Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and we're back with part two of our series on fun.
Speaker 1: Of course, we all roughly know what fun is. You
Speaker 1: know fun when you see it, you know fun when
Speaker 1: you're having it, so you got a gut level understanding.
Speaker 1: But fun is actually rather difficult to define and to
Speaker 1: differentiate from other related concepts like pleasure, happiness, and entertainment.
Speaker 1: So we've been trying to to tease out some of
Speaker 1: the studies about fun and some observations people can make
Speaker 1: about fun and what its unique characteristics are. Now, in
Speaker 1: the last episode we talked a bit uh Rob. You
Speaker 1: had a section about what particular features make a game fun,
Speaker 1: and I thought one of the most interesting things you
Speaker 1: brought up there was the suggestion of a natural association
Speaker 1: between learning and fun, which is in a way kind
Speaker 1: of funny because you can think about very painful attempts
Speaker 1: to to make wrote learning quote fun in some way,
Speaker 1: you know, adding games in school that are of questionable
Speaker 1: fund value sometimes but that could in a way still
Speaker 1: be onto something because there may, in fact be um
Speaker 1: a major role for fun in the kind of learning
Speaker 1: that we do in a non structured way, in a
Speaker 1: non school environment, when we're just learning through free exploratory behavior. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is fascinating to think about because it made me
Speaker 1: think back, certainly on school days and at various age
Speaker 1: points and thinking like, well, when did this? When did
Speaker 1: it become fun to engage in this quest for learning?
Speaker 1: And you know, those are the learning experiences that that
Speaker 1: do tend to stand out the most. Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: similar experiences. A lot of what I remember most from
Speaker 1: school are the things that were the most fun in school. Uh.
Speaker 1: And So I wanted to talk about a paper that
Speaker 1: I came across that I found pretty interesting. I think, again,
Speaker 1: this only addresses one facet of the issue of funds
Speaker 1: is it's not going to give you a total view.
Speaker 1: But it was a really interesting child psychology paper from
Speaker 1: two thousand seven addressing the relationship between toys, fun, and
Speaker 1: a child's ability to control natural experiments. So this paper
Speaker 1: was by a couple of authors named Laura E. Schultz
Speaker 1: and Elizabeth Barreff Bonna Wits. Now for some context, I
Speaker 1: was checking out, particularly some of the other research by
Speaker 1: Laura Schultz. She actually has a a pretty good TED
Speaker 1: talk where she explains sort of the arc of her career.
Speaker 1: It's from a few years back, but Schultz is a
Speaker 1: professor of cognitive sciences at m I T and a
Speaker 1: lot of her research is focused on the question how
Speaker 1: do children learn so well? Because children are able to
Speaker 1: learn how the world works in a relatively short time,
Speaker 1: with relatively limited experiences. I mean, people often phrase this
Speaker 1: question about language in particular, I think because language acquisition
Speaker 1: is just one of the most amazing things. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's astounding, Like the way children acquire language, Like how
Speaker 1: do you learn to put together infinitely variable, grammatically functional
Speaker 1: sentences just by listening to adults talk for a few years,
Speaker 1: Like you don't even have to be taught the rules
Speaker 1: of grammar, you know, when you learn grammar in school.
Speaker 1: The grammar you're learning there is basically just an analytical
Speaker 1: tool or maybe an attempt to kind of regularize or
Speaker 1: normalize exactly the way you construct sentences. But you're you're
Speaker 1: already able to do so in a functional way, I mean,
Speaker 1: where people can understand you. Yeah, the neural plasticity of
Speaker 1: children is just absolutely amazing. I know we've we've touched
Speaker 1: on it a few times over the over the years,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's it's fascinating to learn about. It's it's
Speaker 1: mind blowing to experience in real life and real time
Speaker 1: that you sort of lose some of the mystery at
Speaker 1: times by being so close to it. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: like that they have to acquire so much data in
Speaker 1: such a short period of time. And I think another
Speaker 1: weird thing thinking about this and thinking about it too
Speaker 1: for this episode in terms of fun and also you know,
Speaker 1: talking about games and toys and the imagination, as we'll
Speaker 1: get into, is that we we live in a time
Speaker 1: now where I feel like we we definitely have more
Speaker 1: understanding of what children are and when, what they're not,
Speaker 1: and what they're doing, and that all these things have
Speaker 1: a purpose. But it's so easy to sort of fall
Speaker 1: back in this older way of thinking and look at
Speaker 1: a child playing, a child having fun, and then well,
Speaker 1: of course they having fun. They don't have anything else
Speaker 1: to do, they don't have a job. Uh, look at
Speaker 1: these look at these bumps. But this is frivolous activity, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's for some reason, it's still easy to think
Speaker 1: think that way, But of course we know better now,
Speaker 1: we know that the reality of it is that part
Speaker 1: of what makes ldren children is that they are these sponges.
Speaker 1: They are absorbing all of this information and then processing it, uh,
Speaker 1: coming to terms with it. And so a lot of
Speaker 1: the the ideas that they were discussing in this episode, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the ones that I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into are certainly not the only theories out there,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them do involve this this more
Speaker 1: nuanced vision of the child and what the child is
Speaker 1: doing in the world. Yeah, play is a child's job.
Speaker 1: It is them that they're going to school, but in
Speaker 1: an unstructured way. Play is how they not just you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: You mentioned it's important for them to gather a lot
Speaker 1: of data, and that is true. But another way of
Speaker 1: thinking about it, children are able to generalize inferences about
Speaker 1: how things work, uh, with way less data than you
Speaker 1: would expect to say, a computer to need a certain
Speaker 1: kind of program to need in order to learn how
Speaker 1: something works. So how do children make such powerful general inferences?
Speaker 1: How do they figure out rules about how the world
Speaker 1: works on the basis of so little experience? I think
Speaker 1: play is a big part of this um and so
Speaker 1: the paper I wanted to look at again. This is
Speaker 1: by Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonowitz. It's called
Speaker 1: serious fun. Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence
Speaker 1: is confounded. This was published in the journal Developmental Psychology
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand seven. And this study looks
Speaker 1: at a concept that it calls causal knowledge, meaning an
Speaker 1: understanding of cause and effect relationships in the environment. Another
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it is just understanding how things work. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously a major part of child development is this formation
Speaker 1: of general causal knowledge. Learning that if you set a
Speaker 1: spherical object down on a table and you let go
Speaker 1: of it, it can roll off the edge, or learning
Speaker 1: that if you turn a door knob it will open
Speaker 1: a door, or learning that if you pet the cat
Speaker 1: too roughly, the cat might hiss and scratch you. The
Speaker 1: world is full of these cause and effect relationships, and
Speaker 1: to learn how the world works, you have to not
Speaker 1: only learn, but you have to learn how to learn.
Speaker 1: You have to, to some extent, understand when a relationship
Speaker 1: between two events that you observe is causal and when
Speaker 1: that relationship is just random or safe to ignore. So
Speaker 1: you have to learn how to tell the difference between Okay,
Speaker 1: I pet the cat too rough and it gets angry.
Speaker 1: That's clearly causal, Like that not being gentle with the
Speaker 1: cat is what made it angry versus, oh, I'm plucking
Speaker 1: at the carpet and then a bird lands on the
Speaker 1: window sill. Somehow a child usually figures out that that
Speaker 1: is not actually causal, that's just random. So how does
Speaker 1: a young child master all of this complex inference? Uh?
Speaker 1: I think I was just thinking about this, and I
Speaker 1: think some inference might be helped along by maybe instinctive
Speaker 1: heuristics like physical proximity, like how close is what I
Speaker 1: did to the effect that it might have produce boost?
Speaker 1: Are they physically connected in some way that I can see? Obviously,
Speaker 1: this wouldn't always be the case, especially in a world
Speaker 1: full of you know, remote electronics and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but that would help a little bit. Another way of
Speaker 1: sifting through inferences to separate the good from the bad
Speaker 1: is just by repeating experiments. Whatever you just did, do
Speaker 1: it again and see if the same result happens. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is useful in in actual scientific experiments. You know,
Speaker 1: you want to repeat experiments to see if you get
Speaker 1: the same result. But you can observe children naturally doing
Speaker 1: this all the time. They'll do something and look for
Speaker 1: a result, and then they'll do it again, and they'll
Speaker 1: do it again. Of course, in general, children just love repetition. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and you might you might plausibly argue that there's a
Speaker 1: kind of built in science module in in the child's brain.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not going to be as refined as
Speaker 1: a as a carefully scrutinized scientific method planned by adults,
Speaker 1: But you could say that there's some kind of instinct
Speaker 1: for repetition that might be based on the fact that
Speaker 1: repeating experiments gets you better data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that's what's going on when when generally, if there's something funny,
Speaker 1: I've noticed that with with kids, like they figured out
Speaker 1: a joke that works, whether they're going to keep telling
Speaker 1: that joke, keep telling that joke, and then I guess
Speaker 1: part of the learning experiment is realizing like how far
Speaker 1: how many times can you tell about joke and it's
Speaker 1: still elicits a response, Uh, what are the hard limits
Speaker 1: to it? So the authors of this developmental psychology paper
Speaker 1: are talking about children's acquisition of causal knowledge, and they
Speaker 1: write that since basically since Jean Pig, psychologists have mostly
Speaker 1: accepted that children construct their causal model of the world
Speaker 1: through exploratory play, like this is not something having. Having
Speaker 1: causal knowledge is not usually something that has to be
Speaker 1: explicitly taught by adults, though and of course in some
Speaker 1: limited cases it can be. And it's not something that
Speaker 1: just comes was fully built in hardwired instinct. It's something
Speaker 1: that children learn through experimenting with the world on their own.
Speaker 1: So under this model, a major function of play is learning,
Speaker 1: specifically learning to predict cause and effect relationships in the world. Now,
Speaker 1: if this model is true, you would expect to see
Speaker 1: evidence of that if you just observe the natural patterns
Speaker 1: of exploratory play behavior in children. And the authors isolate
Speaker 1: one major finding which does seem to back up this
Speaker 1: model of the acquisition of causal knowledge, and that is
Speaker 1: children's preference for novel stimuli. So the authors don't phrase
Speaker 1: it this way, but just my interpretation, I think it
Speaker 1: would connect to the idea of like, why do children
Speaker 1: want a new toy when they already have toys at home?
Speaker 1: I think you could argue that, at least in part
Speaker 1: This could be because they already know how the old
Speaker 1: toy works. They've used it in a hundred different ways.
Speaker 1: They've figured out all the different things that it can
Speaker 1: do and what it does when you do different things
Speaker 1: to it, And a new toy provides opportunities to learn
Speaker 1: new things about something else, something different. Yeah, this of
Speaker 1: course is frequently a parental comment about the ephemeral interest
Speaker 1: in toys. Right, you get the fancy new toy, it's
Speaker 1: played with for a day and then it's on the floor,
Speaker 1: and then we quite hypocritically, will say well, why aren't
Speaker 1: you still playing with that toy? And if if the
Speaker 1: child was savvy, they might say, well, you have top
Speaker 1: Gun on VHS. Why aren't you still watching that? Why
Speaker 1: did you stop watching that movie? Why isn't that you
Speaker 1: just go to movie? You like to watch movies, you
Speaker 1: own one, watch it? Um, you know, we're we're not
Speaker 1: that that different in that regard. Another big one, of course,
Speaker 1: is there's the there's the old toy versus new toy.
Speaker 1: But it's something that's always more interesting other kids toys.
Speaker 1: Whenever you take the child out, then you're you're I
Speaker 1: don't know, you're a friend's house. Or or at a
Speaker 1: park and somebody's brought a toy like the toy of
Speaker 1: the other child is instantly interesting for this very reason
Speaker 1: because it is the new toy. It is the novel toy. Well,
Speaker 1: that seems like it might have a double appeal because
Speaker 1: not only is it novel, so it has the appeal
Speaker 1: that all new things do, but it also has been
Speaker 1: sort of pre vetted, like if some other kid is
Speaker 1: playing with it, that shows like, okay, there probably is
Speaker 1: something good about this toy and it would be worth
Speaker 1: my time, right and yeah, and then also there's the
Speaker 1: social dynamics of this thing is also desired, and ownership
Speaker 1: maybe up in the air on it. But this is
Speaker 1: all fascinating thinking about about something about the novel factor here,
Speaker 1: because once again makes us think of fun and uh
Speaker 1: and the idea of learning from the last episode. So
Speaker 1: even if you're just thinking about an object right like
Speaker 1: it's there's something even if it's just a tactile experience,
Speaker 1: you're interested in in what does it feel like, what
Speaker 1: happens when I throw it against a wall, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: of course all of this reminds me once more about
Speaker 1: the connection that we're looking at between fun and learning, right,
Speaker 1: because this paper is looking at a connection between learning
Speaker 1: and exploratory play behavior. This is beyond the scope of
Speaker 1: the paper itself, but I think it is a totally
Speaker 1: reasonable inference to believe that the primary intrinsic motivating factor
Speaker 1: driving exploratory play is fun. So like fun is the
Speaker 1: is the wages that are paid for the work of play? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thinking of a biblical parallelism, is the wages the
Speaker 1: wages of play is fun. It's gonna be the singular,
Speaker 1: is right. Yeah. But anyway, so coming back to the
Speaker 1: author's introduction on this paper, they say, you know, at
Speaker 1: the time this paper was written, there was actually not
Speaker 1: a whole lot of evidence for consistent patterns that have
Speaker 1: been observed in the exploratory behavior of children. Uh, And
Speaker 1: so they're they're going to uh study one pattern in
Speaker 1: this experiment they're setting up. But as as preface to that,
Speaker 1: they write, quote moreover, considerable research suggests that even older
Speaker 1: children and naive adults are poor designing causally informative experiments
Speaker 1: and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would
Speaker 1: support or undermine causal hypotheses. And then they cite a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of studies to back up this assertion. Um.
Speaker 1: They write, quote, such findings pose a challenge for the
Speaker 1: constructivist account. The number of events children might explore in
Speaker 1: principle is vastly greater than the number of events they
Speaker 1: can explore in practice. If children's exploratory play is largely unsystematic,
Speaker 1: how might they generate the type of evidence that could
Speaker 1: support efficient causal learning. So this is a really interesting paradox.
Speaker 1: It seems very likely that children learn causal knowledge by
Speaker 1: exploratory play, and yet children don't seem by and large
Speaker 1: to be very good at designing causally informative experiments like
Speaker 1: that they they have double separating out variables and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Nevertheless, children might have some instincts about how
Speaker 1: to sift some different types of evidence. Uh and the
Speaker 1: authors hypothesized that exploratory playing children might not only be
Speaker 1: drawn toward novelty such as here's a new toy or
Speaker 1: two perceptual complexity, but also to what they call the
Speaker 1: quality of evidence. They observe that there might be a
Speaker 1: relationship between a child's desire to play with something and
Speaker 1: what type of evidence they are getting from it or
Speaker 1: have already gotten from it. Maybe even young children who
Speaker 1: are not so great at designing experiments can in in
Speaker 1: some senses, tell the difference between informative evidence and uninformative evidence.
Speaker 1: They can make predictions based on those differences, and they're
Speaker 1: driven to continue playing based on those differences. So what
Speaker 1: would be the experiment to test this? Well, they tried
Speaker 1: this out on a group of sixty four preschoolers between
Speaker 1: forty eight and seventy months of age. This was an
Speaker 1: experiment staged at a at a children's museum, and the
Speaker 1: experiment goes like this. You've got a special toy built
Speaker 1: for the experiment, and the toy takes the form of
Speaker 1: a box with a slot at the top and two
Speaker 1: levers on the sides. In reality, each lever when you
Speaker 1: press it causes one of two different figures to pop
Speaker 1: up out of the slot at the top of the box.
Speaker 1: There's a puppet figure operated by one lever and a
Speaker 1: little duck operated by a different lever. Now, there were
Speaker 1: several experimental conditions. One was what they called the confounded
Speaker 1: evidence condition UH, and the others were all three different
Speaker 1: types of unconfounded evidence conditions. The difference being that in
Speaker 1: the unconfounded conditions, the child would one way or another
Speaker 1: get to witness or experience unambiguous evidence of how the
Speaker 1: box worked, so they would see the levers being operated
Speaker 1: separately and they would figure out which lever may which
Speaker 1: little figure pop up. But in the confounded condition there
Speaker 1: would be unresolved ambiguity after their initial experience with the box,
Speaker 1: so the difference was that like in the unconfounded conditions, UH,
Speaker 1: there would be a procedure where the child and an
Speaker 1: adult experiment or would count to three and then each
Speaker 1: press a lever at the same time, and then after
Speaker 1: that they would take turns counting to three and pressing
Speaker 1: or operating one or the other lever independently for a
Speaker 1: total of three presses, but in the end the child
Speaker 1: would get to see how what each one did. In
Speaker 1: the confounded condition, the child and the experiment or would
Speaker 1: always each press their lever at the same time on
Speaker 1: the count of three, so it would never be clear
Speaker 1: to the child which lever did what. Either lever could
Speaker 1: operate each of the figures, or one lever could operate
Speaker 1: both of them, or maybe both levers had to be
Speaker 1: pressed at the same time to make them pop up.
Speaker 1: There would be no way to know bay st on
Speaker 1: pressing them at the same time as the experiment er anyway,
Speaker 1: So you have these different conditions, and then at the
Speaker 1: end of each one, the experimenter would walk away and
Speaker 1: tell the child it was okay for them to play
Speaker 1: with whatever they wanted. And so then they had the
Speaker 1: option to keep playing with the box from the procedure
Speaker 1: or reach for a novel box that was also within
Speaker 1: arms reach that hadn't been part of the experiment yet.
Speaker 1: So what did they find. Well, the previous findings from
Speaker 1: other studies about children's preferences for novelty came through. The
Speaker 1: kids very often reached for and spent more time playing
Speaker 1: with the new toy instead of the toy they had
Speaker 1: already played with. But whether or not there was lingering
Speaker 1: causal ambiguity about the original box made a big difference.
Speaker 1: In the unconfounded conditions, where it was clear how the
Speaker 1: box worked, they spent more time playing with the novel toy,
Speaker 1: but in the confounded condition, where the original toy remained
Speaker 1: a mystery, they spent more time playing with the original
Speaker 1: box that they had already played with, And this suggests
Speaker 1: that a lack of good evidence about how an object
Speaker 1: works is a strong motivating factor driving children towards spending
Speaker 1: time in exploratory play with that object, and in some way,
Speaker 1: most children can tell when the evidence that they're aware
Speaker 1: of is sufficient to understand the workings of the box
Speaker 1: or not. Now, there was one funny little note in
Speaker 1: their results section where they write that in the confounded
Speaker 1: condition where the child hadn't been able to see the
Speaker 1: levers operated independently, so didn't know how it worked. Um,
Speaker 1: they write quote, in the course of their free play
Speaker 1: with the familiar box, children often manipulated the levers simultaneously critically. However,
Speaker 1: twelve of the sixteen children or seven also manipulated each
Speaker 1: lever separately, fully disambiguating the evidence. So I thought that
Speaker 1: was funny that they would they would be curious about Okay,
Speaker 1: there would I'm part of them would know I haven't
Speaker 1: yet figured out how this box works. And yet what
Speaker 1: they would do when they got hold of it often
Speaker 1: was initially repeat the same thing that they had already
Speaker 1: seen happen, which is pressing both lovers at the same time,
Speaker 1: which doesn't tell you anything more than they already learned.
Speaker 1: So like like they know that something's wrong, but they
Speaker 1: don't always immediately figure out how to disambiguate the confounded evidence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is fascinating and made me made me think of
Speaker 1: like just of course, just sort of basic toy interactions
Speaker 1: like it made me think for some reason of the panic, Pete.
Speaker 1: Did you do you remember the panic Pete? I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: not yet. Describe it to me. A little pink, sort
Speaker 1: of limbless clown from outer space, and if you squeeze him,
Speaker 1: then the red balls that are in his nose and
Speaker 1: at your holes pop out, and also the blue eyes
Speaker 1: of his the blue balls of his eye sockets. Yes,
Speaker 1: I understand, Panic Pete. Now I seem to recall a
Speaker 1: scene in Jurassic Park where Wayne Knight squeezing one of these,
Speaker 1: chatting with Mr Hammond. Right, Oh, you may be right.
Speaker 1: I forgot about that, but yeah, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: one of these things where if you if you bust
Speaker 1: out this toy in front of a child and you
Speaker 1: squeeze it, you know what the child is going to
Speaker 1: want to do. The child needs to squeeze that toy
Speaker 1: as well to witness this, to to to to to
Speaker 1: have the feeling of of being the the individual in
Speaker 1: power over the pete doll uh and then it's and
Speaker 1: then of course this would not be a treasured toy
Speaker 1: for all eternity. They would squeeze it, however, many many times,
Speaker 1: and then you abandon it because it's it's been used.
Speaker 1: Panic pete has fulfilled all your curiosity. And even as
Speaker 1: a an adult, like that would basically be your experience
Speaker 1: with a panic pete. Um someone gave you one, you
Speaker 1: would be like, Okay, I'll squeeze this a few times. Interesting,
Speaker 1: I have now consumed all of the necessary data, and
Speaker 1: I may set the panic pete aside, well, even thinking
Speaker 1: about like seeing somebody else squeeze the panic pete and
Speaker 1: then um, wanting to squeeze it yourself. I mean, I
Speaker 1: do think there is there are some interesting mysteries that
Speaker 1: like could fill the child's mind before they get a
Speaker 1: chance to try it out, which is like, Okay, would
Speaker 1: just squeezing it normally make it make the eyes pop
Speaker 1: out and the ears pop out and everything? Or do
Speaker 1: I need to squeeze it a special way? Is it
Speaker 1: possible I could squeeze it and it wouldn't work? And
Speaker 1: then what would I need to figure out how to do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Could I what if I have pushed the eyeballs in
Speaker 1: while squeezing the body, what would that do? You know?
Speaker 1: They're all these these sort of different ways. It's almost
Speaker 1: like a you know, sort of a play testing on it,
Speaker 1: you know, like like what what are the what are
Speaker 1: the limits of the design? How can I sort of
Speaker 1: break the design? Like children want to do that naturally?
Speaker 1: And I mean that's one of the ways that toys
Speaker 1: get broken because the child doesn't doesn't know the limits
Speaker 1: of the design. Yet that's a great point. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: play the toy is often played to extinction. Uh, and
Speaker 1: the you know, they like the bounds of science go
Speaker 1: too far out, like only an adult would say, well,
Speaker 1: don't squeeze panic pe too much. Um, if we wanted
Speaker 1: to look good on the shelf. No, no, it's not
Speaker 1: the child play. But so anyway, to come back to
Speaker 1: the study, it's I think this result is really interesting
Speaker 1: that children seem to be more motivated to play with
Speaker 1: a familiar object if they haven't yet been given evidence
Speaker 1: of how all the different parts of that object work.
Speaker 1: And this appears true, so they can figure out some
Speaker 1: things about what the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence is.
Speaker 1: At the same time, there are all these findings that
Speaker 1: suggest that children have at least poor metacognitive ability to
Speaker 1: design experiments and explain concepts like confounded evidence, and yet
Speaker 1: at some gut level they do they are able to
Speaker 1: make stuff like that work in practice. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: author's right quote, the exploratory play of even very young
Speaker 1: children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry.
Speaker 1: And so, of course, coming back to the idea of
Speaker 1: what is the intrinsic motivation driving most exploratory play, I
Speaker 1: would say overwhelmingly it is fun. So I think this
Speaker 1: is a really interesting piece of evidence that not only
Speaker 1: is fun in young children, probably related to learning how
Speaker 1: things work. A sense of fun can be generated to
Speaker 1: some extent by making the evidence of how something works
Speaker 1: remain obscure or ambiguous. And this reminds me of play
Speaker 1: patterns I remember from my own childhood, when, like, especially
Speaker 1: with certain kinds of electronic toys. You know, like a
Speaker 1: toy that would play one of a number of horribly
Speaker 1: annoying prerecorded sounds or sayings, um, if it would just
Speaker 1: play them in the same orders, like you could cycle
Speaker 1: through them and they'd always be in the same order.
Speaker 1: Instead of randomized. I remember being kind of disappointed once
Speaker 1: I realized that I knew the whole cycle of sounds
Speaker 1: by heart, and this kind of meant the fun was over.
Speaker 1: Like I'd figure it out and they'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: kind of satisfying feeling, and then it's like, well, this
Speaker 1: toy is dead now. Uh, you know it's all It's
Speaker 1: like the feeling of fun I got from pressing the
Speaker 1: button and making the noise was part of a drive
Speaker 1: for discovery of causal knowledge, and once I had the
Speaker 1: knowledge firmly in hand, there was not much more fun
Speaker 1: to be had with that thing, except maybe by making
Speaker 1: other people react to it. M interesting. Yeah, yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I think back on on my own play patterns. I
Speaker 1: remember like G I Joe figures, the old G I
Speaker 1: Joe figures, and I remember reaching a point where it was,
Speaker 1: you know, I did a lot of imagination play with them,
Speaker 1: but also got to the point where, oh, I have
Speaker 1: this tiny screwdriver, and so now I can take them
Speaker 1: all apart, and I can put them together in different ways,
Speaker 1: and of course you end up with just a tub
Speaker 1: of parts and a few assembled uh the soldiers, and
Speaker 1: I see pretty much it's a very similar thing with
Speaker 1: with my son's a lego obsession is you know, he'll
Speaker 1: he'll build the thing. Uh, he'll make his own changes
Speaker 1: to it. If it's particularly special, it may live on
Speaker 1: a shelf and and sort of have its shelf life
Speaker 1: as being a decoration. But generally, even if it's on
Speaker 1: the shelf, it may be stripped for parts to create
Speaker 1: some new thing. And so you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: easy for me to come in and be like, well,
Speaker 1: what happened to this thing about now it's pieces um,
Speaker 1: but like that's part of the process, that's part of
Speaker 1: playing with it. It's the one once you've built it
Speaker 1: and played with a little bit, it's no longer novel.
Speaker 1: It's let's move on to the creation of the next thing.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I thought that study was very interesting and
Speaker 1: though this is beyond the scope of it, it also
Speaker 1: makes me think about the link, even in adults, between
Speaker 1: fun and concepts like surprise and mystery. I think there's
Speaker 1: often a strong connection there. Yeah, yeah, that like anything
Speaker 1: you would you know, any kind of you know, movie,
Speaker 1: you're watching, book, you're reading, whatever that has like a
Speaker 1: sense of surprise or mystery in it. In a way,
Speaker 1: that's sort of keeping you in the fun spirit, even
Speaker 1: like a childhood with a novel toy, because you haven't
Speaker 1: yet figured out all the mechanics, like it's not clear
Speaker 1: how it works. Yeah, I mean, dude, to come back
Speaker 1: to video games, for example, I mean, there's there's completing
Speaker 1: the game, right, there's completing the story. There's there's also
Speaker 1: finding the easter eggs, finding the hidden things in it
Speaker 1: um and then perhaps getting into the glitches, finding ways,
Speaker 1: figuring out where the seams are, where the imperfections are,
Speaker 1: and whatever your level. Like, it's it's ultimately all about
Speaker 1: figuring out the thing, understanding the thing, learning the thing.
Speaker 1: Now on the subject of fun and toys there you know,
Speaker 1: there's of course that additional layer of the imagination we've
Speaker 1: alluded to already. You know, it's one thing to figure
Speaker 1: out the physical properties of say a stuffed teddy bear
Speaker 1: and how it interacts with the world. Very young children
Speaker 1: often seem kind of limb into this. You know, you
Speaker 1: hand them the stuff bear and what do they do. Well,
Speaker 1: they throw the bear against the wall, where they throw
Speaker 1: the bear across the car, and then you hand it
Speaker 1: back to them and they do it again. It's just
Speaker 1: endless fun. Um. And if you were I and if
Speaker 1: you're expecting a child like that to spend more time
Speaker 1: snuggling the bear or or or giving the bear a
Speaker 1: little picnic, you might be disappointed because nothing is as
Speaker 1: fun as throwing the bear against the wall. But I mean,
Speaker 1: let's you know, let's not under I mean, throwing is fun.
Speaker 1: I like throwing too, Yeah, yeah, And of course it's
Speaker 1: in a social engagement like this too. You're also you're
Speaker 1: not just playing with the bear, You're also playing with
Speaker 1: the adult. You're getting a rise out of the adult,
Speaker 1: like they're running to get it. It's a big fun
Speaker 1: right in a way the other person there is also
Speaker 1: the toy, right. But but then there is the level
Speaker 1: of the teddy bears picnic. There's the level of of
Speaker 1: teddy bears battling each other, battling of their stuffed animals. Um,
Speaker 1: the various battles, discoveries, adventures that toys may go on.
Speaker 1: And so there's a whole domain fun and with toys,
Speaker 1: and certainly even fun without physical totems as well, that
Speaker 1: I think we might well consider fun. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's fun to engage your imagination in these scenarios
Speaker 1: and um, and these aren't really games per se. Like
Speaker 1: if teddy bears are having a picnic, unless the child
Speaker 1: I don't know has a has just a very gifted
Speaker 1: mind for game design, there's probably not a game mechanic
Speaker 1: to what's going on. Likewise, if teddy bears are battling
Speaker 1: each other or action figures are exploding all over the
Speaker 1: living room, right. And in fact, I would say children
Speaker 1: often have very poor instincts about how to design a
Speaker 1: fun game. Oh good god, yes, I've occasionally there will
Speaker 1: be a game that has been designed and I'll be
Speaker 1: asked to play it, and um, I mean it's great,
Speaker 1: it's great that the mind is already going there. But
Speaker 1: you know, early game design is often a bit clunky,
Speaker 1: So they have better examples than than than I feel
Speaker 1: like I did as a kid. Like I remember designing
Speaker 1: horrible games as a as a child out but I
Speaker 1: had horrible examples to go off off for the most part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So these activities, you know, they're not really games again,
Speaker 1: they lack any uh, you know, rule structure. Instead, they
Speaker 1: seem to be orchestrated dramas of the mind that use
Speaker 1: physical totems and idols. And this is interesting because, unlike
Speaker 1: some of the previous examples, it seems at least like
Speaker 1: there's less of a firm connection to learning, right, at
Speaker 1: least at first it may seem that way because what
Speaker 1: is being learned at the Teddy Bears picnic? You already
Speaker 1: know what the bear is. You're not unlocking some mystery
Speaker 1: of the object, right. Uh, it's But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: if it's not learning as fun than what's going on here,
Speaker 1: why is the child doing it? This child who again
Speaker 1: is this sponge that has to take in all of
Speaker 1: this data about the world and and and essentially a
Speaker 1: form an adult mind out of it all. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I see what you're saying about that. Even though
Speaker 1: it's harder to see exactly how imagination plays about learning,
Speaker 1: I would probably liken it too. You know, the difference
Speaker 1: between imagination play and playing with the physical object like
Speaker 1: a toy that has mechanics is kind of the difference
Speaker 1: between a thought experiment and a physical experiment. A thought
Speaker 1: experiment can still be informative, it's just it's just an
Speaker 1: informative in a looser way, like it relies on you
Speaker 1: having good intuitions about what's plausible and what would happen
Speaker 1: without checking against the laws of physics. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: I think that does get to some of what seems
Speaker 1: to be going on here. And now I want to
Speaker 1: drive home that we're not doing an exhaustive look at
Speaker 1: imagination play here. There's a lot of scholarship out there
Speaker 1: about imagination play and early childhood learning. But so I'm
Speaker 1: just essentially carving out like a few thoughts on this
Speaker 1: here that I think play well with what we've been
Speaker 1: discussing in these these fun episodes. But in the context
Speaker 1: of humor on the past episod oades of stuff to
Speaker 1: bow your mind, we've discussed incongruity theory before, or more
Speaker 1: formally and clearly, incongruity resolution theory. Some incongruity in the
Speaker 1: world is observed, and by resolving it, and if we're
Speaker 1: talking about humor, we're talking about cracking a joke or
Speaker 1: you know, or or engaging with humor of some kind,
Speaker 1: we reduce the tension that that incongruity created, and in
Speaker 1: doing so we release a feeling of joy. Just a
Speaker 1: quick reminder that in that uh, fun, fun, fun study
Speaker 1: that we talked about in the previous episode where people
Speaker 1: were asked to remember a fun situation and then later
Speaker 1: circle all of the words that described it accurately. The
Speaker 1: number one word circled was happiness or happy, but the
Speaker 1: number two was laughing. So there's clearly a strong natural
Speaker 1: association people have between the idea of fun and between
Speaker 1: and humor. Yeah. Yeah, So it would be natural that
Speaker 1: there would be some overlap between these these areas of study.
Speaker 1: So in particular this time around that I was looking
Speaker 1: at a book by by Dorothy G. And Jerome L.
Speaker 1: Singer from two thousand nine titled The House of Make
Speaker 1: Believe that I thought, that's some insightful content in it.
Speaker 1: One quote from the book here quote playful interactions between
Speaker 1: self and others, or in the case of pure fantasy,
Speaker 1: play self and symbolic others, or between self and objects
Speaker 1: usually results in a somewhat reduced level of novelty or
Speaker 1: incongruity that evokes joy. So the idea of tackling novelty
Speaker 1: here this is This is interesting because it does seem
Speaker 1: like more we focus on in these episodes, seems like
Speaker 1: we're driven to understand something to the point of making
Speaker 1: it mundane, where like, give me that novelty. So I
Speaker 1: can destroy all of its allure, and once the allure
Speaker 1: has been drained from it, then I will discard it,
Speaker 1: or I'll put it on the shelf, etcetera. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like I want to suck all of the fun out
Speaker 1: of this thing and make it not fun anymore in
Speaker 1: the process, Like the fund is almost a you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not actually a physical abstance in the object,
Speaker 1: but it might as well be. And once you have
Speaker 1: drained it by extracting all of the novel information that
Speaker 1: you can get from it, you've done all the experiments
Speaker 1: you can. Now you've taken the fun and it's gone right.
Speaker 1: So it's easy to understand that with the object like
Speaker 1: the panic pete. You know, you squeeze it, squeeze it
Speaker 1: until it's not no longer fun anymore than you get
Speaker 1: rid of it. But the world is full of novel
Speaker 1: and incongruous things, situations, feelings and more. Um So these
Speaker 1: are all things that the child has to has to
Speaker 1: has to make sense of and to process. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of data coming in and they get has to
Speaker 1: deal with it. Uh So this is just one theory, naturally,
Speaker 1: but the idea here is that examples of imagination play
Speaker 1: dip into the world of simulation and control of incongruous
Speaker 1: realities that help us help better prepare us for those realities.
Speaker 1: And the control factor is key here as well, because
Speaker 1: we're generally considering incong reality in the adult world that
Speaker 1: children certainly have no control over. Like there's something there's
Speaker 1: something strange in the adult world that you don't fully understand, um,
Speaker 1: and you certainly don't have control over it. But then
Speaker 1: by engaging in imaginative play, you sort of create a
Speaker 1: model of it, a model of what might be going
Speaker 1: on or what you've come to understand is going on,
Speaker 1: and and it's one that you can control and manipulate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot of the imaginative play behaviors
Speaker 1: of children are uh, creating and trying to mimic scenarios
Speaker 1: that they would have observed in the adult world, either
Speaker 1: you know, in person or in media some way that
Speaker 1: they don't fully understand that they partially but don't fully understand,
Speaker 1: and trying to act it out or imagine it out
Speaker 1: maybe too somehow better grasp how it works. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they The authors here also point out citing Diana Schmuckler's work.
Speaker 1: They point out that brief story, be they real stories
Speaker 1: or fictions or myths, etcetera. They assist children in the
Speaker 1: creation of schemas or scripts, which, when matched with previously
Speaker 1: formed schemes or scripts, can help to reduce fear or
Speaker 1: confusion brought on by novelty and incongruity in the world.
Speaker 1: And I found that really interesting because it reminds me
Speaker 1: of a lot a lot of what what I would
Speaker 1: hear as a parent, especially early on with our son
Speaker 1: hearing uh, like the doctor asked about imagination play, and like, well,
Speaker 1: what is the imagination play consists of? And so forth
Speaker 1: and and and certainly parents can think of all sorts
Speaker 1: of strange or in hilarious examples of this too. It's
Speaker 1: not just a situation where the children are going to
Speaker 1: just carry out the same story over and over again
Speaker 1: that they've heard. No, there will be tweaks, there will
Speaker 1: be changes, and and in to to the parents mind,
Speaker 1: it might be strange like, okay, you're doing you're reenacting
Speaker 1: this battle from our wars, but the Pokemon are here
Speaker 1: as well, and of course they're just you know, or
Speaker 1: they're probably better examples of that, and probably more like
Speaker 1: sort of personally poignant examples of that. But it's the
Speaker 1: taking of these scripts, these schemes, and combining them with
Speaker 1: other schemas, putting twists on them, and and and then control.
Speaker 1: It's like little thought experiments carried out over and over again.
Speaker 1: And I think sometimes it's observed where like there'll be
Speaker 1: something like a death, and a child will take death
Speaker 1: and introduce death into the imagination play of a given scenario,
Speaker 1: and like that's clearly a part of processing what this means. Like,
Speaker 1: here's this this huge, um alarming, potentially traumatizing thing that happens,
Speaker 1: and and you know, perhaps you haven't been been that
Speaker 1: well prepared for it. Where can you test that out?
Speaker 1: Where can you process that? Where can you take some
Speaker 1: of the edge off of that? But in play, introducing
Speaker 1: the unfamiliar into the play makes it fun, It keeps
Speaker 1: it fun. Yeah, Yeah, that's another That's that's another important
Speaker 1: thing to think about. Like there's this we're drawn to novelty. Well,
Speaker 1: if you begin to employ your imagination, you can keep
Speaker 1: making something novel. You can keep interjecting the injecting the
Speaker 1: novel into the scenario, into the into the toy itself,
Speaker 1: even and the game that reminds me to coming back
Speaker 1: to games. Uh, like, what is what? What do you
Speaker 1: do when you have a successful game that resonates with people? Well,
Speaker 1: it's you gotta bust out some some DLC, right, You
Speaker 1: gotta bust out some expansions for your board game. You
Speaker 1: gotta bust out eventually a sequel, and you you you
Speaker 1: stay true to some extent, but you add new features,
Speaker 1: You add new you make the familiar novel again, and
Speaker 1: that's the key to success. Well, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: about the ways that when I was a kid, we
Speaker 1: would take a familiar game with physically familiar mechanics such
Speaker 1: as Tag and just sort of skin it over with
Speaker 1: we are these characters chasing each other, you know, we're
Speaker 1: from this movie or and and it would change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're still going chase, but it takes on this different
Speaker 1: imaginative dimension. I wonder, I wonder if anybody's ever experimented
Speaker 1: with this, you know, kids playing a common game like
Speaker 1: Tag or something and trying out. Okay, now if you
Speaker 1: imagine yourself as these characters while playing, does it change
Speaker 1: the way they play the game? Do they do anything
Speaker 1: physically different? Oh? I bet I I'm almost certain they
Speaker 1: do especially if if it involves really embodying certain characters
Speaker 1: or animals. I've certainly observed kids playing tag where they'll yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all going to be cats and dogs, and it
Speaker 1: does seem to change the way that they play. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's a little frightening because they're like, oh man, they're
Speaker 1: really really acting like animals out there. Anyway, I think
Speaker 1: I think it's all interesting to think about. But again
Speaker 1: I want to drive home that that obviously early childhood
Speaker 1: development and childhood learning again huge field, lots of work
Speaker 1: within those fields. We're only looking at a few examples here,
Speaker 1: so please don't take anything we're saying here. It's like
Speaker 1: this is this is the golden and uh and only
Speaker 1: truth concerning childhood play and imagination, et cetera. All right, well,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we're gonna need to call part two
Speaker 1: of our series on fun there. We may in fact
Speaker 1: be back with the part three. Well, we'll leave that
Speaker 1: as a surprise for you. You've got to figure out
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Speaker 1: of time, right That podcast feed, by the way, is
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Speaker 1: where you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
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Speaker 1: short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
Speaker 1: do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
Speaker 1: most serious concerns and just talk about a fun and
Speaker 1: weird film. Huch. Thanks as always to our excellent audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
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Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
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