From the Vault: Pretend Play, Part 5

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 5 of 5) (originally published 1/23/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Pretend Play Part five is coming at you,
Part five of five. This one originally published one twenty three,
twenty twenty five. Let's have it.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with
the fifth and for now the final part in our
series on pretend Play. Now, sometimes when we do a
longer series like this, we say, you know, devour in
whatever order you like, but this really is one series
where we do recommend listening in order, because today we're
going to build on and refer back to stuff we

(00:55):
talked about in some earlier episodes from this series, but
to refresh break in those earlier parts, we talked about
definitions and subdivisions of pretend play, play that involves non
literal action and understanding. We talked about which aspects of
pretend play appear to be universal and which appear to
be culturally variable. For example, the evidence is pretty strong

(01:18):
that all children around the world engage in pretending, even
in environments where it is actively discouraged, and it emerges
on a pretty consistent developmental schedule, though there is wide
variation across cultures and within cultures across like home conditions
and different types of parental influence in how much time
children spend on pretend play and in what its themes

(01:41):
and contents are. Some cultures have more fantasy themes, like
talking animals, others are more realism bound in their pretend
games and so forth. We also talked about the specific
issue of imaginary companions, where those come from, how they
usually work, what patterns manifest within and across cultures. We
talk about possible links between pretend play and complex cognitive

(02:04):
skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind,
whether pretend to play may help children develop these capabilities,
or whether it makes use of common neural structures with them.
We talked about the idea of the paracosm, which is
an extension of the idea of an imaginary friend or
imaginary companion into a whole imaginary world, maybe even with

(02:27):
its own geography, inhabitants, its own history and rules and customs,
and we looked at how paracosms develop and whether they're
associated with other things later in life, like an adult
capacity for creativity. And then finally, we also talked about
ways in which imaginative play could be said to carry
on into adult life, often in different guises.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
That's right, and we're going to continue on in this
episode to roll out discussion on some of these themes.
But I guess we should stress that there is so
much out there, and there's so much ongoing research into
not only pretend play and but also you know, childhood imagination,
adult imagination and so forth. This is really one of

(03:10):
those series where we could just keep going and going
and find new angles, new studies to discuss each time.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've just come across so
many interesting things. I keep finding new, fascinating stuff I
wasn't even aware of when I first decided I wanted
to do this topic on the show. So it just
keeps unfolding and there's more and more, and the more
and more.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Is so good.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
But we are going to have to cut it off
after today. Maybe we'll return to this topic in some
form in the future. But one thing I wanted to
come back to in today's episode, now that we've looked
at a lot of the different cultural environments and varieties
of play expression. Is the question of the biological basis
for pretend play? Is pretend to play a culturally contingent activity,

(03:57):
you know, something that we just kind of like made up,
didn't have to be a part of what human life is,
something like I don't know, parades. You know a lot
of different cultures have parades, but that's probably not a
biologically mandated behavior, that's just something culture made up. Or
is pretend play actually biologically mandated? Is it biologically programmed

(04:18):
in the human animal? And if it is the latter,
that sort of implies that it confers a survival or
reproduction advantage. So what would that be? So for this question,
I wanted to look at a really really interesting paper
published in twenty seventeen in the journal Trends in Cognitive
Sciences called Why do the Children Pretend Play? By an

(04:41):
author named Angeline S. Lillard, who is a professor of
psychology at the University of Virginia and she runs a
research center there called the Early Development Laboratory. I'm not
going to cover everything Lillard gets into in this paper,
but I wanted to give kind of a sketch of
her main argument and pick some interesting things to pull
out and talk about. So at the beginning of this article,

(05:03):
Lillard reviews a lot of the same evidence we've already
looked at earlier in the series, pointing to a pretty
standard schedule for development of pretend play in childhood, saying
pretend play usually begins by around eighteen months of age,
often with object substitution, though in the last episode we
looked at a few kind of very specific types of

(05:23):
pretend play that are often observed to pre date object substitution,
but object substitution is a big early milestone, usually occurring
by around one and a half years old. And then
talking about how pretend play seems to peak around the
age of three to five and most often stops around
the age of eleven. I think in the last episode

(05:44):
we cited a researcher who said it's around nine or
ten when it starts to wane. Lillard says around the
age of eleven is when it usually ceases, though the
question of whether it actually ceases is also debatable. In
some cases, kids keep pretending longer, and you can make
argument that activities sustained into adulthood are actually continued types
of pretend play, maybe sort of in disguise or not

(06:07):
so much in disguise. Now, Lillard makes the argument that
because pretend play of some form is culturally universal and
its development schedule is fairly regular and predictable, it's probably
an evolved biological trait and not just a contingent behavior
that we happen to create through culture. And I think

(06:29):
I would agree that this seems likely based on that information.
So Lillard asks the question that I brought up a
minute ago. If it is a biological trait of our species,
and if it's not just an epiphenomenal byproduct of some
other capacity like symbolic thinking, what evolutionary advantage does pretending provide?

(06:50):
As an aside, we already looked at some possible answers
to this question in that twenty fifteen paper by Weisberg
that we talked about in earlier parts of the series.
So it was brought up that maybe pretend play helps
facilitate the development of counterfactual reasoning, symbolic understanding, and theory
of mind. Though, as you'll recall, Weisberg highlighted that these

(07:11):
correlations are difficult to study in a way that's practical
rigorous and ethical. So while some studies do provide hints
in support of all three of these links, the evidence
is fairly weak. It's mostly just establishing correlations. Lillard's paper
also notes how difficult this is to study and the

(07:31):
indirect quality of much of the evidence available to us.
We have some indications, specifically, like from tragic examples of
children who suffered social isolation and infancy, that early deprivation
of normal interaction with human caregivers can lead to noticeable
deficits in pretend play later in childhood. So like children

(07:52):
who don't have enough human social interaction when their babies
tend to play pretend much less and they're older, suggesting
some kind of link between pretend play and socialization. However,
Lillard's paper makes use of a very interesting, totally separate
line of evidence for the biological function of pretend play,

(08:13):
and that is the analogy of non human animals.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, yes, whether animals play This is probably a question
that has already been bouncing around people's minds as they
listen to these episodes.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Yeah, well, and so specifically it'd be the question of
whether animals play pretend Because I think it's pretty widely
agreed by researchers in the relevant fields that animals do play.
In this paper, Lillard refers to one particular definition of
play that has been popular used in a lot of research,
and it comes from a psychologist named Gordon Berghart. And

(08:50):
Burghart's criteria for play, I think he had five of them.
The criteria or that one we've already talked about this
that it's not functional, meaning that it's it's not activity
that is necessary for survival in any direct way. So
even if you enjoy chopping wood, chopping wood is not
considered play. To use Lillard's summary quote, is voluntary and pleasurable.

(09:13):
It differs in form or some other way from the
functional expression. It is repeated, and it tends to occur
under conditions of abundance not stress. Now, if you look
at those criteria, I think it's widely agreed that many
species of non human animals, especially a lot of vertebrates
and mammals, engage in play. But do these animals play pretend?

(09:36):
This is more controversial, but Lillard makes the case that
at least some forms of animal play should be considered
examples of pretense. And both of these are fortunately going
to be familiar to us and to listeners because we
can see them in our pets. I think, in fact,
it's maybe not even a coincidence that play would be

(09:57):
especially common among the animals that we happened to make
our domestic companions. So first example is playing with inanimate
objects as if they were live prey. You can see
this in cats, you can see this in dogs. I'm
sure you've seen plenty of this in your home, Rob.
You know, a cat will often any little furry thing,

(10:19):
or maybe doesn't in some cases, maybe doesn't even have
to be all that furry. It could be an aluminum ball,
or it could be a piece of string or something
like that. They will play with it and treat it
as if it were a mouse or some other kind
of prey animal. They will bat it around, they will
bite it, they will chase it, and so forth.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yes, yeah, we see this all the time. Yeah, ranging
from what we call the most dangerous game of finger mouse.
This is where you move your finger underneath the blanket.
Not recommended because it's an easy way to get your
finger scratched in or bitten. But yeah, all manner of toys,
laser beams, you name it.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Oh, I didn't even think of the laser pointer. Yeah,
but I used to do the same thing when I
had cats. You know, you move your hand or your
toes around underneath the blanket. Yeah, and it drives absolutely nuts.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah. And my cat does not need any encouragement to
attack body parts. She attacks my feet all the time.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Now, there's an interesting finding that Lillard notes, which is that, apparently,
in like formal studies of this type of play behavior
in cats, apparently as cats become older, on average, the
object needs to be increasingly similar to an actual prey
animal to induce the playing response. This will obviously vary

(11:37):
from cat to cat, but on average, more often a
kitten will attack anything you know. It will play with string,
will play with aluminum balls, whatever you know. It's all
a mouse to the kitten. But an older cat, as
it matures, will increasingly only be enticed into this type
of game by something that resembles in some way an
actual prey animal.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Well, my cat, I can safely say, is not average.
She's quite old at this point, but her she still
plays and some of her favorite items just recently have
been things like a plastic milk cap like off of
an oat milk jug. How if she had a great
time with that, buttons things like that, anything she can

(12:22):
get her claws on, so it doesn't seem to necessary.
We have other toys that do resemble rodents or birds
or whatever, and she's into those as well. But otherwise
she doesn't seem to discriminate. Now, not making this an
episode about cats, but I think obviously there's something to
be said here too about the domestic, like in house cat,

(12:43):
like a fully indoor cat versus a cat that's going
indoors and outdoors. This is a fully indoor cat, and
I know there have been various observations made about like
what that does. Does that keep a cat in more
sort of a semi permanent stage of kitten hood to
some degree, maybe has an effect on how they associate
with toys. Maybe you see more of this average situation

(13:06):
that's laid out here. If the cat actually has physical
access to normal prey animals on a regular.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Basis, yeah, that seems quite plausible to me.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Though.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
An interesting thing that Lillard notes here is that there
is the opposite observation in humans that as children get older,
it's usually less important for the play object to resemble
the real object. In order for them to play pretend
with it. And so because of differences like this, Lillard
thinks that the treating and inanimate object as life prey
is not a great analogy for human play. However, there's

(13:38):
another thing observed in animals which she thinks is maybe
a good analogy for human pretend play, and that is
play fighting. We've probably all seen this before in dogs,
but in the scientific literature, play fighting is characterized as
a social locomotive play activity where animals try to gain

(13:59):
temper very physical advantage over one another in a way
that somewhat resembles the behavior of those same animals as
adults in violent competition, but is different in that the
animals typically take turns being the aggressor and that the
fight behaviors are truncated. So the dog might in a
play fight, it might put its jaws around the other

(14:23):
dog's body, maybe put the jaws around the neck, but
it does not bite down, or it doesn't usually, and
if it does, that's a you know, that's clearly not
what the behavior is intended to produce. Lillard argues that
play fighting could be viewed as an analog for pretend
play in humans and gives a number of reasons. For example,

(14:43):
both of these activities, pretend to play in humans and
play fighting involve creating an as if scenario where the
play activity appears to be a modified representation of a
real activity, but with limits put on it. Like the
play fighting stops for the bite pressure is too much,
and so forth, Lillard writes quote. As Baitsen also pointed out,

(15:06):
an animal that is engaged in play fighting must read
a behavior as denoting a behavior different from the behavior
it resembles. And then the sub quote of baits In
here quote the playful nip denotes the bite, but it
does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.
In other words, the playful nip is a pretend bite,

(15:27):
just as a child can pretend talk into a pretend
phone to symbolize really talking into a real phone. In
this way, both pretend play and play fighting behaviors are symbolic.
They mean something other than what they are. She also
calls attention to the fact that both pretend play in
humans and play fighting in other mammals rely on the

(15:51):
exchange of specific ritualized gestures and indicators that the activity
is play and not real. And I don't think I
was aware of a lot of this. For example, she
talks about a bunch of observations in rats that when
rats playfight, and apparently they do this a lot. Rats playfight.
She says, when they play fight, they don't bite at

(16:14):
or target the same areas of the body that they
do when rats are actually fighting in real violent competition.
So when they're playfighting, she says, they target a nuzzle
like the nape of the neck, whereas real fighting and
tends to involve attacks on the flanks and the lower back.

(16:34):
And apparently they also emit high pitched ultrasonic vibrations when
they're play fighting, which other rats can hear, which seems
to help the rats avoid mistaking a bid for a
playfight with the threat of a real fight. Now, understanding
those kinds of gestures and social communication and rats might
not be very intuitive to us, but we can easily

(16:58):
see the same kind of thing in dogs with the
famous play bow. Now, if you've ever seen dogs doing
play fighting, you will quite frequently, often at the beginning
of the encounter, and then at certain moments throughout the
play fighting session, the dogs will kind of back up
and then they will bow the front of the body
down and spread their paws apart and put their head

(17:18):
down with the back of the body up with the
haunches the butt raised up. And I've got a picture
here for you to look at, Rob, though I'm sure
you're familiar with this on your own as well.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Well, I mean, now that it's pointed out to me,
I have seen dogs doing this, and I guess I'm
realizing for the first time that this must be why
we call the pose and yoga down dog, because we
are creating a pose that looks like this. I always
just thought like, well, okay, it's just I'm on all fours.
I'm sort of like a dog right now. But I

(17:50):
guess this is the name thing.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
So in yoga it's the butt is up, the head
is down, correct.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, okay, though usually in the picture you're showing here
the dogs four pause forearms are on the ground, and yeah,
that's usually not the case with down dog. There are
versions of down dog where you do have four arms down.
I guess it's more gets inded like dolphin and so forth.
But anyway, enough animals. We're talking about dogs, right.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
So studies show that playbows are they really are used
for social communication. Like you can see that they're most
common right after a candid play fight has sort of
pushed the limits or has for some reason become ambiguous. So,
for instance, when a play bite just got pretty rough,

(18:35):
you know, like a dog. They're playing, but one bit
the other kind of hard, it seems, then the playbow
would be deployed. It's used to regulate the shared understanding
of the activity and to signal kind of sorry about that,
we're still in play mode. This is not a real fight.
And in this way this would be considered a form
of meta communication, allowing all the participants in an activity

(18:57):
to continually understand the correct in which the shared activity
should be interpreted. It's the signal this is play this
is not real. And it turns out that with pretend
play humans do this too. There are specific kinds of
gestures and signals that have been observed within human play fighting,

(19:17):
but even outside the realm of play fighting and just
in pretend play that the kinds we've been talking about
in this series so far. Maybe cooking in a play kitchen,
or using a banana as a telephone, or using a
little block as a car, you know, an object substitution
enactment play any of these things. The signals used to
communicate pretend to play might be more culturally variable in

(19:41):
humans than in dogs. But for example, research in the
United States has particularly found that when mothers play pretend
with young children, they use specific body language cues such
as strong eye contact, mistimed movements, and a smile immediately
following the pretend behavior. And so like, I can imagine

(20:05):
all these kind of things kind of like exaggerated weird
movements and kind of looking at the child, making eye
contact and then smiling after you say, like here's the phone. Also,
this is not mentioned in the study, but I really
thought about like using a different voice. You know, we've
talked about about parental voice modulation on the show before.

(20:26):
I think we did whole episodes on this of like
the you know, the baby voice, the way parents tend
to speak to children, and like what kind of purpose
that serves where it comes from. But I think there's
a version of this with pretend to play too. Like
I notice when we start taking on a pretense, I
kind of sound different. I'm doing something with the timing
of my speaking and the pitch of my voice and

(20:49):
stuff that I'm not normally doing when I'm just playing
with my daughter.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, and that makes sense. Yeah, I mean we often
don't think about it, but we are sort of conveying that. Okay,
we're shifting over one degree to the left or the
right here into the imagination space.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah. Oh this book is a boat now. Yeah. Yeah,
And so you can think about different reasons for this
meta communication within the play itself. So like in play fighting,
meta communication is important for physical safety, you know, like
you don't want the fight to you don't want the
play fight to escalate to a real fight. So meta

(21:24):
communication literally helps dogs and rats and humans avoid hurting
one another. But with pretend to play in human children,
it strikes me that it's probably important for something we
talked about earlier in the series information quarantining, to prevent
children from drawing incorrect lessons about reality from a game

(21:45):
of pretend, you know, so the child does not end
up thinking that a remote control can actually place phone calls.
We're showing this is play, so the child doesn't learn
something that's wrong. So in this paper, Lillard looks at

(22:08):
studies of play fighting in animals to see what, if anything,
can be established about its survival and reproduction value, what
does it do for the animals? This section involves a
lot of discussion of the difficulties and limitations in designing
these experiments, and the paper is worth a read if
you want to learn more about that. But to mention

(22:30):
one prominent example type of experiment she brings up. It
is an experiment where you take a baby rat and
pair it in its enclosure only with a single adult
female rat and no littermates. Now, with other littermates present,
a baby rat will typically engage in play fighting as
it matures, but when it is paired only with an

(22:52):
adult female rat, the baby rat will receive socialization from
the adults, so it's not like total social isolation or deprivent.
But adult female rats specifically will not engage in play fighting,
so this seems to reasonably well isolate and remove play
fighting on its own. But it's important to note that

(23:14):
this is not a perfect isolation of the variable, because
having littermates is the norm for baby rats, so this
is not just like a perfectly normal baby rat with
only play fighting taken away. It's just getting as close
to that as researchers can are. There any differences in
rat development from this setup. Oh yes, a few examples.
Rats that grow up with socialization but without play fighting

(23:38):
have trouble interpreting social signals later in life. For instance,
later if another rat tries to initiate play fighting, the
deprived rat will often misinterpret it as a bid for
real fighting. They also have difficulties with other types of
social communication. They have difficulties with mating and with copulation,

(23:59):
and it seems that across multiple domains, rats that don't
have experience with play fighting just have trouble reading social
signals from other rats. Also, the lack of juvenile experience
with play fighting seems to change the development of the
medial prefrontal cortex in a rat's brain, and the behavioral

(24:21):
result of this is a difficulty with the inhibition of impulses.
And I thought this part was really interesting. Lillard infers
that play fighting helps develop a rat's inhibition skills because
play fighting is an exercise in inhibition. You are sort

(24:41):
of fighting, but you're not really going all the way
you have to. In fact, one of the key skills
of play fighting is to stop yourself from really biting
the other rat hard. So, counterintuitively, when we see, you know,
animals or children play fighting. We often think think of
this as like, you know, you might have feelings like, oh,

(25:02):
are they developing aggression? I mean, it's possible that that
could be happening too, But counterintuitively, playfighting seems to be
a way to get experience holding back aggression.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
This is also a topic that may tie into some
things I've read about domestic cats and whether, like to
what extent a given cat has been exposed to other cats.
I'm to understand this can have an impact on, say,
how likely they are to bite if they are perturbed
or wishing to express something like, you know, have they

(25:37):
had enough of I guess the feline equivalency of the
play fighting model.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Wow, I've never heard of that. But if I'm understanding
you right, you're saying it's the idea that if a
cat has grown up around other cats, they are more
likely to inhibit or hold back the expression of aggression
with say, humans in the household.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
That is what I've heard. Now. I did not go
into research on this for this episode, so it's entirely possible.
Sometimes when I get it the most wrong, it's in
cases like this where it's nothing I researched. It's just
something floating around in my head. So I would say,
don't take that to the bank. But it's out there
at least in the form of like cat owner folk wisdom,

(26:19):
and it may have scientific underpinnings as well. Well.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
I feel like if that's true, that would line up
exactly with these findings, and that would be really interesting.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
My cat is here, but she's asleep, so I can't
I can't get any foul to asker.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, but anyway, in the conclusion of this section, Lillard says,
quote taking turns at being dominant also involves inhibition. You
think about it that way, So it's not just like,
you know, when you get the better of another animal
in play fighting and you bite down on them, but
you don't really bite down all the way. That's inhibition.
You have to have the executive function to hold back.

(26:55):
But also taking turns involves a type of holding back.
I would imagine. I haven't done research on this either,
but I would imagine just in general in the human analogy,
like any kind of sharing or relinquishing power over something
within a game involves a type of inhibition control.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, that makes sense, So Lillard.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
Says, maybe play fighting is really important for strengthening the
neural circuitry behind inhibition, and if you don't have play
fighting in these animals where it's common that circuitry for
inhibition doesn't really develop fully. So looking over all this
research in rats, Lillard says that that playfighting is probably
important for the development of a rat's ability to read

(27:41):
social signals from other rats, to coordinate social activity with
other rats, to regulate stress, and exercise inhibition or holding
back behaviors. Now the question is, of course, could pretend
to play serve similar functions in human development. Lillard argues yes,
though she's cautious to say, you know, we shouldn't conclude

(28:03):
too much on the basis of analogies with other animals,
but in the absence of stronger experimental designs on humans,
which are probably not going to be forthcoming for very
understandable reasons, this is a really interesting, if only partial
piece of the picture. So essentially her idea is that
pretend play in humans might be important for understanding social

(28:25):
signals and for emotion regulation. I mentioned earlier that pretend
to play in humans involves a lot of reading of
social information or metacommunication between parents and children or at
older ages between children and other children. So we had
those things like the strong eye contact, the smile after
the pretend action. You know, we alluded to the kind

(28:48):
of pretend play voice. These signals let the child know
that what is taking place is play and it is
not to be taken literally.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
This also reminds me of some of the research we've
discussed in the past concerning laughter. Laughter is a social cue.
Oh yes, potentially to let other individuals know that there
is not a risk and so forth.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
Totally, I think they could fit right in the suite there.
So anyway, from here, Lillard goes on to analyze a
number of other experiments that have tried to establish links
of this sort between early pretend to play and specifically
with theory of mind, which is heavily involved in social
communication and understanding. So there's some big overlap there, and

(29:32):
Lillard proposes a possible causal model that goes something like this,
So early pretend to play sensitizes a child to social signals.
This is the meta communication that goes on when you're
playing pretend. All the little eye contact cues and the
changes of voice and the little things you do to
let the child know that the banana is not really

(29:54):
a phone. We're playing a game right now. This is
a separate reality, and so that makes the child sensitive
to those social signals. This sensitivity in part helps a
child develop the capacity for symbolic understanding, Lillard writes, quote
Yet this sensitivity alone would not develop the symbolic function. Rather,

(30:17):
it is the sensitivity in concert with the fact that
the parent is presenting reality at two levels to the child,
where one level serves as a symbol for the other. Thus,
both parental pretend and the child's sensitivity to social signals
are postulated to undergird the symbolic function, which is also
used in language and the interpretation of other symbols. And then, finally,

(30:42):
after this, the symbolic understanding in turn helps the child
with theory of mind. Now, how would symbolic understanding lead
to theory of mind? Lillard says that it is crucially
quote learning that reality can exist at two levels, the
nip and the bite, the banana and the telephone, the

(31:03):
false belief and the reality. So this ties into the
theory of mind. So like the symbolic understanding that there
can be two different realities, like what I know to
be true versus what I know sally incorrectly thinks to
be true. It is this ability to think at multiple
levels of reality that leads to typical adult social functioning,

(31:27):
in large part through theory of mind. So Lillard writes
about this in the end quote there might be continuity
then with pretend to play and play fighting. In both cases,
metacommunication is key and fundamental in humans. This ties into
a symbolic capacity that is not well developed in other species,

(31:48):
but a common root is reading social signals indicating that
a behavior is to be interpreted at other than face value.
And then finally, also Lillard goes on to have another
section about the connection between between pretend play and self
regulation or inhibitory control, like we already talked about, and

(32:08):
that one also seems plausible too, because the very act
of pretending is in a way an exercise in holding back.
It could be in play fighting holding back aggression. But
in the case of just say, like playing pretend, playing
in a play kitchen, or playing bananas telephone, you are
holding back the exercise of what you know to be

(32:29):
really the case. It's an inhibition type of impulse that
allows you to say, actually, I will not act on
what I know to be reality. Instead, I will act
on this secondary pretense scenario. So anyway, I found this
model very interesting, and especially in the way that I
don't know, it highlights just how convoluted human development can be.

(32:51):
Like if Lillard is correct about this, say about the
pathway that sort of starts with a child being sensitized
to social signals and communication through pretend to play in
the same way that animals probably are through play fighting,
and that's somehow leading to like all of these complicated
adult capacities through the mediating capacity of symbolic understanding. I

(33:14):
don't know, it's fascinating to imagine just how unpredictable the
development process of a human mind could be, that you
wouldn't necessarily make that connection without having all of these
pieces of evidence to establish in between make that connection
between you know, like reading gestures and body language in
pretend play to the final conclusion of adult socialization and

(33:37):
theory of mind.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
I think one of the really interesting takes on pretend
play and creativity in general that we've been looking at
is this idea that you know, you can sort of
look at it as this scaffolding that is used to
sort of struck the mature psyche, you know, and our
sort of semi completed adult forms. And yet the other

(34:10):
interesting side of the coin is to look at ways
in which we continue to engage in creative endeavors, including
pretend play, and the possibility that, okay, all that scaffolding
is still there and perhaps it can be reutilized to
help us with problems and challenges that we face as adults.

(34:34):
And so yeah, I talked more broadly about creativity in
general and pretend play specifically in adults. In the last
episode we touched on some examples such as Dungeons and Dragons,
a tabletop role playing game. I imagine most people listening
to the show know at Dungeons and Dragons, says, we
didn't stop to describe it, but of course it is

(34:57):
you know, pen and paper, sometimes miniatures, books of rules,
and of course sometimes it has digital components. But at
the core, it is a scenario that's taking place within
the heads of the players. It is a shared storytelling
creative endeavor. And so that is frequently brought up as
an example of pretend play that kids engage in and

(35:19):
adolescents engage in, but also plenty of adults do we
also have the example of improv theater as a big
one that lines up with pretend play in a number
of ways. And then we also touch briefly on Graveside
conversations with the Debt as an example of adult humans
speaking to an imagined mind state, something that you could

(35:42):
almost compare to speaking with an imaginary friend with all
the caveats that we discussed in that last episode. So
today I wanted to follow up on all of that
with a look at some additional literature that gets a
little more in depth about the benefits of adult pretend play.
But I do want to drive home again that this
is certainly an example where there's so much material out

(36:05):
there and our understanding of how imagination play and creativity
factors into adult lives and what the benefits are. You know,
this continues to develop. So I've had a really helpful
article by Alyssamwison titled do grown Ups Pretend Play? Or

(36:25):
I'm sorry, do grown Ups Play Pretend? And her primary
focus professionally is on mental childhood development, but in this
she also lines things up with the adult experience of
engaging and pretend play, and she explores different imaginative adult
activities that arguably match up with the idea of pretend play.

(36:46):
She brings up D and D of course, she brings
up cosplay, which we briefly touched on. I think, you know,
the idea that you might dress up as a favorite
fictional character and to certain extents, act as that fictional
character her at say, some sort of a convention. She
brings up LARPing live action role playing, which also crosses

(37:08):
over into the realm of play fighting of course, you know,
on stage fighting and so forth, which is interesting. You're
not actually trying to kill somebody with a LARPing sword.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Hopefully not. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
And then she also brought up an example that I
hadn't really thought of that much in terms of pretend play,
but engagement with fictional media, especially books, but also movies
and TV shows. And I think that this is something
that might not line up with every definition of pretend play,
but it's food for thought, especially so far as written

(37:41):
fiction goes. I was thinking about this, and we might
we might throw non visual works in there as well,
audio books, podcasts certainly, and also I think low five
visual storytelling as well. Like I'm thinking, you know that
sweet spot of like retro role playing games where the
visuals on the screen gave you a representation of what

(38:02):
things were and where they are, but then you might
have this additional mental image and a mental version of
what was happening. It's more akin to say, engaging with
a book.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
And do you make this distinction, because something like engaging
with a book is more of a participatory imaginative action
than say, passive media like watching a TV show.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
By and large, But at the same level, I have
to acknowledge that even like it's easy to say be
dismissive of cinema and say, well, the movie is giving
you everything you need, is giving you the visuals, the sound,
and then it doesn't leave anything to the imagination. But
certainly not every scene is laying it all out there.
There are plenty of moments where we as the viewer
have to imagine what is being seen by the protagonist.

(38:45):
We imagine the monster that's been glimpsed, or we imagine
the monster in full and when we only see its feet,
or you know, various scenes where characters are describing something
and we don't see it. They're just telling a story.
It's essentially more of an odd audio based storytelling situation.
But certainly with a work of written fiction. You know, okay,

(39:08):
it's it's going to tell its story, it's going to
describe thoughts and action, and it's going to guide you
along its course. It's going to plant its seeds. But
the author, sometimes from beyond the grave, is of course,
you know, thinking thoughts directly into your active mind, or
not directly via the book. But but you know, reading
is a social work. It's you know, it's not an

(39:30):
entirely devoid of personal imagination or even imaginative choices. I
imagine many of you have this, have had this experience
where you make a like a mental note of what
a character looks like, or you even decide how you
will cast them in your imagination. I used to do
this a lot when I was a younger reader, and

(39:52):
I'll occasionally lean on this technique if I'm reading something
that has a confusing cast of characters, or I'm having
a trouble keeping track of everyone. I'm like, Okay, what's
this person's last name? And then I'm like, okay, you're
Harry Dane Stanton. We're just gonna we're just gonna try
and streamline this a little bit. And I imagine various
folks engage in varying degrees of this, though you know

(40:15):
it's not always the case. But even if you don't
actively decide how you're going to interpret something visually, when
you're reading, your your mind is still visualizing the information
that has been conveyed to you, like via your your
own mind. You know, it's working off the various models,
the various people you've you've seen and encountered. So there

(40:39):
is still this like creative endeavor to that's entirely a
product of your mind as a particular story is coming
to life in your head. Now, some of that is
me just spitballing there. But she argues that adults engage
in such activities as these for many different reasons, and
these reasons generally line up with some of the reasons

(41:01):
that children engage in imagination play. To learn, to have
the experience of traveling somewhere, to have various experiences you
wouldn't have in your normal life, to laugh, and all
of these experiences can be empathetic, they can be personally empowering,
and much more. Now, Mewison mentions the importance of mastery

(41:23):
and psychological distance in play for children. We see both
of these. Of course, children tend to pretend to be older,
more experienced individuals when they're playing. There are, of course
counterexamples to that, but she refers to something that has
been dubbed the Batman effect, where children will stick to
a task longer if they're pretending to be someone else,

(41:46):
generally someone with a greater degree of mastery. In this term,
the Batman effect stems from a twenty seventeen study by
White at All published in Child Development Batman Effect improvingance
in young children. You can probably guess what this consistent of.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
I've heard of this, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
So they in this study, they looked at six and
four year olds and they found, quote, children who impersonated
an exemplar other, in this case, a character such as Batman,
spent the most time working, followed by children who took
a third person perspective of the cell on the self,
or finally a first person perspective, so, you know, creating

(42:27):
that psychological distance and embodying like a person of mastery,
the extreme of course being Batman.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Well, yeah, this makes me think about the nature of
enjoyment in an activity and flow states and such. You know,
it's often said that you are essentially in a flow
state when you are engaging in an activity that's sort
of maximally challenging but also still within your ability to do,

(42:59):
and you're getting consistent feedback that you are doing it correctly.
So like an activity that's too easy can be boring,
an activity that is too hard, if you feel like
you're just failing at it over and over, it becomes frustrating.
And so I wonder if assuming a kind of exemplar
character mind state allows you to simulate flow even if,

(43:22):
like for you, this activity you neither you maybe don't
have actual mastery of it. You are continually making mistakes,
but it's part of the game to just not acknowledge
that and say like, I'm doing it perfectly or maybe
around the maybe on the other side, maybe it makes
it more exciting an activity that would otherwise be so
easy that it's boring.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, Or I mean you're just you're becoming Batman. You're
taking on grim determination to finish a task. Like would
Batman stop sweeping the floor halfway through? No, he would
buckle down and finish the job, because that's how Batman
does it.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
Well.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
You never see Batman finish the job. It always cuts
away right after the most exciting part. Do you see
Batman like making the hand off to the police and
all the I guess occasionally.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
He often leaves them right hanging by battering in an alley. Yeah,
so interesting to think about, and I would, of course,
I would be gained to hear any examples of the
Batman effect from anyone's lives or the lives of children
in someone's life. But the question then emerges, do adults
do this as well? Well? Muissen mentions an acquaintance of

(44:32):
hers who she says channeled something she's dubbing the Buffy effect.
So this individual was preparing for childbirth and channeled Buffy
the vampire Slayer just sort of find the like, I
don't know, to get in the zone for what was
to come. So that's and that's that's interesting, and I

(44:52):
would love to hear from any listeners out there who
have some version of this, Like if you ever embodied
or you know, pretend played to some extent a fictional
character in order to make it through some you know,
big or small trial in your life. Maybe it's sweeping
the floors, maybe it's childbirth, very different endeavors, but you

(45:13):
can imagine where Yeah, you can sort of like psych
yourself into it a little bit, like it reminds me
of This is a much, I guess, more casual version
of this. But you hear people talking about like engaging
in beast mode or something, you know, to sort of
like beast through a particular challenge or a workout, et cetera.
And you know, I mean, on one level, yeah, it's
just a saying, but is it, Like you know, language

(45:35):
is powerful, and if we're engaging in beast mode, are
on some level are we engaging in some sort of imaginablecanthropy,
some imagined a hulking out in order to complete a task.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
I can speak from personal experience that sometimes a difficult
like workout, physical workout task is easier if you make
the kinds of noises that are not polite to make
at the gym, you know, if you like really roar
or grunt. I mean, I understand why Jim's would prefer
people not do that, but it kind of does help.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
I kind of forgot that there's like a no grunting,
no sound effects rule in some gems.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
I don't know if they all have that, but yeah,
I think someplaces they're like, please, please don't scream at
your you know, the person on the machine next to you.
But no, I think it does kind of help. And
I wonder, I don't know, maybe there's a totally different
mechanism at play there, but one could see how it
could also just be part of like imagining yourself in
some more dramatic kind of scenario than you actually are. Like,

(46:33):
you're not just doing a workout, you are, you know,
you're crossing some incredible hurdle in some kind of dramatic scenario.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
Well, even if you are not, like on any level,
pretend playing that you were a beast during your workout,
you still might be entering into like a slightly different
mindset and a slightly different version of yourself, you know,
like like and you're not just gym now your workout Jim,
you know, or workout Jane or you or whatever the

(47:01):
case may be. You know, And I think that makes
a lot of sense. You know, we we often think
of a cohesive self, but we know that under close scrutiny,
this doesn't you know, completely pan out. We the person
we are changes over time, and there are often sort
of like different versions of ourselves depending on what our

(47:21):
environment is, you know what time of day it is,
and so forth. So you know, you may have a
you know, a workout self that is, you know, a
little bit to the left or the right of who
you were before you came into that workout, and then
hopefully the person after the workout has yet another person
that is maybe a couple of degrees removed from your
starting point. Ewison also mentions in passing the fake it

(47:45):
till You Make it mantra, I believe she kicked off
the article sort of bringing this up, you know, sort
of like, hey, is this imagination play? And I think
maybe there is something to go on there as well,
you know, the idea of you know, generally, when people
were talking about faking it till you make it, they're
talking about I guess it's not unlike the Batman idea.
It's like you're not saying I'm going to be Batman.

(48:07):
I'm going to be you know, the professional that I
think I should be in the situation, or that the
parent I think I should be, the spouse I think
I should be, and so forth, and engaging in that
until on some level that becomes more than norm.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
Why do I have a negative feeling about that phrase.
I guess it's perfectly fine in some scenarios. For some reason,
I'm associating it with like engaging in fraud.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah, there has been You do see pushback against that
turn of phrase, in part because it can be interpreted,
I think, to sort of discount hard work and actual
striving for change in your life and the idea that
I would just fake it and you'll eventually you know,
it's I don't think we should maybe take it too literally.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
The charitably interpreted version of it is fine. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Now again, the Batman effect entails a certain amount of
psychological distance, and Muisen also points out that we see
element of this an adult imaginative choices. She says that,
you know, one may wish to engage with media that
offers a subjectively preferred level of psychological distance from whatever
your reality might be. The example she gives is that
of parents wishing to avoid media in which children are

(49:16):
in danger. You know, I can speak to that, you know,
especially when I had a young child, I was like,
what was the movie The Babba Duke that came out?
I think my child was very long. I was like, no,
thank you, I'm not going to skip on the Babba Duke,
and I still haven't gotten around to seeing.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
Oh it's really good, but yeah, I saw it. But
before I had a child, I can absolutely speak to this, Like,
you know, becoming a parent completely changed what my sensitivities
in media and storytelling were, and like certain types of
things that wouldn't really have bothered me before, like children
in danger suddenly became very difficult to watch.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yeah, an example that came to my mind reading this
article was, of course the height of the pandemic. I
know a lot of us may be chose not to
watch plague oriented media, you know, like it seems like
maybe a time to skip on the zombie apocalypse scenarios
and so forth. So I think there are different levels
of this depending on you know, highly subjective, you know,

(50:17):
whatever's going on in your world and more importantly in
your life, because there could be things going on in
your world that are just not weighing, particularly on your
your psyche, or you're not aware of. And then she
stresses mastering control in both adult and child models here,
and I think this is this is pretty straightforward. You know,
there's so much in our lives as adults that feel

(50:38):
out of our control, and it may just be objectively
out of our control, and yet you know, we have
these responsibilities and you want to at least have this
feeling of control, and so you sometimes find it in
large acts, but often in small acts. And also these
are the things you can find via involvement in various

(50:59):
imaginative games. I think many video games fit this, and
I believe that some of the most frequent examples, though,
concerned tabletop gaming and especially tabletop role playing games like
Dungeons and Dragons. A hallmark of some of these experiences
that I've seen discussed in past papers that I've read
is the idea of too of a fixed, small scale universe,

(51:23):
you know. I mean, you think of so many different
sandbox video games. There is the corner to the screen,
like there is a limit to the world, and so
you feel like you can master it in a way
that you cannot be a master of reality.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
I think that's a really insightful point. When people talk
about like video games or RPGs being I don't know,
freeing or empowering in a way, I think they're usually
focusing on the on the power of the characters played
like that it can be an empowerment fantasy in that
you play as someone who is very capable and can

(52:00):
do a lot of things. And I'm sure that is
part of it as well, but I think it's absolutely right.
Maybe what is maybe even more important is that within
video games or within a tabletop RPG, you can understand
what all the rules are. You can and that's never
true in reality and in life. We're all living our
lives playing a massive game, a massive RPG where the

(52:24):
rules are not clear and maybe they're changing.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
And you know, very often in our video games and
our imaginative media, there is often a very clear line
between good and evil. You know, it's it's it's zombies
or invading robots or aliens, whatever the case may be. Like,
there's a clear distinction, at least on some level in
terms of how you're supposed to tackle adversity and so forth.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah, there are clear ways to know how to play,
which in reality it's confusing.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
Yeah. Now, transitioning out of Muissen here, she does mention
embassing in therapeutic use of tabletop roleplaying games, and she
references a twenty twenty two Wired article by Cam Burns

(53:16):
Health therapists. You're using tabletop games to help people. And
I was looking at that article. The author of this
Burns speaks with clinical psychiatrist Raphael Bokemazo, and in this
conversation it's stressed that tabletop roleplaying games, and I think
this is important to note, they're not therapy in and

(53:36):
of themselves, and you know you can't, like realistically look
at your own Dungeons and Dragons night and say I
am going to therapy. Rather, they can be used as
a tool in therapy by trained professionals, opening spaces for
patients to explore things like identity, mortality, gender, social skills,

(54:00):
overcoming social anxiety, and so forth. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Yeah, I think in the same way that like sports
are not therapy, but could in some scenarios be therapeutic.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Yeah, and could you tap into some of those therapeutic
effects on your own most certainly, but not to the
degree that a trained professional would be able to utilize
it with specific games with the right patients. Now, there's
been quite a lot written on the possibility of using
Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role playing games for

(54:29):
therapeutic purposes. I was looking at one paper from nineteen
ninety four by Wayne d. Blackmun titled Dungeons and Dragons
The use of a fantasy game in the psychotherapeutic treatment
of a young adult. The adult in question had schizoid
personality disorder, and more recently you see this rolled out
as a tool in specially aimed therapy groups. I found

(54:52):
a nice article on Johns Hopkins University's website by Claire
Gudreau titled tabletop Therapy, How Dungeons and Dragons can improve
mental health. This is from twenty twenty three, and it
highlights a session in which players engage. This is not
like you know, this is just one example of how
one particular therapy group handles it. But you might have
sixty to ninety minutes of OURPG time. Granted that's you're

(55:15):
packing a lot in, but I trust the professionals. Here
followed by a session in which quote the players take
a step back to reflect on the session and see
how it relates to their own lives. And I thought
this was interesting because it reminded me of the pivotal
integration step in some models for psychedelic assisted therapy, where
you engage in some sort of an altered state and

(55:36):
then you top it off with therapist assisted reflection.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
I can see that comparison as well.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
Yeah, so engaging in this imaginative pretend play gaming scenario,
but then you know, couching it in a discussion of
how this relates to where you are in your life
and whatever your current obstacles might be. The other big
thing that of course is stressed in this article and

(56:03):
in other places as well, is the goal is also
making therapy fun and approachable for target patients, so generally
that that is part of the scenario as well. Like
perhaps someone is a little adverse to a therapy environment,
but it's kind of like a great icebreaker. Well, we're
not going to just get in and start talking about
our feelings or our problems. We're going to play a game.

(56:25):
And you know, you'll find multiple examples of this where,
if not tabletop role playing games, sometimes just other games,
card games, board games, and so forth are used to
sort of, you know, break that ice down a little bit.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
I wonder how this interacts with Robert. I'm sure you
know what I'm talking about here that at least in
my limited experience with tabletop RPGs, there is kind of
a difficulty adults have taking it too seriously and so
there's often a lot of joking involved where like, you know,

(56:58):
it's not like we're embarrassed to be playing D and D,
but you know, we all came here for fun. This
is what we like to do. But there is a
kind of ongoing like rhythm of being in the game
and then moments of stepping back and kind of meta
commentary and joking about what's going on and then changing
the subject and talking about something in the real world
and then getting back to the game. And at least

(57:19):
that's my experience, and I wonder if that's there's just
a difficulty I think for a lot of adults to
engage and sustained pretend to play like like a tabletop
RPG in the way that kids can, where kids can
just you know, like really take it seriously, stay in
character and keep it going.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Yeah, it's been it's been my experience that this is
very hard to come by with adults, even if you
kind of like set a goal for yourself. And I
mean I would also stress just you know, casually, whatever
your gaming environment is. Yeah, it's like, you know, you
don't want to force anything on your group. Maybe your
group is doz Lean more serious, maybe it's a bunch
of goofballs. If it's a bunch of goofballs, maybe don't

(57:59):
go for that super grim dark serious scenario unless I
don't know. I think sometimes you can find a nice
balance though, where like, for instance, when I recently ran
Alien RPG stuff with my group, we're generally more on
the goofball spectrum, but for some reason we were able
to do that one in a way which felt appropriately serious,
but we still had a lot of like goofball moments

(58:21):
doing it. And maybe there was a certain maybe to
a certain extent, it had to do with like distance
from the character. So it's almost like you were watching
a movie play out and you could you could have
these laughs while still engaging in the seriousness of the story.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
I mean to be clear, I wasn't trying to say
people should do it one way or the other. It's
just my observation of how these things usually go is
there's a lot of kind of a lot of stepping
back and almost almost maybe deliberate kind of signals of
we're not taking this too seriously. We're joking now. Haha.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Oh yeah, I mean getting it. It's like play fighting, right, Yeah,
Because you are often dealing with these themes of mortality
and failure, you know, rolling a natural one, missing your
shot and then getting run through by a goblin sword
or something, and you know, and if you're not careful,
you can let emotions run run high in those those situations. Now,

(59:16):
I've seen other studies that highlight the potential for tabletop
role playing game assisted therapy with autistic adults to help
with social cognition. Like I say, this is kind of
a it seems like a rich area of therapy where
folks are exploring different potential uses. On one hand, play
seems to certainly be that spoonful of sugar that can

(59:37):
help the medicine go down, like, you know, let's make
therapy fun and approachable, but it also seems to have
unique properties undo itself, you know, again kind of comparing
it to some degree with the idea of engaging in
a psychedelic experience and then having a therapist help you
integrate that into your life, you know, like, let's use
some of that mental scaffolding that we talked about earlier

(01:00:00):
and see how we can get to where we're looking
to go with therapy. Now, I mentioned improv as well.
I looked at a pair of studies from twenty sixteen
to twenty seventeen. There is a Comedic improv Therapy for
the Treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder by Sheili at All
Journal of Creativity and Mental Health, and the other one

(01:00:21):
is Theraprov a pilot study of improv used to treat
anxiety and depression Kruger at All Journal of Mental Health.
The former highlighted quote a novel treatment for social anxiety
disorder by harnessing the following therapeutic elements group, cohesiveness, play, exposure,
and humor, while the latter article explored a brief therapeutic
group based intervention model for patients with symptoms of anxiety

(01:00:46):
and depression. So I'm not going to get into all
the beats of these two studies, but both articles expressed
a great deal of optimism for the use of these
techniques alongside other treatments, other treatment methods and tools. I've
also looked at papers exploring the potential for integrative play
therapy already used for children more in adult situations, and

(01:01:08):
of course there are other play based therapy tools that
are used with adults as well, including a big one
that that I completely spaced on and that is art therapy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
Oh, I'm aware that exists, but I don't really know
anything about.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
It, right right, I mean I don't. It's one of
those things where I'm mostly familiar with it from seeing
it in passing in films like, for instance, there's a
at some point in Stranger Things, there's a scene where
you see people engaging in art therapy, and or you know,
you'll I've watched TV shows where the characters involved do
something with art therapy. But yeah, you can definitely loop

(01:01:43):
art therapy in with other play based therapy models, you know.
So perhaps this is a topic we could come back
to at some point, the idea of play based therapy,
or more specifically art based therapy, because it's been around
since in some form or another since at least the
mid twentieth century, and there have been a number of
studies regarding how it can be used to help with

(01:02:04):
various conditions and ailments. Well, you know, as we close
out this five episode look at pretend play, I do
feel like I have a more well rounded understanding of
what children are doing when they engage and pretend play,
as well as to the extent to what extent we're
continuing to engage and pretend play throughout our adult lives.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Mm hmm. Yeah, it really makes me think about when
we see these games children play that seem so funny
that I think sometimes adults are tempted to think of
play as frivolous, or to think of pretend play as
especially frivolous. You know, these like silly scenarios that kids

(01:02:47):
are making up is something that's just sort of, you know,
not an important human activity, And it seems to me
that that couldn't be further from the truth that play
really is like the important work of childhood, and pretend
to play is maybe the most important kind.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah, children's play is serious. It's building the person they
will become. And then like the scaffolding is just not
just abandoned after that, you know, like we're still using
it to varying degrees, sometimes kind of invisibly to ourselves
as we go through our daily life as adults.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Yeah, play is building minds.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
There you go, that would look great on a bumper
sticker T shirt what have you.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
But all right, I guess that does do it for
the series for now.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
That's right. Again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there.
We're getting some great feedback from listeners. I'm sure we're
going to have a listener mail in the very near
future where we begin to roll through some of this
examples of imaginary friends and paracosms and so forth. So yeah,
right in, we'd love to hear your thoughts on all
of this, either from your own personal experience as a

(01:03:52):
pretender or observations you've made of children in your life
that are pretending, or animals. Certainly we already mentioned dogs cats.
Write in about your dogs and cats and their possible
pretend play and play in general. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We

(01:04:14):
do a little short form episode on Wednesdays, and on
Fridays we set us on most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
Huge thanks as always to our regular audio producer JJ Posway,
but also big thanks today to our guest audio producer
Andrew Howard.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Thanks Andrew.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
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 (01:04:51):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.