Pretend Play, Part 4

In this 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)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
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

(00:38):
cardboard box becomes the castle gray 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, if we haven't heard the previous parts

(01:01):
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. So one of our favorite examples is

(01:23):
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 as cooking dinner in
the dollhouse, imaginary companions, and other things. We talked about
possible links explored in the research between pretend play and

(01:46):
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. In Part two, we talked

(02:08):
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 while pretending does appear to be

(02:31):
basically universal, there is pretty wide variation in how much
children play pretend, and in the themes of the pretend play,
and in some particular cases, in the framing of whether
pretend entities are understood as real in some important way
or not. And then last time we also examined the

(02:52):
fascinating phenomenon of paracosms, essentially extending the concept of an
imaginary friend to where it is not 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 to generate paracosms and things like

(03:15):
creativity in later life.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
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 or have pretend worlds that you sometimes

(03:40):
engage 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 extrapol of
Star Wars. They said. It's different planets set in the

(04:04):
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 but generate new
ideas as well. And then the other one. I think

(04:26):
this was earlier. It 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 evil Pikachu.
It was really wild, and at the time it was
like it was at times it was a little much.
I was like, this Pikachu is an ally, guys, what

(04:49):
are you doing.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Is evil Pikachu already a thing? Or is that that's
purely original?

Speaker 2 (04:54):
I mean, Pikachu's been around long enough. I imagine all
variations possible have been dreamt off. Pikachu, I'm sure has
played a role in various paracosms.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
I am Pikachu, I contain multitudes.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
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 (05:20):
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.

(05:41):
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

(06:03):
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

(06:23):
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

(06:46):
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 developed different mental and physical capabilit Something interesting that
this twenty twenty four paper did was get really granular

(07:06):
in that specific regard breaking pretend to 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 when parents observed all these different types of

(07:30):
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 got imaginary friends, banana phone, I'm a lion,
what's left? And it's true that some of these categories
they explore are kind of overlapping or are kind of
subdivisions of activities we've already talked about into two different subtypes,

(07:54):
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 2 (08:11):
Okay, all right, this will be fun, because, yeah, I
think we can compare notes in multiple ways here.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
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

(08:37):
pretending to cry.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Hmm, 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 (08:57):
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

(09:20):
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 empty cup. Then there

(09:42):
is pretending empty vessels are full on another, I feed
my doll from this empty cup, or I try to
make Dad drink from this 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 2 (09:58):
Yeah. 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 (10:08):
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 2 (10:26):
Okay, finger guns wouldnt imagine Okay.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah. Then after that you got one that will be
more familiar to us. Pretending to be an object like
I am a tree.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
There is pretend what I'm sorry, I'm just imagining that
pretend gang, gotcha.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah, it's very Yeah, I don't know, it's more complex
than you might think.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, for the quiet kids.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
There's pretending to be an animal like I am a
bunny rabbit.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
This was huge with my child until really very recently.
There would often be request to play zookeeper at playground
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 (11:11):
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

(11:32):
object substitution with more specific props that are very different
from the thing they're mimicking, So like toy car is
a telephone?

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Interesting, all right, And so this is casual object 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 (12:03):
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 2 (12:10):
Yeah yeah, And I guess you get into the example
that I already brought up about the lightsabers building a
lightsaber help.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
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. Okay, I don't think we
did that one. 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

(12:38):
of the above categories we mentioned. Beyond this, there is
what the authors call socio dramatic pretending. This means creating
not just 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

(13:01):
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 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, and so forth after that. There is pretending
to be fantasy characters already existing in culture, like you know,

(13:22):
I am Princess Leiah, I am Batman, I am Santa Claus,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
And obviously we encourage that across the board, yes, you know,
and for 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 much encouraged
this sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
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 every day activities. And examples of this might be

(14:03):
I am 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 2 (14:21):
One of my kids friends would pretend to open their
own bank.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
That's sort of in the category.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
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 (14:39):
That is curious. And then finally you've got acting out
completely made up fantasy scenarios. You know, I ride a
dragon through the sky and I use magic to transform
people into cats and that sort of thing. Yeah, so

(15:01):
I really liked this granular attention to detail in 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

(15:25):
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

(15:46):
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
report 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

(16:10):
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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
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, ay, 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 (16:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
So that's a great example of where it's also good
to chat with the parent and they'll be like, I've
never heard of mister Bongos. I think they made mister
bongoes up like literally just now for fun.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, because you brought up the idea.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah yeah, you let mister Bond goes.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
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

(17:27):
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,

(17:50):
and I was interested what do 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

(18:13):
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

(18:33):
was roughly roughly in the chronological order of observance, so
remember the empty cups 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

(18:56):
of 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. So this does agree in part

(19:20):
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 question

(19:41):
myself because you know, 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 begin correct, But
I think before my daughter ever pretended one object was another,
she would pretend to sneeze and pretend to be asleep,

(20:03):
and also pretend to eat or drink things that were
not really there, and she thought it was hilarious with
most of these.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, I don't remember how this shook out with my
own kit, but in general this does seem accurate.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
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

(20:38):
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,

(21:02):
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

(21:25):
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 imaginative, imaginative behavior into adulthood, even
if it's not exactly play like when they were a child.

(21:47):
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 start building paracosms
those it's I think fairly common for those to continue
from ages like eight to twelve or so.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
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 (22:24):
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, again,

(22:50):
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, they relate

(23:11):
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 a
little bit more likely to create imaginary companions. They cite

(23:34):
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 related to pretending.
But again the differences are not huge, and it's not

(23:56):
known for sure why this would be. Similar question with
the thing about us 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 that could
make sense, like if there's more co pretending between the

(24:19):
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 more on
the surveys.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
But I guess I'm still kind of foggy as to
how this would shake out between younger and older parents,
not just because I was am was and was an
older parent, but I'm just wondering, like, what's what would
be the broad difference there.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
That's a good question. I don't actually know. They didn't
mention it this part, but maybe there was somewhere in
there that got lost from but they could have some
data indicating that, on average, younger parents spend more time
pretending with kids. But I don't know.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
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

(25:29):
time to spend with the kid, Like, I don't know
it just I guess 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 some findings and
some statistical information.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
But 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 guess, So who knows
what the real reason was.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
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 (26:09):
Possibly. Yeah. 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

(26:31):
to the variations in the style of play, Like, I
don't think otherwise I would have noticed that it's so
common to pretend to cup has something in it. Like
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

(26:54):
I guess it's so common that it is different than
like I'm using an invisible toothbrush. It seems like, like
you know, tons of kids. Maybe maybe most kids are
pretending there's something in a cup when there actually isn't.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
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 and the cup is not clear
to be to be clear, the cup has to cannot
be made of trans translucent plastic. But you know, I've
consumed everything in the cup, and I want to continue

(27:28):
to have 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 (27:36):
Sipping from a cup is part of the rhythm of
conversation at a party.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
And if you're out of out of a beverage, I mean,
you're out of options, right, Yeah, so sometimes you've got
to pretend.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
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

(28:19):
wanted to talk about today, isn't it, Rob, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
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 angle. So it's like, yeah, yeah, that

(28:42):
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 oddly. So,

(29:02):
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,

(29:25):
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 Sinha at All twenty twenties, playing with
creativity across the life span. This was in tech trends

(29:46):
linking 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 of
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?

(30:09):
How 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 (30:19):
Oh so that is the meaning of used with purpose
here in this quote.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, okay, Yeah, he positive that childhood fantasy and imagination
were essentially catalysts for adult creativity, which would 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

(30:46):
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 (30:58):
You know, it's understandable just solving practical problems that may
or may not have a strong economic component.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
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.

(31:28):
And 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 (31:38):
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

(32:00):
is writing a memo for work creative?

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Not?

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Usually it could be Usually.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
That's your creativity challenge for the day, make it a
creative exercise.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
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

(32:31):
novelty in a kind of random sense. It's novelty that
is useful or effective in some way. It does something right.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, and it's good. 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

(33:02):
needs 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

(33:23):
the 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 uh, and
I believe that is what's meant by wholeness here. Uh
the idea that like that, yes, with an act of
creativity is not just this like leakage of energy from

(33:45):
your psyche, you know. And I think this whole this
holds true for children and adults as well. Discussed like
when when you're engaging and create a creative output like
that is it's like the output of your being, you know,
it is like not to get to you know, wax
too poetic about it. But I mean, it's like a
light shining out of your soul and your your mind.

(34:07):
It's it's not just this shadow that happens to be
cast by who you are.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
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 2 (34:32):
Yeah, I believe. I believe she's a pretty big name
in this field.

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

Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, yeah, And you know, and looking around, I'm not
sure how often she uses the term wholeness, but they
reference whole. They had kind of some wholeness up as
being an aspect of her definition. Oh okay, And I
do think that that plays out with what she's stressing here.
But you know, even in adults, though, the way we

(35:04):
think of usefulness or to you know, to use Russ's
model usefulness or effectiveness. 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?

Speaker 3 (35:24):
I don't know. We've been doing the show a long time,
so I can't always recall.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
But yeah, I forget whole episodes sometimes.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
But I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
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

(35:54):
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, huge impact.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
General theory of relativity or something. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
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

(36:31):
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

(36:56):
a given field.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
Okay, and then you have many.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
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

(37:19):
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 and many see 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

(37:40):
way that our mind is working. It's helping us roll
around various concepts and so forth.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
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 2 (37:54):
Yeah, but an important thing they stress is that any
kind of creativity is going to start out novel and personal.
So you know, a many create 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 for and certainly gives

(38:18):
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 in adults as you know,
just in terms of its usefulness like in the workplace

(38:42):
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 C exercise could transition into a
pro s or any of the other forms of creativity.

(39:03):
You know, to quote Lawrence of Arabia, big things have
small beginnings.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
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

(39:28):
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

(39:49):
kind of lower stakes games with the ideas that they're
manipulating in their major work.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And one of the big ideas
here is that most of us are not getting gauge
and 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

(40:14):
those little C and many C exercises they're still novel,
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 that. You know, you had many adults

(40:35):
suddenly dealing with more free time, but also expressing themselves
through 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 Dudges and Dragons than usual,

(40:56):
or they're they're turning back to an old hobby. And yeah,
part of that is like maybe they had some extra
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 Sinha at All, they write the following quote

(41:19):
as human beings. We are programmed to use play in
creative expression to connect and work through the difficulties. Creativity
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

(41:41):
various games, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, or otherwise various
creative endeavors one might engage in. But I 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,

(42:05):
and the authors here argue that pretend play is an
adaptive 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

(42:27):
adults was seen as is useful almost always in a
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

(42:48):
interesting in recent years to see improv theater and it's
often brought in to say, business spaces and so forth,
realizing that it is a fun and helpful skill set
to bring into some sort of a work environment.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
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

(43:25):
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

(43:46):
they are framing the events of their life in a
kind of in a modified, not very realistic way 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

(44:09):
a frame, a frame that is probably not the way
an objective observer would describe what they're doing. Does that
make sense?

Speaker 2 (44:18):
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 in a way if that
most most non improv adults are not doing, but very
much in line with the kind of pretend play a
child might engage in.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah yeah. And there is something 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 2 (44:52):
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,

(45:14):
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 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

(45:34):
improv theater and childhood pretend play. I think kids are
sometimes not as good at the yes and aspect of improv.
That's you know, 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

(45:55):
on this as well. We didn't know I haven't really
got into this, but you have like parallel play 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 (46:14):
Yeah, and I can see, yes. And as a form
of sharing, I mean it as 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 the narrative.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
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 room for maybe
a you know, forty sixty split there on creative control
of the paracosm.

Speaker 4 (46:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
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,

(47:15):
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

(47:36):
process things and let things out. Now another example that
they bring up. 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

(47:57):
speaking to angels and 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.

(48:21):
And this 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 (48:30):
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 extremely important relationship with her with her mother's grave,
essentially with her mother was an important writer in her

(48:51):
own right, Mary Wollstonecraft, and 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 2 (49:07):
Wow. Yeah, and I feel like a lot of us, yeah,
can speak to examples of this the way that gunku
at All sum this up, They say, quote, these conversations
enable 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 4 (49:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
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 gravesite. 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. Have

(49:55):
you contradicting ideas in your head, multiple of them at once.
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 in another level like you are
speaking to the ghost of a loved one that is

(50:15):
spiritually present, like in a movie about a ghost, 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

(50:39):
a spirit of a loved one that is now residing
in another realm of existence. You know, the idea that
well 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 there's nothing here. I am just engaging in
this idea of the person that is passed. And then yeah,

(51:01):
ultimately you might think of it all, I'm dealing with
a mental simulation of the deceased via theory of mind.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yeah, and for something as deeply personal and emotional as
a grave side conversation with the deata, 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 the power of human
imagination and our engagement with simulated realities as a means

(51:28):
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 useful in the in
the sense that it is going to change the world

(51:50):
or generate income. But it can be highly useful depending
on the individual obviously in the situation, like for their
their their own feeling, and for their own sense of
well being.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
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

(52:25):
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

(52:46):
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 wounds of her toys, and she she
gets kind of sadness in her boy, you know, she's like,

(53:08):
oh 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. Yeah,
so I don't know. There are many many ways obviously

(53:30):
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 for fun. Instead, it's something that's like usually for fun,
but it also can sometimes be something else. It's something
we're doing for kind of intrinsic motivations, but they're not

(53:52):
really related to like pleasure or laughter or excitement.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Yeah. Yeah, so at any rate, Yeah, these, like I say,
I thought I was going to 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,

(54:17):
But 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 (54:23):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
All right, 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 have taken an improv class or two, or done
a little improv maybe in a college acting class. Tell

(54:46):
us about it. 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 right 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

(55:09):
and we'll 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 (55:18):
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 2 (55:26):
Absolutely, absolutely all right, Just a reminder. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to
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If you're on Instagram, follow us at STBYM podcast. We're
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(55:49):
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We have higher numbers on other platforms like Twitter, but
I kind of want the Instagram want to be hired,
So help us out with that if you have the ability.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
To do so. We have a Twitter account.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Yeah, we do. It's active. You can follow us on Twitter.
It does get updates about the.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Content huge thanks 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 1 (56:37):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Speaker 2 (57:02):
The four part