Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's
Speaker 1: Saturday Fault episode coming at you. Pretend Play Part four.
Speaker 1: It's that simple. This was part four of five and
Speaker 1: it originally published one one, twenty twenty five. Let's have it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And today we returned the
Speaker 3: fourth installment in our discussion of pretend play, play that
Speaker 3: involves non literal action and understanding. So when I pretend
Speaker 3: my fingers are worms crawling up the side of the couch,
Speaker 3: that's going on in our house this week, by the way,
Speaker 3: fingers are worms. Or when I pretend a cardboard box
Speaker 3: becomes the castle grace skull, or when I change the
Speaker 3: diaper on a stuffed velociraptor, or if I go on
Speaker 3: adventures in the backyard with an imaginary friend. These are
Speaker 3: all forms of pretend play play that takes place within
Speaker 3: a pretend frame and treats anything in the world or
Speaker 3: in the situation as other than what it literally is. Now,
Speaker 3: if you haven't heard the previous parts in this series,
Speaker 3: I think This is one where we really would recommend
Speaker 3: listening in order. We're going to be building on some
Speaker 3: conversations we had in previous episodes today, but in those
Speaker 3: previous installments to refresh, we talked about ways that researchers
Speaker 3: define and subdivide pretend play into activities like object substitution.
Speaker 3: So one of our favorite examples is banana is a telephone.
Speaker 3: They talk about that a lot in the research enactment
Speaker 3: play where you Might be. You know, I am cooking
Speaker 3: dinner in my play Kitchen replica, play where you have
Speaker 3: my toy Triceratops is cooking dinner in the dollhouse, imaginary companions,
Speaker 3: and other things. We talked about possible links explored in
Speaker 3: the research between pretend play and the development of advanced
Speaker 3: cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind,
Speaker 3: addressing the question of whether pretending might help children develop
Speaker 3: some of those important faculties, or at least whether pretending
Speaker 3: in those faculties might draw on the same underlying neural structures.
Speaker 3: In Part two, we talked in more depth about research
Speaker 3: on imaginary friends and imaginary companions, how often they manifest
Speaker 3: within and across different cultures, what forms they take, what
Speaker 3: children believe they know, and things like that. In the
Speaker 3: most recent episode, we looked more at the question of
Speaker 3: how adult culture influences pretend play among children, noting that
Speaker 3: while pretending does appear to be basically universal, there is
Speaker 3: pretty wide variation in how much children play pretend and
Speaker 3: in the themes of the pretend play in some particular cases,
Speaker 3: in the framing of whether pretend entities are understood as
Speaker 3: real in some important way or not. And then last
Speaker 3: time we also examined the fascinating phenomenon of paracosms, essentially
Speaker 3: extending the concept of an imaginary friend to where it
Speaker 3: is not only a single character or playmate, but an
Speaker 3: entire imaginary world, maybe with its own geography, culture, populations,
Speaker 3: and rules. And we discussed links between a childhood tendency
Speaker 3: to generate paracosms and things like creativity in later life.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and I have a paracosm update here. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 1: because after we'd record this, I realized, well, my child
Speaker 1: is twelve and almost thirteen, which places them toward the
Speaker 1: end of what is broadly considered the paracosm period for kids.
Speaker 1: So I asked them the next morning over breakfast. I
Speaker 1: was like, I know, you had some pretend worlds and
Speaker 1: or have pretend worlds that you sometimes in Gaine with
Speaker 1: other friends. Tell me about them, and so they laid
Speaker 1: it all out for me. They said, there are two
Speaker 1: pretend worlds, both of them social in nature, that they
Speaker 1: shared with one particular other friend. So one of these
Speaker 1: with one friend is essentially an extrapolation of Star Wars.
Speaker 1: They said. It's different planets set in the Old Republic
Speaker 1: era on which Jedis have adventures. Okay, which I think
Speaker 1: that's a pretty good example because it's like, clearly it's
Speaker 1: built upon the Star Wars universe, but a universe like
Speaker 1: the Star Wars universe is kind of limitless, so yeah,
Speaker 1: you can build out other things that draw on the
Speaker 1: existing Star Wars lore but generate new ideas as well.
Speaker 1: And then the other one, I think this was earlier,
Speaker 1: was a really wild take on Pokemon that they had
Speaker 1: with another friend that was super into Pokemon at the time,
Speaker 1: and they would describe these epic wars between Pokemon factions
Speaker 1: and like an e Pikachu. It was really wild and
Speaker 1: at the time it was like it at times it
Speaker 1: was a little much. I was like, this is Pikachu's
Speaker 1: at an ally, guys, what are you doing?
Speaker 3: Is evil Pikachu already a thing? Or is that that's
Speaker 3: purely original?
Speaker 1: I mean, Pikachu's been around long enough. I imagine all
Speaker 1: variations possible have been drummed off. Pikachu, I'm sure has
Speaker 1: played a role in various paracosms.
Speaker 3: I am Pikachu, I contain multitudes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for some reason, these kids didn't like Pikachu. I
Speaker 1: think they didn't like Pikachu's fame, like Pikachu being the
Speaker 1: most famous of the Pokemon, but they love Piachu, the
Speaker 1: Pokemon that evolves into Pikachu. So there you go.
Speaker 3: Gotta take Pikachu down a pig I guess so well. Obviously,
Speaker 3: Pretend to Play is a really rich subject where we
Speaker 3: just keep finding new angles to examine and things to
Speaker 3: talk about. I don't know exactly how many parts we're
Speaker 3: going to go to here. This will be part four.
Speaker 3: We may actually make it to part five in this series.
Speaker 3: But there was something I wanted to address in today's episode.
Speaker 3: One reason is that one of the big overviews of
Speaker 3: Pretend to Play research addressing like the links with other
Speaker 3: cognitive capacities and stuff like that. One of the big
Speaker 3: overviews we talked about. It's about ten years old at
Speaker 3: this point, so I was looking around for some more
Speaker 3: recent research on pretend to play to see if there
Speaker 3: are kind of updates to any of the stuff we've
Speaker 3: already talked about. Obviously there's new stuff coming out all
Speaker 3: the time. But one thing that caught my attention was
Speaker 3: when I came across an interesting write up in Nautilus
Speaker 3: by Elena Rankin from September twenty twenty four, which was
Speaker 3: reporting on a paper published in the journal Cognitive Development
Speaker 3: the same year. And that paper was by a pair
Speaker 3: of researchers named Elena Hoyka who is affiliated with the
Speaker 3: University of Bristol, and Eloise Prutin, who at the time
Speaker 3: I believe was a trainee clinical psychologist at Oxford. And
Speaker 3: this paper is called the Early Pretending Survey or EPs,
Speaker 3: A Reliable Parent Report Measure of pretense type development for
Speaker 3: four to forty seven month olds. Now, we've already talked
Speaker 3: about a few different kinds of pretend play and how
Speaker 3: they don't all emerge at once, but rather come online
Speaker 3: at different times as a child grows up. As the
Speaker 3: children develop different mental and physical capabilities. Something interesting that
Speaker 3: this twenty twenty four paper did was get really granular
Speaker 3: in that specific regard breaking pretend play down into lots
Speaker 3: of different categories, in fact, into nineteen different categories of activity.
Speaker 3: And then they did a large survey of the parents
Speaker 3: of about nine hundred kids between the ages of four
Speaker 3: months old to forty seven months, which is just shy
Speaker 3: four years old, to try to get fine detail on
Speaker 3: when parents observed all these different types of pretend play
Speaker 3: first manifesting. Now you might think nineteen different types of pretending,
Speaker 3: like how do you get to that? Like beyond the
Speaker 3: banana phone, I don't know what else is there? You
Speaker 3: gotta imagine andary friends, banana phone, I'm a lion. What's left?
Speaker 3: And it's true that some of these categories they explore
Speaker 3: are kind of overlapping or are kind of subdivisions of
Speaker 3: activities we've already talked about into two different subtypes, but
Speaker 3: I still thought it was really interesting, and this brought
Speaker 3: up stuff that I had actually observed with my own
Speaker 3: daughter but had sort of forgotten about in our earlier
Speaker 3: discussions of pretend play from this series. So I want
Speaker 3: to look through this list of play activities from the paper.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, this will be fun because yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we can compare notes in multiple ways here.
Speaker 3: So we're going to start with some we haven't really
Speaker 3: talked about before. One category is pretending to be in
Speaker 3: another state. Now that's not a state, like a geographic region,
Speaker 3: a state, another state of being, like pretending to be asleep,
Speaker 3: or pretending to sneeze when you don't actually have to sneeze.
Speaker 3: Somewhat similar but a little bit different, is pretending to cry.
Speaker 1: Okay, there are different dynamics to all of these, because
Speaker 1: you know, you can pretend to cry and work yourself
Speaker 1: up to a real cry. Oh sure, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you can do that with a sneeze. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: been research into this. Likewise, you can pretend to be
Speaker 1: asleep and fall asleep.
Speaker 3: But yeah, okay, here's another one. Pretending to do everyday
Speaker 3: adult activities like cooking or driving. We could think of
Speaker 3: this as a kind of enactment play. So we've already
Speaker 3: talked about versions of this. Pretending that this is apparently
Speaker 3: really big. It sounds very specific, but it's a very
Speaker 3: very commonly observed thing. Pretending empty vessels are full, so
Speaker 3: drinking from an actually empty cup or pouring One example
Speaker 3: I thought of is pouring invisible cereal out of an
Speaker 3: empty cereal box into a bowl. And this one can
Speaker 3: actually split up into three subtypes. So there is pretending
Speaker 3: empty vessels are full in relation to serving the self,
Speaker 3: like I drink from a literally cup. Then there is
Speaker 3: pretending empty vessels are full. On another, I feed my
Speaker 3: doll from this empty cup, or I try to make
Speaker 3: Dad drink from the empty cup, and then finally pretending
Speaker 3: empty vessels are full on many others. So I'm feeding
Speaker 3: many different toys or people in this manner.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, looking back that I remember doing a lot of
Speaker 1: sampling of various food, imaginary food, or drinks that my
Speaker 1: kid had prepared you.
Speaker 3: Another one is what the authors call gesturing an object.
Speaker 3: This would not be external object substitution, but instead things
Speaker 3: like my finger is a toothbrush, essentially mentally extending or
Speaker 3: substituting parts of the body as a pretend external object.
Speaker 1: Okay, finger guns wouldnt imagine.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, then after that you got one that will
Speaker 3: be more familiar to us, pretending to be an object
Speaker 3: like I am a tree. There is pretend what.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, I'm just imagining that pretend gang.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very Yeah, I don't know, it's more complex
Speaker 3: than you might think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the quiet kids.
Speaker 3: There's pretending to be an animal, like I am a
Speaker 3: bunny rabbit.
Speaker 1: This was huge with my child until really very recently.
Speaker 1: There would often be requested to play zookeeper at playgrounds
Speaker 1: where I would have to be a zookeeper doing a
Speaker 1: British accent, like a like an Attenborough type accent, describing
Speaker 1: nature documentary style what the animal is doing while they
Speaker 1: did animal pretend play.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. There is classical object substitution, which we've already
Speaker 3: talked about, but they actually break this down into multiple categories.
Speaker 3: There is object substitution with non descript props, so this
Speaker 3: might be when the literal prop is somewhat generic and versatile,
Speaker 3: like toy block is a phone. And then there is
Speaker 3: object substitution with more specific props that are very different
Speaker 3: from the thing they're mimicking, so like toy car is
Speaker 3: a telephone?
Speaker 1: Interesting, all right, and so this is casual optic substitution,
Speaker 1: So imagine this is different. This differs from something that
Speaker 1: I saw later on with my child, where they would
Speaker 1: craft a pretend telephone or a pretend computer, or a
Speaker 1: pretend Nintendo switch out of like cardboard and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: That seems more specific than what we're talking about here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that does seem like a different thing. If you're
Speaker 3: building it, that's like a like the play, if the
Speaker 3: play is centered around the fabrication process.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I guess you get into the example
Speaker 1: that I already brought up about the lightsabers building a
Speaker 1: lightsaber help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay. After this, there is pretending to be another person.
Speaker 3: This would be a really existing person like I am
Speaker 3: Grandpa or I am Mom.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't think we did that one.
Speaker 3: And then there are further distinctions about the social context.
Speaker 3: There's pretending alone versus pretending with somebody else. And I
Speaker 3: guess those two categories could apply to any of the
Speaker 3: above categories you mentioned. Beyond this, there is what the
Speaker 3: authors call socio dramatic pretending. This means creating not just
Speaker 3: a single action in pretense, but creating a more elaborate
Speaker 3: pretend story. So maybe not just like I am Grandpa,
Speaker 3: I pour tea like Grandpa. Instead it's like I am
Speaker 3: Grandpa and I want to go to the store to
Speaker 3: buy candy for my doggie. But on the way to
Speaker 3: the store, I get attacked by pirates and my doggie
Speaker 3: gets hurt and I have to put a band aid
Speaker 3: on my doggie so he can feel better, and then
Speaker 3: we all go swimming in the lake, and you know,
Speaker 3: so forth after that. There is pretending to be fantasy
Speaker 3: characters already existing in culture, like you know, I am
Speaker 3: Princess Leiah, I am Batman, I am Santa Claus, that
Speaker 3: sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And obviously we encourage that across the board, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: and for a children and adults, you know, certainly get
Speaker 1: into that dressing up as these various characters. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think a lot of us very very
Speaker 1: much encouraged this sort of thing.
Speaker 3: There is, of course, pretending to have an imaginary friend
Speaker 3: or companion. We've already talked about that a lot. There is.
Speaker 3: I thought this was an interesting distinction. There is pretending
Speaker 3: to do real activities that are not available to most
Speaker 3: people most of the time, So real activities, but not
Speaker 3: everyday activities. And examples of this might be I am
Speaker 3: a rocket ship commander. That's a real thing, but most
Speaker 3: people don't do that I am a pop singer and
Speaker 3: I'm on TV in front of millions. That's a real thing.
Speaker 3: Most people don't do it, So that's distinct from both
Speaker 3: fantasy activities and from everyday activities like driving or cooking.
Speaker 1: One of my kids friends would pretend to open their
Speaker 1: own bank.
Speaker 3: That's sort of in the category.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they'd make their own money. I think I still
Speaker 1: have some of their pretend bills around here somewhere in
Speaker 1: one of my books. It's a bookmark called them Darryl Bucks.
Speaker 3: That is curious. And then finally you've got acting out
Speaker 3: completely made up fantasy scenarios. I ride a dragon through
Speaker 3: the sky and I use magic to transform people into
Speaker 3: cats and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I really liked this granular attention to detail and
Speaker 3: the different ways that pretend to play can manifest. And
Speaker 3: this paper actually developed a new tool for asking participant
Speaker 3: parents questions to track the emergence of these different pretend activities.
Speaker 3: So the tool the authors developed was called the Early
Speaker 3: Pretending Survey or EPs, and the authors tested the EPs
Speaker 3: for internal reliability, stability over time, inter observer agreement, and
Speaker 3: they found it performed pretty well, which they leveraged to
Speaker 3: argue that the EPs could be quote useful for researchers
Speaker 3: to better understand how pretending relates to other areas of development, eg.
Speaker 3: Cognition and language. Now, I can imagine we've already talked
Speaker 3: in some ways about difficulties with relying on parental reports
Speaker 3: for understanding childhood play, and those things are here as well.
Speaker 3: But I can imagine that one advantage of using parental
Speaker 3: reports in a survey as opposed to directly observing children
Speaker 3: play in a lab is that the lab setting for
Speaker 3: one thing might change what the children do, and so
Speaker 3: relying on parental observations gives you access to how children
Speaker 3: behave in settings that are normal for them, you know,
Speaker 3: like what they do at home or at school, and
Speaker 3: in places where they normally are. I think we can
Speaker 3: all relate to the fact that when we go to
Speaker 3: an unfamiliar and maybe even uncomfortable place, we act different.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And on top of that, this reminds me
Speaker 1: of an example from some studies we're talking about with
Speaker 1: imaginary friends, where it was pointed out that a you
Speaker 1: want to talk to the kid and the adult, but
Speaker 1: when you ask the kid about their imaginary friends, they
Speaker 1: might just create one right there on the spot.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's a great example where it's also good to
Speaker 1: chat with the parent and they'll be like, I've never
Speaker 1: heard of mister Bongoes. I think they made mister Bongoes
Speaker 1: up like literally just now for fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you brought up the idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you let mister bong goes.
Speaker 3: In, right. So the laboratory observation setting might be a
Speaker 3: conjuring Captain Howdy kind of thing with the Ouiji aboard.
Speaker 3: Another big thing is that obviously having to have researchers
Speaker 3: directly observe children playing over time in a laboratory setting
Speaker 3: or any kind of whatever the controlled setting is is
Speaker 3: just cumbersome, you know, It's like time consuming, and so
Speaker 3: a survey format allows you to gather much larger sample
Speaker 3: sizes than direct observation in a controlled setting. It's because
Speaker 3: that the latter is costly and time consuming. So the
Speaker 3: author has administered this survey to parents primarily in the US, UK, Canada,
Speaker 3: and Australia in across the years twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: and I was interested what did they find. I can't
Speaker 3: discuss everything mentioned in the paper, but some of the
Speaker 3: highlights we've been talking. Here's one thing that's kind of
Speaker 3: surprising based on our previous discussion. We've been talking about
Speaker 3: a prevailing belief that object substitution like you know, banana
Speaker 3: is a phone, is usually one of the first types
Speaker 3: of pretend play observed, most often emerging at one and
Speaker 3: a half years of age or so. But this survey found,
Speaker 3: and this agrees with some previous research, that actually there
Speaker 3: are some other types of pretend play that come even earlier,
Speaker 3: come before object substitution, and these would be some of
Speaker 3: the more specific ones that we were talking about at
Speaker 3: the beginning of the list. The list I read earlier
Speaker 3: was roughly roughly in the chronological order of observance. So
Speaker 3: remember the empty pretend play. The EPs found that this
Speaker 3: happens early, with like half of kids doing it by
Speaker 3: around thirteen months of age, and then the other thing
Speaker 3: before object substitution is by around fifteen months. Half of
Speaker 3: kids have shown some signs of pretending with their own body,
Speaker 3: such as pretending to be in a different state, like
Speaker 3: pretending to sleep or pretending to sneeze, or pretending to
Speaker 3: be something else with their body like I am a tiger,
Speaker 3: I'm growling, roar, and then it's by seventeen months of
Speaker 3: age or so that half had shown signs of object substitution.
Speaker 3: So this does agree in part with the schedule we've
Speaker 3: been talking about before, where object substitution shows up on
Speaker 3: average about one and a half years old, but finds
Speaker 3: that some types of pretend play tend to happen even
Speaker 3: earlier than object substitution. And though I didn't really think
Speaker 3: much about either of these earlier examples, now that I
Speaker 3: reflect on it, I have to yes myself, because you know,
Speaker 3: my memory is involved, and who knows what I'm being
Speaker 3: primed to misremember here, But I think this squares exactly
Speaker 3: with my own experience as the parent of a toddler,
Speaker 3: Like I have a two year old right now, and
Speaker 3: my memory may be gein correct, but I think before
Speaker 3: my daughter ever pretended one object was another, she would
Speaker 3: pretend to sneeze and pretend to be asleep, and also
Speaker 3: pretend to eat or drink things that were not really there,
Speaker 3: and she thought it was hilarious with most of these.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't remember how this shook out with my
Speaker 1: own kit, but in general this does seem accurate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Now, from here, the story based socio dramatic play
Speaker 3: that we were talking about that starts to happen more
Speaker 3: when kids are around two years old usually, and then
Speaker 3: complex make believe fantasy concepts tend to take hold when
Speaker 3: children are around three. And of course it may be
Speaker 3: that these later play types are dependent on the development
Speaker 3: of language skills, so as children get better at using
Speaker 3: manipulating language, that also sort of helps them construct these
Speaker 3: abstract or counterfactual scenarios. Now, what about other general findings
Speaker 3: in this paper. Well, one thing is that within the
Speaker 3: survey range like four months to four years, kids pretending
Speaker 3: scores steadily increased with age, which actually made me wonder, okay,
Speaker 3: in this early period is just basically going straight up,
Speaker 3: when do we actually see reductions in pretend play? That
Speaker 3: actually came up in the Nautilus article that I shouted
Speaker 3: out for pointing me to this research, because the author
Speaker 3: of that Nautilus article cited some commentary by a researcher
Speaker 3: named Sandra Russ at Case Western and Russ says that
Speaker 3: it is most often around the age of nine or
Speaker 3: ten that children start to kind of relinquish their pretend play.
Speaker 3: But of course that can vary, and you could argue
Speaker 3: with most people, it never completely goes away. Some people
Speaker 3: continue to show similar imag imaginative behavior into adulthood, even
Speaker 3: if it's not exactly play like when they were a child.
Speaker 3: They might have creative hobbies like writing or art or acting,
Speaker 3: which could be in some ways analogous. And of course
Speaker 3: some kids continue pretending into older ages. I think we
Speaker 3: talked about how, you know, with kids that start building paracosms,
Speaker 3: those it's I think fairly common for those to continue
Speaker 3: from ages like eight to twelve or so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like twelve or thirteen, Yeah, somewhere in that range. So,
Speaker 1: and I guess that makes sense if you're looking at
Speaker 1: this as like a general progression of one's use of imagination,
Speaker 1: that that would continue a little bit, a little bit
Speaker 1: further into your development.
Speaker 3: Any other broad differences within the children in the survey,
Speaker 3: One was that girls, on average had a somewhat higher
Speaker 3: EPs score than boys, though it was a small difference.
Speaker 3: The gender difference was not huge, but it was statistically significant.
Speaker 3: And also I thought this was interesting. Children of younger
Speaker 3: parents had higher EPs scores than children of older parents. Now,
Speaker 3: again these differences are not huge, but that's interesting. Why
Speaker 3: would pretending be happening a little bit more, a little
Speaker 3: bit earlier in girls and in children of younger parents.
Speaker 3: In both cases, it's not known with high confidence what
Speaker 3: explains it, but the authors offer a couple of informed
Speaker 3: guesses in their discussion section as to the gender distinction.
Speaker 3: They relate this possibly to the fact that at both well.
Speaker 3: First of all, they say that this sort of correlates
Speaker 3: to previous findings in other studies that both in the
Speaker 3: toddler age and in the primary school age, girls have
Speaker 3: been found to engage in a little bit more fantasy
Speaker 3: play on average than boys do, and that they're also
Speaker 3: a little bit more likely to create imaginary companions. They
Speaker 3: cite several papers to that regard, and so like, what
Speaker 3: would be the explanation, Well, it's possible, again not known
Speaker 3: for sure, that this could be related to language skills.
Speaker 3: In some cases, girls acquire language skills on a slightly
Speaker 3: accelerated timeline, and it could be that language development is
Speaker 3: related to pretending. But again the differences are not huge,
Speaker 3: and it's not known for sure why this would be.
Speaker 3: Similar question with the thing about younger parents having slightly
Speaker 3: more pretending happening earlier. The author's right quote perhaps younger
Speaker 3: parents spend more time pretending with their children, allowing more
Speaker 3: opportunities for parents to observe or even scaffold pretending. So
Speaker 3: that could make sense, Like if there's more co pretending
Speaker 3: between the parent and child happening, that could affect the
Speaker 3: survey results in multiple ways. It could mean that the
Speaker 3: child is actually doing more pretending because they're getting more
Speaker 3: practice with an adult present. Or it could mean that
Speaker 3: the children are pretending the same amount, but the parents
Speaker 3: are observing it happen more and thus they're reporting it
Speaker 3: more on the surveys.
Speaker 1: But I guess I'm still kind of foggy as to
Speaker 1: how this would share out between younger and older parents,
Speaker 1: not just because I was am was and was an
Speaker 1: older parent, but but I'm just wondering, like, what's what
Speaker 1: would be the broad difference there.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I don't actually know. They didn't
Speaker 3: mention it this part, but maybe maybe there was somewhere
Speaker 3: in there that got lost for me. But they could
Speaker 3: have some data indicating that, on average, younger parents spend
Speaker 3: more time pretending with kids, But I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I guess the most obvious
Speaker 1: possible explanation for that. One might think I would be
Speaker 1: like work responsibilities, but I can just you know, just
Speaker 1: shooting from the hip here, I can think of various
Speaker 1: scenarios in which younger parents would be working more, but
Speaker 1: then also examples where maybe younger parents have more free
Speaker 1: time to spend with the kid. Like, I don't know
Speaker 1: it just I guess. I'm I'm not sure how the
Speaker 1: generalities that they're dealing with here would really pan out,
Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm sure it's based on based on
Speaker 1: some findings and some statistical information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's the slight correlation having to do with
Speaker 3: the age of the parents is just what they observed
Speaker 3: in the sample. I guess the part about that having
Speaker 3: anything to do with parents spending time pretending with the
Speaker 3: kids is just an informed gus, so who knows what
Speaker 3: the real reason was.
Speaker 1: I guess the other possibility would be older parents have
Speaker 1: already had additional children, and then therefore there's less attention
Speaker 1: to go around.
Speaker 3: Possibly. So, as I said, none of these differences were huge,
Speaker 3: and I guess we don't really know for sure why
Speaker 3: they manifest in this fairly large sample. But one thing
Speaker 3: I thought was interesting about the study was just coming
Speaker 3: back to the kind of granular detail tracking these different
Speaker 3: types of play emergence with a finer attention to the
Speaker 3: variations in the style of play.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 3: I don't think otherwise I would have noticed that it's
Speaker 3: so common to pretend to cup has something in it
Speaker 3: like that that feels like such a specific thing. But
Speaker 3: it's interesting that it's observed so often they had to
Speaker 3: give it its own category. I mean, you could just
Speaker 3: think of that as a kind of like invisible object play,
Speaker 3: but I guess it's so common that it is different
Speaker 3: than like I'm using an invisible toothbrush. Like it seems like,
Speaker 3: you know, tons of kids. Maybe maybe most kids are
Speaker 3: pretending there's something in a cup when there actually isn't.
Speaker 1: I'll occasionally do that as a grown up, pretended there's
Speaker 1: something in a cup and pretend to drink it, mainly
Speaker 1: if I'm at some sort of like a social function,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and the cup is not clear to
Speaker 1: be to be clear, the cup has to cannot be
Speaker 1: made of translucent plastic. But you know, I've consumed everything
Speaker 1: in the cup, and I want to continue to have
Speaker 1: like the gesture of drinking it. Yeah, to do something
Speaker 1: with my hand. I may engage in that level of
Speaker 1: play slash deception.
Speaker 3: Sipping from a cup is part of the rhythm of
Speaker 3: conversation party.
Speaker 1: And if you're out of a beverage, I mean you're
Speaker 1: out of options, right, Yeah, so sometimes you got to pretend.
Speaker 3: Well, So anyway, I thought that was an interesting study,
Speaker 3: but I was thinking more about the fact that they say,
Speaker 3: you know, most often the real height of childhood style
Speaker 3: pretend to play. It starts to fade around the age
Speaker 3: of nine or ten. However, of course, as we know,
Speaker 3: different types of pretending can go on for a lifetime,
Speaker 3: and I think that's something that's related to what you
Speaker 3: wanted to talk about today, isn't it, Rob Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I got interested in the angle of pretend play
Speaker 1: and play and creativity in adults and other ages in
Speaker 1: addition to childhood and early adolescents. And part of this
Speaker 1: was my wife's suggestion. She was like, well, that would
Speaker 1: be an interesting aga. So it's like, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: sounds that sounds sounds fascinating, and so I'm not really
Speaker 1: going to get into a lot of like specific studies.
Speaker 1: Maybe that'll be something I can get into in the
Speaker 1: next episode. But I ended up looking at material that's
Speaker 1: really tackling the idea of pretend play and adults more broadly.
Speaker 1: So obviously we've been discussing the idea of pretend play
Speaker 1: as a manifestation of developing creativity, and I think that's
Speaker 1: perfectly valid. That's often how it is understood. Childhood psychologist
Speaker 1: lev Vygotsky, who lived eighteen ninety six through nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: outlined a three step creativity development process creative imagination in childhood,
Speaker 1: imagination and thought coming together in adolescence, and finally the
Speaker 1: individual enters into adulthood quote where experience creativity is directed
Speaker 1: and used with purpose. I was reading about this in
Speaker 1: an article by at All twenty twenties, playing with Creativity
Speaker 1: across the life span. This was in tech trends linking
Speaker 1: research and practice to improve learning. Now, as you can
Speaker 1: always already imagine, we'll get into some of the ideas
Speaker 1: around this. This is kind of, I think, from our
Speaker 1: modern perspective, limiting understanding of creativity, the idea that it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: being creative just for the sake of fun. That was
Speaker 1: all right when you were younger, But now you're a
Speaker 1: grown up, how is it going to produce funds. How
Speaker 1: are you going to make money off of that? Or
Speaker 1: change the world for the better and so forth, Your
Speaker 1: creativity has to be put to work. That horse isn't
Speaker 1: wild anymore. You need to strap it to the cart.
Speaker 3: Oh so that is the meaning of used with purpose
Speaker 3: here in this quote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, Yeah, he positive that childhood fantasy and imagination
Speaker 1: were essentially catalysts for adult creativity, which would be which
Speaker 1: was seen as more purposeful, you know, like, and you know,
Speaker 1: I think there are some valid arguments for that as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously when we become adults and we engage
Speaker 1: in cultures and a society that often puts an emphasis
Speaker 1: again on making money, and also legitimately like taking things
Speaker 1: you're good at and have a passion for, and finding
Speaker 1: professions and callings in life that line up with those.
Speaker 3: You know, it's understandable just solving practical problems that may
Speaker 3: or may not have a strong economic component.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this purpose aspect is interesting and something discussed
Speaker 1: at length in that paper I just cited. Apparently some
Speaker 1: definitions of creativity, stress, usefulness and effectiveness is criteria for creativity,
Speaker 1: tying into Vagotsky's take on adult creativity. Other models call
Speaker 1: for dual aspects of novelty or originality and usefulness or effectiveness.
Speaker 1: And you know, when you start talking about effectiveness and
Speaker 1: usefulness as well, especially more recent understandings of it, there's
Speaker 1: more room for nuance there.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Okay, So I guess this is going to
Speaker 3: the question of how do we actually define creativity. If
Speaker 3: we're trying to study it scientifically, you need a very
Speaker 3: clear and strict definition. And instead, it's one of those
Speaker 3: things that we kind of we feel it out, we
Speaker 3: know what we see it. Some activity is just seems
Speaker 3: creative or doesn't. Like, writing a story is creative, But
Speaker 3: is writing a memo for work creative?
Speaker 1: Not? Usually it could be usually that's your creativity challenge
Speaker 1: for the day, make it a creative exercise.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess there's something. Yeah, Like, these definitions
Speaker 3: mentioned something about novelty. So creativity is something that's kind
Speaker 3: of different or unexpected. It's not just kind of going
Speaker 3: through the motions or engaging in habits. It's doing something
Speaker 3: different and novel. But the other half of this in
Speaker 3: these definitions is kind of stressing that it's not just
Speaker 3: novelty in a kind of random sense. It's novelty that
Speaker 3: is useful or effective in some way. It does something right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's interesting when we get into like what
Speaker 1: does that mean for it to do something right, to
Speaker 1: do something useful. As discussed in this paper, childhood psychologist
Speaker 1: doctor Sandra Russ proposes a slightly different definition for creativity
Speaker 1: and with a different emphasis on what some of the
Speaker 1: key aspects mean. So she defines it as it needs
Speaker 1: to be novel, it needs to be effective, and it
Speaker 1: needs to be whole. So she argues that especially with children,
Speaker 1: we can't put much weight on the importance or usefulness
Speaker 1: of any of this, right, like how useful is a
Speaker 1: child's paracosm, how useful is a child's imaginary friend. But
Speaker 1: the big thing that she stresses is play is the
Speaker 1: product it is. It is an output of how they
Speaker 1: think and feel. Multiple aspects of a child's being are
Speaker 1: involved in the act of play, and I believe that
Speaker 1: is what's meant by wholeness. Here the idea that like that, yes,
Speaker 1: with an act of creativity is not just this like
Speaker 1: leakage of energy from your psyche, you know. And I
Speaker 1: think this holds true for children and adults as well
Speaker 1: as Guss like when when you're engaging in created creative
Speaker 1: output like that is it's like the output of your being.
Speaker 1: You know, it is like not to get too you know,
Speaker 1: wax too poetic about it, but I mean, it's like
Speaker 1: a light shining out of your soul and your your mind.
Speaker 1: It's it's not just this shadow that happens to be
Speaker 1: cast by who you are.
Speaker 3: Well that is beautifully put. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I
Speaker 3: think you're right. Sorry, but sorry, my mind was just
Speaker 3: divided into different places because I just realized while you're
Speaker 3: saying that also that you were citing that the work
Speaker 3: of Sandra Russ, who was the same person that I
Speaker 3: just cited in my section about about most pretend to
Speaker 3: play tending to fade around the age of nine or
Speaker 3: ten years old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe. I believe she's a pretty big name
Speaker 1: in this field.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but of course with a lot of variation. But
Speaker 3: that's an interesting criterion that I don't think I would
Speaker 3: have gotten this, this concept of wholeness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and you know, and looking around, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how often she uses the term wholeness, but they
Speaker 1: reference whole. They they had kind of some wholeness up
Speaker 1: as being an aspect of her definition. Okay, and I
Speaker 1: do think that that that plays out with what she's
Speaker 1: stressing here. But you know, even in adults, though, the
Speaker 1: way we think of usefulness or to you know, to
Speaker 1: use Russ's model usefulness or effectiveness, Uh, it varies from
Speaker 1: field to field. In this paper, they broadly address different
Speaker 1: forms of creativity, invoking the four C creative creativity model
Speaker 1: by James C. Kaufman and doctor Ronald Baghetto. Have we
Speaker 1: talked about this before? I don't know.
Speaker 3: We've been doing the show a long time, so I
Speaker 3: can't always recall.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I forget whole episodes sometimes.
Speaker 3: But I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels fresh to my mind. So basically, the
Speaker 1: way the four C creativity model plays out is that
Speaker 1: you have four different modes of creativity. First of all,
Speaker 1: you have big C creativity. This is landmark work that
Speaker 1: changes a field or changes the world. So like big
Speaker 1: C creativity would be like I have invented the steam engine,
Speaker 1: or I have I present you with a new religious
Speaker 1: model and spiritual model for your way of life, something
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 3: Huge impact general theory of relativity or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Then you have little C creativity. And this is
Speaker 1: still this is work that has strong interpersonal value. It's additive,
Speaker 1: it's cumulative. And we can think of various examples of
Speaker 1: this as well. I mean, I think, like a great book,
Speaker 1: but not a book so great that it changes the
Speaker 1: world might fit under little C creativity if I'm understanding
Speaker 1: the concept correctly, or I would say not even they
Speaker 1: don't even think about greatness. But a book you like
Speaker 1: has you know, strong personal value, and you know you
Speaker 1: share that with others and so forth. Then you have
Speaker 1: pro C creativity. This is not game changing, but it's
Speaker 1: effective and beneficial within a given field. So you know,
Speaker 1: a new means of doing something, some new innovation within
Speaker 1: a given field.
Speaker 3: Okay, and then you have many.
Speaker 1: C creativity, And this is an interpersonal creativity that is
Speaker 1: a part of the learning process. So my understanding on this,
Speaker 1: like to draw an example from like our daily work
Speaker 1: pretty much is like sometimes when we run across a
Speaker 1: new concept, we kind of have to make sense of
Speaker 1: it ourselves, and we'll sort of turn to some sort
Speaker 1: of a personal novel metaphor for how it works, you know,
Speaker 1: like compare it to a Santo movie or what have you.
Speaker 1: You know, So we're engaging in many C creativity according
Speaker 1: to this model here, you know, it's it's not going
Speaker 1: to change the world. It's not trying to change the world.
Speaker 1: It's not really innovating anything. But it's helping us in
Speaker 1: a learning process, Like it does have value within the
Speaker 1: way that our mind is working. It's helping us roll
Speaker 1: around various concepts and so forth.
Speaker 3: The kind of creativity we engage in, we all engage
Speaker 3: in basically every day, coming up with analogies or ways
Speaker 3: of thinking about or explaining things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but one an important thing they stress is that
Speaker 1: that that any kind of creativity is going to start
Speaker 1: out novel and personal. So you know, a mini creates
Speaker 1: many C creativity project could become a pro C, could
Speaker 1: become a little C, could become a big C, and
Speaker 1: so forth. So I think it's a pretty useful idea
Speaker 1: for and certainly gives it a little more nuanced to
Speaker 1: the idea of like what is the enterprise of creativity
Speaker 1: and what role does it play? So applying all of
Speaker 1: this to adults, the idea that Russ and the paper
Speaker 1: proposes here is that, yes, childhood creativity has an influence
Speaker 1: on adult creativity, but we can't just think about creativity
Speaker 1: in adults, as you know, just just in terms of
Speaker 1: its useful wellness, like in the workplace or for a career. Again,
Speaker 1: we can't just think of it as strapping that horse
Speaker 1: to a cart. Play in particular, they stress for children
Speaker 1: and adults allows us to process challenges and emotions while
Speaker 1: also supporting other forms of creativity. So again, a mini
Speaker 1: c exercise could transition into a pro se or any
Speaker 1: of the other forms of creativity. You know, to quote
Speaker 1: Lawrence of Arabia, big things have small beginnings.
Speaker 3: And I think often this is sort of a cliche
Speaker 3: at this point, but how often in history you see
Speaker 3: people who do I don't know, make big creative leaps
Speaker 3: that are often categorized as the useful sort. You know,
Speaker 3: people who make big scientific breakthroughs, or people who you know,
Speaker 3: do great works of art or something are often also
Speaker 3: engaged in what we might think of as a lot
Speaker 3: of trivial collaborative outside of work play of a creative sort.
Speaker 3: You know, they're just sort of in whatever off hours
Speaker 3: they have, kind of talking to other people who are
Speaker 3: involved in similar pursuits and engaging and engaging in little
Speaker 3: kind of lower stakes games with the ideas that they're
Speaker 3: manipulating in their major work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And one of the big ideas
Speaker 1: here is that most of us are not going to
Speaker 1: engage in big C creativity. Most of us are not
Speaker 1: going to create a new religion, create some sort of
Speaker 1: new technology it changes the world. We're not going to,
Speaker 1: you know, write the Great American novel or what have you.
Speaker 1: But those little C and many C exercises they're still novel,
Speaker 1: they're still useful, and they're still whole. So in this
Speaker 1: paper they make several observations about adult play during COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen lockdowns, you know, taking us back to that time
Speaker 1: in which you know, we can I think everyone listening
Speaker 1: can probably remember. You know, you had many adults suddenly
Speaker 1: dealing with more free time but also expressing themselves through
Speaker 1: play and even process emotions and even trauma through that
Speaker 1: play in addition to nurturing joy. You know, So suddenly
Speaker 1: people who had the ability to do so, you know,
Speaker 1: they might suddenly they're playing more Dudgeons and Dragons than usual,
Speaker 1: or they're they're turning back to an old hobby. And yeah,
Speaker 1: part of that is like maybe they had some extra
Speaker 1: time they were trapped in their home and so forth.
Speaker 1: But additionally, like the creative process, gave them a way
Speaker 1: to work through what they were feeling. So in this
Speaker 1: paper from sin at All, they write the following quote.
Speaker 1: As human beings, we are programmed to use play in
Speaker 1: creative expression to connect and work through the difficulties. Creativity
Speaker 1: is not just about finding solutions to problems. It is
Speaker 1: about expressing emotion and processing change. Now does it involve
Speaker 1: pretend play? Coming back to the overarching theme of these episodes? Subjectively,
Speaker 1: my argument was yes, you know, I was thinking about
Speaker 1: various games. Dungeons and dragons are otherwise various creative endeavors
Speaker 1: one might engage in. But I've also found literature that
Speaker 1: lines up with this too. Oh okay, I was looking
Speaker 1: at a paper this is by Gungku at All published
Speaker 1: in Topoi, an international review of philosophy from two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, titled Pretend Play as a lifespan Activity, and
Speaker 1: the authors here argue that pretend play is an adaptive
Speaker 1: human activity of adulthood as well as childhood. They point
Speaker 1: out that a lot of the early work in childhood
Speaker 1: psychology creative view in which childhood is playful and fanciful,
Speaker 1: while adult adulthood is all logical and productive. We touched
Speaker 1: on that already. The idea that okay, you're grown up
Speaker 1: and now put your creativity to work again. Creativity and
Speaker 1: adults was seen as is useful almost always in a
Speaker 1: big sea or at least little sea aspiring manner. The
Speaker 1: authors here, though, argue the opposite, that pretend play can
Speaker 1: be found throughout adult life as well, and they point
Speaker 1: to adult improv theater as a key example of this. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: not everyone engages in improv theater, but it has been
Speaker 1: interesting in recent years to see improv theater and it's
Speaker 1: often brought in to say, business spaces and so forth,
Speaker 1: realizing that it is a fun and helpful skill set
Speaker 1: to bring into some sort of a work environment.
Speaker 3: Hmm yeah, okay, So I was thinking of ways that
Speaker 3: pretend play can continue into adulthood, and it made me wonder,
Speaker 3: does something count as pretend play if you were sort
Speaker 3: of trying to hide the fact that you're doing it,
Speaker 3: if it's just sort of a private game with yourself,
Speaker 3: and maybe you're not really thinking of it as pretend
Speaker 3: play and you don't necessarily tell other people about it.
Speaker 3: But I don't know. What's coming to mind is that
Speaker 3: I think probably a lot of adults go about their
Speaker 3: business with this model we've talked about before, where they're
Speaker 3: kind of seeing themselves as a character in a narrative.
Speaker 3: You know, they're not like I am Luke Skywalker, but
Speaker 3: they are framing the events of their life in a
Speaker 3: kind of in a modified, not very realistic way that
Speaker 3: that paints them as like the hero of an important story.
Speaker 3: Does that count as pretend play? I mean it's I
Speaker 3: don't I don't know if it's like altering the literal
Speaker 3: facts of reality, but it's it's putting their life within
Speaker 3: a frame, a frame that is probably not the way
Speaker 3: an objective observer would describe what they're doing. Does that
Speaker 3: make sense?
Speaker 1: Now there's at least a patina of pretend play involved here. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Whereas in an improv class you might literally be pretending
Speaker 1: to be a dump truck. Yes, in a way if
Speaker 1: that most most non improf adults are not doing, but
Speaker 1: very much in line with the kind of pretend to
Speaker 1: play a child might engage in.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And there is some kind of freeing about that,
Speaker 3: you know, when you when you watch improv, there's like
Speaker 3: a there's a feeling of cutting loose that's very exciting
Speaker 3: that you don't see even in a lot of otherwise
Speaker 3: creative adults.
Speaker 1: Now that this paper does not get into it, But
Speaker 1: of course I'm also reminded of various observations about other
Speaker 1: forms of acting in which there can be kind of
Speaker 1: a contagious aspect to the part one is playing and
Speaker 1: one's own thoughts and actions. So, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: you especially when adults. I mean, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: when kids pretend play. You know, sometimes animal simulations can
Speaker 1: get a little out of hand, and mom and dad
Speaker 1: might get scratched or bit But but on a on
Speaker 1: another level, there's always that possibility with adult actors as well. Now,
Speaker 1: I think it's an interesting comparison between improv theater and
Speaker 1: childhood pretend play. I think kids are sometimes not as
Speaker 1: good at the yes and aspect of improv that's central
Speaker 1: to the philosophy of improv. But you know, I think
Speaker 1: that's on another level that's often one of the big
Speaker 1: lessons that they learn when they play with others. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of research on this as well. We
Speaker 1: didn't know I haven't really got into this but you
Speaker 1: have like parallel play with kids where it's like little
Speaker 1: Susie and little Bobby. They are not really playing together.
Speaker 1: They are both playing with dump trucks in the sand,
Speaker 1: but they're just kind of playing alongside each other. And
Speaker 1: thank goodness they both have dump trucks, because otherwise they
Speaker 1: would be a fight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I can see, yes. And as a form
Speaker 3: of sharing, I mean it is a way of give
Speaker 3: and take and of sharing, not the physical props of
Speaker 3: play if you have to share your one dump truck toy,
Speaker 3: but of sharing the direction of the play, sharing a narrative.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If it's for example, if you're engaging in an
Speaker 1: imagine shared world, in a paracosm, Yeah, you have to
Speaker 1: share that, like one person can't be just be the
Speaker 1: god of this realm. I guess there's there's room for
Speaker 1: maybe a you know, forty sixty split there on creative
Speaker 1: control of the paraphousm.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But another way that the improv theater example I think
Speaker 1: is interesting is that it's an example where adults often
Speaker 1: or at least sometimes have to relearn how to engage
Speaker 1: in pure imagination play. You know a lot of you
Speaker 1: hear plenty of accounts of adults who take an improv
Speaker 1: class and it's like they're one over by it, you know,
Speaker 1: it transforms them, like they're able to reconnect with this
Speaker 1: this creative energy that they hadn't had, perhaps since they
Speaker 1: were kids. And this all kind of ties into that
Speaker 1: whole idea of creativity as being this expression of the whole.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just this thing you know you
Speaker 1: do you know in this one exercise like it is
Speaker 1: you know, it is a way that you're able to
Speaker 1: process things and let things out. Now, another example that
Speaker 1: they bring this one was really fascinating in part because
Speaker 1: we already kind of stumbled over this a little bit
Speaker 1: when we were talking about imaginary friends. We were talking about, Okay,
Speaker 1: what do adults engage in that are akin to imaginary friends?
Speaker 1: And we talked about things like speaking to angels and
Speaker 1: shouting at the devil and so forth. But the example
Speaker 1: brought up in this paper is that you will have
Speaker 1: the situation of adults engaging in conversation with the dead
Speaker 1: had a grave site. For example, adults essentially engaging in
Speaker 1: a conversation with an imagined or simulated mind. And this
Speaker 1: was an idea that was apparently discussed in a paper
Speaker 1: by I. E. Josephson nineteen ninety eight titled constructing Oneself
Speaker 1: in the City of the Silent.
Speaker 3: Oh wow. This is interesting because just last night I
Speaker 3: was reading sort of a biographical article about the life
Speaker 3: of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and she apparently
Speaker 3: had an an extremely important relationship with her with her
Speaker 3: mother's grave, essentially with her mother was an important writer
Speaker 3: in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft, and she she would
Speaker 3: visit her mother's grave and like apparently had a strong,
Speaker 3: powerful emotional relationship with her mother's tombstone, would sort of
Speaker 3: like talk to and relate to her mother who died
Speaker 3: after giving birth to her.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, And I feel like a lot of us
Speaker 1: can speak to examples of this the way that ganku
Speaker 1: at all sum this up. They say, quote, these conversations
Speaker 1: enabled the grieving survivors to reinterpret their joint past with
Speaker 1: the deceased, as they also help them prepare for the future,
Speaker 1: a finding that is corroborated by other clinical studies.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like a lot of us can
Speaker 1: can speak to this on some level. I've certainly engaged
Speaker 1: in this before, speaking to the dead, reaching for the dead,
Speaker 1: particularly at a great side. Yeah, and I want to
Speaker 1: stress again, as we've touched on this many times on
Speaker 1: the show, that we as humans are capable of juggling
Speaker 1: multiple and even contradicting ideas about say, the persistence of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Have you contradicting ideas in your head, multiple of them
Speaker 1: at once. So, you know, standing at the grave of
Speaker 1: a loved one, you might at once feel as if
Speaker 1: you were speaking to a person who is in the past.
Speaker 1: You know you're speaking you're a person who only exists
Speaker 1: in memory. You may also feel, on another level, like
Speaker 1: you are speaking to the ghost of a loved one
Speaker 1: that is spiritually present, like in a movie about a ghost,
Speaker 1: or someone who is there but invisible, like in other
Speaker 1: movies about ghosts. I mean, you really can't discount the
Speaker 1: power that say, ghost movies have on these sort of
Speaker 1: like almost subconscious ideas about the deceased and the role
Speaker 1: that they have in our lives. You might see them
Speaker 1: as a spirit of a loved one that is now
Speaker 1: residing in another realm of existence. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: that will they're looking down on me and so forth.
Speaker 1: You also, on some level, maybe even like front loaded,
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, well, this is just an empty
Speaker 1: corporeal vessel, like there's you know, there's nothing here. I
Speaker 1: am just engaging in this idea of the person that
Speaker 1: is passed. And then yeah, ultimately you might think of it, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with a mental simulation of the deceased via
Speaker 1: theory of mind. Hmm. Yeah, And for something as deeply
Speaker 1: personal and emotional as a grave sided conversation with the dead,
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to accept that any number of
Speaker 1: these can be in play, and we shouldn't be dismissive
Speaker 1: of any of them, at least from an emotional standpoint,
Speaker 1: you know. But I think it's a great concept concerning
Speaker 1: the power of human imagination and our engagement with simulated
Speaker 1: realities as a means of processing and evaluating feelings and
Speaker 1: as an expression of wholeness and creativity, you know. So
Speaker 1: you know it is it is ultimately a kind of
Speaker 1: pretend play, but pretend play that you know has very
Speaker 1: high emotional stakes. But at the same time, it's not
Speaker 1: useful in the sense that it is going to change
Speaker 1: the world or generate income, but it can be highly
Speaker 1: useful depending on the individual obviously, in the situation, like
Speaker 1: for their their own feelings and for their own sense
Speaker 1: of well being.
Speaker 3: Well, this actually makes me reframe one of the ways
Speaker 3: I was thinking about childhood pretend play. In the first part,
Speaker 3: we briefly discussed a definition of play, which is that
Speaker 3: it's non instrumental activity. It's activity that is not put
Speaker 3: toward any kind of external purpose. It's purely It's often
Speaker 3: described as purely for enjoyment, and that makes it sound
Speaker 3: like anything that is play, or by extension, pretend play,
Speaker 3: should be for fun. But actually, I mean, obviously, I
Speaker 3: think it makes sense in a way to call this
Speaker 3: kind of interfacing with the dead a form of pretend play,
Speaker 3: except the word play sounds wrong because play is supposed
Speaker 3: to be fun. But then when I think of the
Speaker 3: pretend play games I actually like watch my daughter go through.
Speaker 3: They're usually fun, but they're not always fun. Sometimes they
Speaker 3: actually feel quite serious and sometimes quite sad. Like one
Speaker 3: thing she likes to do is to pretend to treat
Speaker 3: and heal the wound of her toys, and she she
Speaker 3: gets kind of sadness in her voy, you know, she's like, oh,
Speaker 3: he you know, dinosaur, her need feel better. And that
Speaker 3: almost strikes me as somewhat similar to the Graveside conversation.
Speaker 3: I mean, in a way that still has to be play,
Speaker 3: that is play, but there's no laughter involved, it's not fun,
Speaker 3: and the main emotion seems to be sympathy and sadness.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I don't know. There are many many ways obviously
Speaker 3: in which those things are different, but it does seem
Speaker 3: to drive home that there's maybe something that is missing
Speaker 3: when we think of play as an activity that is
Speaker 3: strictly were fun. Instead, it's something that's like usually for fun,
Speaker 3: but it also can sometimes be something else. It's something
Speaker 3: we're doing for kind of intrinsic motivations, but they're not
Speaker 3: really related to like pleasure or laughter or excitement.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so at any rate, Yeah, these, like I say,
Speaker 1: I thought I was gonna get more into sort of
Speaker 1: granular discussions of you know, of adult imagination play and
Speaker 1: like the benefits of engaging maybe in something like improv theater.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I realized this all ended up being a
Speaker 1: little bit broader and a little bit more philosophic, But
Speaker 1: I thought it was really fascinating and it made me
Speaker 1: sort of rethink a lot of what I thought I
Speaker 1: knew about creativity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally all right.
Speaker 1: Well, I think we're going to go ahead and close
Speaker 1: this episode out, and we're thinking we're going to be
Speaker 1: back with one more of these, because there's still plenty
Speaker 1: to talk about. And in the meantime, we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from all of you. I know we have some
Speaker 1: people out there who are improv actors or certainly taken
Speaker 1: an improv class or two, or done a little improv
Speaker 1: maybe in a college acting class. Tell us about it.
Speaker 1: How do your experiences line up with what we've been
Speaker 1: discussing here, Any other of your thoughts, experiences, and so
Speaker 1: forth concerning this episode or the previous episodes in the
Speaker 1: Pretend Play series write in. We would love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. And oh and as always, if you want
Speaker 1: what you share to be to not be shared in
Speaker 1: a future listener mail episode, let us know and we'll
Speaker 1: honor that. Likewise, if you would like to use a pseudonym,
Speaker 1: you know, just let us know as well. Just tell
Speaker 1: us what to do with the copy you send.
Speaker 3: Us, with the understanding that if you don't give us
Speaker 3: any instructions of that sort, we will use your first
Speaker 3: name and consider it fair game to read on air.
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