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January 23, 2025 65 mins

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 5 of 5)

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

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
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

(00:36):
talked about in some earlier episodes from this series, but
to refresh briefly, 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

(01:00):
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

(01:23):
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 talked about
possible links between pretend to play and complex cognitive skills

(01:46):
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

(02:09):
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 2 (02:30):
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, but also childhood imagination, adult imagination,
and so forth. This is really one of those series

(02:52):
where we could just keep going and going and find
new angles, new studies to discuss each time.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
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 is so good. 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

(03:19):
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 play
a culturally contingent activity?

Speaker 2 (03:39):
You know?

Speaker 3 (03:39):
Something that we just kind of like made up and
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

(04:00):
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

(04:23):
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,

(04:45):
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

(05:05):
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

(05:26):
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, and
in some cases kids keep pretending longer, and you can
make arguments that activities sustained into adulthood are actually continued
types of pretend play, maybe sort of in disguise or

(05:48):
not so much in disguise. Now, Lillard makes the argument
that because pretend play of some form is culturally universal
and it's 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

(06:11):
think 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? As an aside, we already looked

(06:34):
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 correlations are difficult to study in

(06:55):
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 indirect quality of much of the
evidence available to us. We have some indications, specifically, like

(07:20):
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 who don't have enough human social interaction
when their babies tend to play pretend much less when

(07:42):
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, and that is the analogy of non human animals.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yes, yeah, 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 (08:07):
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,

(08:31):
and 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 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

(08:53):
and pleasurable. It differs in form or some other way
from the functional expression. It is repeat 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 in mammals, engage in play. But do these

(09:16):
animals play pretend? 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

(09:38):
would be 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.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Rob.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
You know, a cat will often any little furry thing,
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 2 (10:18):
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 (10:37):
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 2 (10:48):
Yeah, and then my cat does not need any encouragement
to attack body parts. She attacks my feet all the time.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Now, there's an interesting finding that Lillards, 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

(11:19):
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 2 (11:41):
Well, my cat, I can safely say, is not average.
She's quite old at this point, but 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 get

(12:04):
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 in house cat, like a fully

(12:25):
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
that has an effect on how they associate with toys.

(12:45):
Maybe you see more of this average situation that's laid
out here. If the cat actually has physical access to
normal prey animals on a regular basis.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, that seems quite plausible to me.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Though.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
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

(13:20):
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

(13:41):
temporary 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. The dog might in a play fight,

(14:02):
it might put its jaws around the other 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

(14:22):
and gives a number of reasons. For example, 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 before the bite pressure is too much, and so forth.

(14:45):
Lillard writes quote as Baitsen also pointed out, 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 play f denotes the bite, but it does not
denote what would be denoted by the bite. In other words,

(15:06):
the playful nip is a pretend bite, 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

(15:29):
play fighting in other mammals rely on the 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,

(15:49):
and apparently they do this a lot. Rats playfight. She says,
when they playfight they don't bite at or target the
same areas of the body that they do when rats
are actually fighting in real violent competition. So when they're
play fighting, she says, they target a nuzzle like the
nape of the neck, whereas real fighting and tends to

(16:13):
involve attacks on the flanks and the lower back. 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 play
fight with the threat of a real fight. Now, understanding
those kinds of gestures and social communication and rats might

(16:36):
not be very intuitive to us, but we can easily
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

(16:58):
down and spread their paws apart and put their head
down with the back of the body up with the
haunches the butt raised up, and 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 2 (17:12):
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 not all fours.
I'm sort of like a dog right now. But I

(17:32):
guess this is the name thing.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
So in yoga it's the butt is up, the head
is down.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Correct. Yeah, okay, though usually in the picture you're showing
here the dogs four paws, four arms are on the ground,
and yeah, that's usually not the case with down dog,
though there are versions of down dog where you do
have four arms down. I guess that's more gets sended
like dolphin and so forth. But anyway, enough animals. We're
talking about dogs, right.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
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,

(18:17):
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

(18:39):
to continually understand the correct frame 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, but even out side the realm of play

(19:01):
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

(19:21):
culturally variable in 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

(19:46):
I can imagine all these kind of things kind of
like exaggerated weird movements that 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
the study, but I really thought about like using a
different voice. You know, we've talked about about parental voice

(20:07):
modulation on the show before. I think we did a
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

(20:29):
the pitch of my voice and stuff that I'm not
normally doing when I'm just playing with my daughter.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, and that makes sense. Yeah, I mean we often
don't think about it, but we're sort of conveying that. Okay,
we're shifting over one degree to the left or the
right here into the imagination space.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:27):
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 that the child doesn't
learn something that's wrong. So in this paper, Lillard looks

(21:50):
at 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 or 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

(22:11):
to mention 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

(22:34):
adult female rat, the baby rat will receive socialization from
the adult, so it's not like total social isolation or deprivation.
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

(22:56):
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

(23:20):
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,

(23:41):
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 playfighting seems to change the development of the medial
prefrontal cortex in a rat's brain, and the behavioral result

(24:03):
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

(24:23):
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 of this
as like, you know, you might have feelings like, oh,

(24:44):
are they developing aggression? I mean, it's possible that that
could be happening too, But counterintuitively, play fighting seems to
be a way to get experience holding back aggression.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
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

(25:19):
had enough of I guess the feline equivalency of the
play fighting model.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
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 2 (25:41):
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 owner folk wisdom, and

(26:02):
it may have scientific underpinnings as well. Well.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
I feel like if that's true, that would line up
exactly with these findings, and that that would be really interesting.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
My cat is here, but she's asleep, so I can't
I can't get any foul asker.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
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.

(26:37):
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 and the human analogy,
like any kind of sharing or relinquishing and relinquishing power
over something within a game involves a type of inhibition control.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
So Lillard 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

(27:22):
to read 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, And though she's cautious to say, you know,

(27:43):
we shouldn't conclude 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 pick. Sure, So essentially
her idea is that pretend play in humans might be

(28:05):
important for understanding social 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,

(28:26):
the smile after the pretend action. You know, we alluded
to the kind 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 2 (28:39):
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 (28:53):
Totally, I think they could fit right in the suite there.
So anyway, from here, Lillard goes on to analyze an
number of other experiments that have tried to establish links
of this sort between early pretend play and specifically with
theory of mind, which is heavily involved in social communication
and understanding. So there's some big overlap there, and Lillard

(29:14):
proposes a possible causal model that goes something like this,
So early pretend 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

(29:36):
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,

(29:59):
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,

(30:24):
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

(30:45):
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.

(31:09):
In large part through theory of mind. So Lillard writes
about this in the end quote there might be continuity
then with pretend 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,

(31:29):
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

(31:50):
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 banana as telephone, you
are holding back the exercise of what you know to

(32:11):
be 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

(32:32):
can be. Like if Lillard is correct about this, say
about the pathway that sort of starts with a child
being sensitized to social signals and metacommunication 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.

(32:56):
I 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

(33:19):
and theory of mind.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
I think one of the really interesting takes on pretend
play in 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 construct the mature psyche, you know, and our
sort of semi completed adult forms. And yet the other

(33:52):
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.

(34:16):
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 a Dungeons and Dragons, says, we didn't
stop to describe it, but of course it is pen

(34:39):
and paper, sometimes miniatures, whole 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 you know, kids engage in and

(35:01):
adolescents engage in, but also plenty of adults do. We
also have the example of improv theater as a big
one that has lines up with pretend play in a
number of ways. And then we also touched briefly on
Graveside conversations with the Debt as an example of adult
humans speaking to an imagined mind state, something that you

(35:24):
could almost compare to speaking with an imaginary friend, you know,
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

(35:46):
material out 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 hand really
helpful article by Alyssa Mwison titled Do grown Ups Pretend Play?

(36:07):
Or 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. She brings up D and D of course,

(36:30):
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 at say some sort of a convention.
She brings up LARPing live action role playing, which also
crosses over into the realm of play fighting of course,

(36:53):
you know, on stage fighting and so forth, which is interesting.
You're not actually trying to kill some with a LARPing sword.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Hopefully not.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, 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 fiction goes. I was thinking about this,

(37:25):
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 things were and where they are, But
then you might have this additional mental image and a

(37:48):
mental version of what was happening. That's more akin to say,
engaging with a book.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
And do you make this distinction, because something like engaging
with a book is more of a participatory imaginative than say,
passive media like watching a TV show.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
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.

(38:27):
We imagine the monster that's been glimpsed, or we imagine
the monster in full than 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.
And it's essentially more of an odd audio based storytelling situation.
But certainly with a work of written fiction, you know, okay,

(38:50):
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 some times from beyond the graves, of course, you know,
thinking thoughts directly into your active mind, or not directly
via the book, but but you know, reading the social work,

(39:11):
it's you know, it's not an 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

(39:32):
I was a younger reader, and 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. Stand. We're
just gonna we're just gonna try and streamline this a
little bit. And I imagine various folks engage in varying

(39:54):
degrees of this, though you know 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 mind is
still visualizing the information that has been conveyed to you,
like via your own mind. You know, it's working off

(40:15):
the various models, the various people you've seen and encountered.
So there 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

(40:36):
adults engage in such activities as these for many different reasons,
and that these reasons generally line up with some of
the reasons that children engage in imagination play. To learn,
to have the experience of traveling somewhere, to to have
various experiences you wouldn't have in your normal life, to laugh.

(40:56):
And then all of these experiences can be empathetic, they
can be personally empowering, and much more. Now, Mewison mentions
the importance of mastery 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

(41:20):
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, 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 Improving perseverance in young children. You

(41:44):
can probably guess what this consists of. I've heard of this, yeah, yeah,
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 I'm working, followed by children who
took a third person perspective of the cell on the self,

(42:04):
or finally a first person perspective, so, you know, creating
that psychological distance and embodying like a person of mastery,
the extreme of course being Batman.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
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

(42:41):
do 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

(43:03):
flow even if, 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 and activity that would
otherwise be so easy that it's boring.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
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. Well.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
You never see Batman finish the job, do you, It
always cuts away right after the most exciting part. Do
you see Batman, like making the hand off to the
police and all that. I guess occasionally 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 game to hear any examples of the man

(44:00):
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?

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Well? Muissen mentions an acquaintance of 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

(44:32):
that's and that's that's interesting, And I 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 can imagine where. Yeah,

(44:56):
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,

(45:16):
you know, language is powerful, and if we're engaging in
beast mode, are on on some level? Are we engaging
in some sort of imaginablecanthropy, some imagined a hulking out
in order to complete a task.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
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 gims would prefer
people not do that, but it kind of does help.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
I kind of forgot that there's like a no grunting,
no sound effects rule in some gems.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
I don't know if they all have that, but yeah,
I think someplace 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.

(46:15):
Like you're not just doing a workout, you are, you know,
you're crossing some incredible hurdle in some kind of dramatic scenario.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
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 gym,
you know, or workout Jane or whatever the case may be,

(46:45):
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 environment is, you know, what

(47:06):
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. Mewison also mentions in passing the

(47:27):
fake it 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 it's not unlike the Batman idea.
It's like you're not saying I'm going to be Batman.

(47:49):
I'm going to be, you know, the professional that I
think I should be in this 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 (48:02):
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 2 (48:11):
But 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 (48:31):
The charitably interpreted version of it is fine. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Now again, the Batman effect entails a certain amount of
psychological distance, and Muisen also points out that we see
elements of this in adult imaginative choices. She says that,
you know, one may wish to engage with media that
offers subjectively preferred level of psychological distance from whatever your
reality might be. The example she gives is that of

(48:56):
parents wishing to avoid media in which children are 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 And 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 (49:14):
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 2 (49:37):
Yeah, an example that came to my mind reading this
article was, of course, during the height of the pandemic.
I know, a lot of us maybe chose not to
watch plague oriented media, you know, like it seemed 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, I was subjective, you know,

(49:59):
whatever 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 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

(50:20):
out of our control, and it may just be objectively
out of our control, and yet you know, we 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

(50:40):
various imaginative games. I think many video games fit this
uh and 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 that i've I've seen discussed in
past papers of I've read is the idea of too

(51:01):
of a fixed, small scale universe, you know, I mean
you think of so many different sandbox video games. There
is a 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 (51:20):
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

(51:42):
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

(52:06):
rules are not clear and maybe they're changing.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, 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 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 (52:30):
Yeah, there are clear ways to know how to play,
which in reality it's confusing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Now, transitioning out of Muissen here, she does mention embassa
in therapeutic use of tabletop role playing games, and she
references a twenty twenty two Wired article by Cam Burns
how therapists you're using tabletop games to help people? And
I was looking at that article. The author of this
Burn speaks with clinical psychiatrists Raphael Bokemazo, and in this conversation,

(53:12):
it's stressed that tabletop role playing games, and I think
this is important, they're not therapy in and 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

(53:36):
explore things like identity, mortality, gender, social skills, you know,
overcoming social anxiety and so forth.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
Yeah. Yeah, I think in the same way that like
sports are not therapy, but could in some scenarios be therapeutic.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
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

(54:12):
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

(54:33):
a nice article on Johns Hopkins University's website by Claire
Goudreau titled Tabletop Therapy, How Dungeons and Dragons can improve
mental health. This was 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

(54:57):
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

(55:18):
then you top it off with therapists assisted reflection.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
I can see that comparison as well.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
The other big thing that of course is stressed in
this article and in other places as well, is the
goal is also making therapy fun and approachable for target patients.
So generally 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

(56:04):
our feelings or our problems. We're going to play a game.
And you know, you'll find multiple examples of this where,
if not tabletop roleplaying 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 (56:18):
I wonder how this interacts with Robert. I'm sure you
know what I'm talking about. Heret 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,

(56:40):
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

(57:01):
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 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 2 (57:19):
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

(57:41):
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 in
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

(58:03):
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 (58:18):
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 2 (58:36):
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 if you're not careful,
you can let emotions run run high in those those situations. Now,

(58:58):
I've seen other studies that highlight the potent 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

(59:19):
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

(59:42):
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 All Journal of
Creativity and Mental Health, and the other one is theraprov

(01:00:04):
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 and depression.

(01:00:30):
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 some papers exploring the potential for integrative play therapy
already used for children more in adult situations, And of

(01:00:50):
course there are other play based therapy tools that are
used with adults as well, including a big one that
I completely spaced on, and that is art therapy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Oh, I'm aware that exists, but I don't really know
anything about it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
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

(01:01:25):
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

(01:01:46):
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 in 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 (01:02:07):
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

(01:02:28):
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 2 (01:02:46):
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 (01:03:03):
Yeah, play is building minds.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
There you go, that would look great on a bumper
sticker T shirt what have you.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
But all right, I guess that does do it for
the series for now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
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

(01:03:34):
pretender or observations you've made of children in your life
that are pretending or animals. Certainly we already mentioned dogs
and 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.

(01:03:56):
We do a little short form episode on Wednesdays, and
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
Huge thanks as always to our regular audio producer JJ Posway,
but also big thanks today to our guest audio producer
Andrew Howard. Thanks Andrew H. 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 (01:04:32):
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.

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