughter go through.
They're usually fun, but they're not always fun. Sometimes they
actually feel quite serious and sometimes quite sad. Like one
thing she likes to do is to pretend to treat
and heal the wound of her toys, and she she
gets kind of sadness in her voy, you know, she's like, oh,

(53:27):
he you know, dinosaur, her need feel better. And that
almost strikes me as somewhat similar to the Graveside conversation.
I mean, in a way that still has to be play,
that is play, but there's no laughter involved, it's not fun,
and the main emotion seems to be sympathy and sadness.

Speaker 4 (53:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
So I don't know. There are many many ways obviously
in which those things are different, but it does seem
to drive home that there's maybe something that is missing
when we think of play as an activity that is
strictly were fun. Instead, it's something that's like usually for fun,
but it also can sometimes be something else. It's something

(54:08):
we're doing for kind of intrinsic motivations, but they're not
really related to like pleasure or laughter or excitement.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Yeah. Yeah, so at any rate, Yeah, these, like I say,
I thought I was gonna get more into sort of
granular discussions of you know, of adult imagination play and
like the benefits of engaging maybe in something like improv theater.
And yeah, I realized this all ended up being a
little bit broader and a little bit more philosophic, But

(54:37):
I thought it was really fascinating and it made me
sort of rethink a lot of what I thought I
knew about creativity.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Yeah, totally all right.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Well, I think we're going to go ahead and close
this episode out, and we're thinking we're going to be
back with one more of these, because there's still plenty
to talk about. And in the meantime, we'd love to
hear from all of you. I know we have some
people out there who are improv actors or certainly taken
an improv class or two, or done a little improv
maybe in a college acting class. Tell us about it.

(55:06):
How do your experiences line up with what we've been
discussing here, Any other of your thoughts, experiences, and so
forth concerning this episode or the previous episodes in the
Pretend Play series write in. We would love to hear
from you. And oh and as always, if you want
what you share to be to not be shared in
a future listener mail episode, let us know and we'll

(55:28):
honor that. Likewise, if you would like to use a pseudonym,
you know, just let us know as well. Just tell
us what to do with the copy you send.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
Us, with the understanding that if you don't give us
any instructions of that sort, we will use your first
name and consider it fair game to read on air.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Absolutely absolutely, all right, just a reminder. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Core
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and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to
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(56:09):
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I kind of want the Instagram want to be hired,
so help us out with that if you have the
ability to do so.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
We have a Twitter account.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
Yeah, we do. It's active. You can follow us on Twitter.
It does get updates about the content.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
Huge things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. More
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Speaker 3 (57:24):
H