Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: 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
Speaker 3: couch that's going on in our house this week, by
Speaker 3: the way, fingers are worms, Or when I pretend a
Speaker 3: cardboard box becomes the castle gray Skull, or when I
Speaker 3: change the diaper on a stuffed velociraptor, or if I
Speaker 3: go on adventures in the backyard with an imaginary friend.
Speaker 3: These are all forms of pretend play, play that takes
Speaker 3: place within a pretend frame and treats anything in the
Speaker 3: world or in the situation as other than what it
Speaker 3: literally is. Now, if we haven't heard the previous parts
Speaker 3: in this series, I think this is one where we
Speaker 3: really would recommend listening in order. We're going to be
Speaker 3: building on some conversations we had in previous episodes today,
Speaker 3: but in those previous installments, to refresh, we talked about
Speaker 3: ways that researchers define and subdivide pretend play into activities
Speaker 3: like object substitution. So one of our favorite examples is
Speaker 3: banana is a telephone. They talk about that a lot
Speaker 3: in the research enactment play where you might be You know,
Speaker 3: I am cooking dinner in my play kitchen replica, play
Speaker 3: where you have my toy triceratops as cooking dinner in
Speaker 3: the dollhouse, imaginary companions, and other things. We talked about
Speaker 3: possible links explored in the research between pretend play and
Speaker 3: the development of advanced cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning,
Speaker 3: and theory of mind, addressing the question of whether pretending
Speaker 3: might help children develop some of those important faculties, or
Speaker 3: at least whether pretending in those faculties might draw on
Speaker 3: the same underlying neural structures. In Part two, we talked
Speaker 3: in more depth about research on imaginary friends and imaginary companions,
Speaker 3: how often they manifest within and across different cultures, what
Speaker 3: forms they take, what children believe they know, and things
Speaker 3: like that. In the most recent episode, we looked more
Speaker 3: at the question of how adult culture influences pretend play
Speaker 3: among children, noting that while pretending does appear to be
Speaker 3: basically universal, there is pretty wide variation in how much
Speaker 3: children play pretend, and in the themes of the pretend play,
Speaker 3: and in some particular cases, in the framing of whether
Speaker 3: pretend entities are understood as real in some important way
Speaker 3: or not. And then last time we also examined the
Speaker 3: fascinating phenomenon of paracosms, essentially extending the concept of an
Speaker 3: imaginary friend to where it is not a single character
Speaker 3: or playmate, but an entire imaginary world, maybe with its
Speaker 3: own geography, culture, populations, and rules. And we discussed links
Speaker 3: between a childhood tendency to generate paracosms and things like
Speaker 3: creativity in later life.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and I have a paracosm update here. Oh
Speaker 2: really yeah, Because after we'd record this, I realized, well,
Speaker 2: my child is twelve and almost thirteen, which places them
Speaker 2: toward the end of what is broadly considered the paracosm
Speaker 2: period for kids. So I asked them the next morning
Speaker 2: over breakfast. I was like, I know you had some
Speaker 2: pretend worlds and or have pretend worlds that you sometimes
Speaker 2: engage with other friends. Tell me about them. And so
Speaker 2: they laid it all out for me. They said, there
Speaker 2: are two pretend worlds, both of them social in nature,
Speaker 2: that they shared with one particular other friend. So one
Speaker 2: of these with one friend is essentially an extrapol of
Speaker 2: Star Wars. They said. It's different planets set in the
Speaker 2: Old Republic era on which Jedis have adventures. Okay, which
Speaker 2: I think that's a pretty good example because it's like,
Speaker 2: clearly it's built upon the Star Wars universe, but a
Speaker 2: universe like the Star Wars universe is kind of limitless,
Speaker 2: so yeah, you can build out other things that draw
Speaker 2: on the existing Star Wars lore, but but generate new
Speaker 2: ideas as well. And then the other one. I think
Speaker 2: this was earlier. It was a really wild take on
Speaker 2: Pokemon that they had with another friend that was super
Speaker 2: into Pokemon at the time, and they would describe these
Speaker 2: epic wars between Pokemon factions and like an evil Pikachu.
Speaker 2: It was really wild, and at the time it was
Speaker 2: like it was at times it was a little much.
Speaker 2: I was like, this Pikachu is an ally, guys, what
Speaker 2: are you doing.
Speaker 3: Is evil Pikachu already a thing? Or is that that's
Speaker 3: purely original?
Speaker 2: I mean, Pikachu's been around long enough. I imagine all
Speaker 2: variations possible have been dreamt off. Pikachu, I'm sure has
Speaker 2: played a role in various paracosms.
Speaker 3: I am Pikachu, I contain multitudes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for some reason, these kids didn't like Pikachu. I
Speaker 2: think they didn't like Pikachu's fame, like Pikachu being the
Speaker 2: most famous of the Pokemon. But they love Piachu, the
Speaker 2: 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 developed different mental and physical capabilit Something interesting that
Speaker 3: this twenty twenty four paper did was get really granular
Speaker 3: in that specific regard breaking pretend to play down into
Speaker 3: lots of different categories, in fact, into nineteen different categories
Speaker 3: of activity, and then they did a large survey of
Speaker 3: the parents of about nine hundred kids between the ages
Speaker 3: of four months old to forty seven months, which is
Speaker 3: just shy four years old, to try to get fine
Speaker 3: detail on when parents observed all these different types of
Speaker 3: pretend play first manifesting. Now you might think nineteen different
Speaker 3: types of pretending, like, how do you get to that?
Speaker 3: Like beyond the banana phone, I don't know what else
Speaker 3: is there? You got imaginary friends, banana phone, I'm a lion,
Speaker 3: what's left? And it's true that some of these categories
Speaker 3: they explore are kind of overlapping or are kind of
Speaker 3: subdivisions of activities we've already talked about into two different subtypes,
Speaker 3: but I still thought it was really interesting, and this
Speaker 3: brought up stuff that I had actually observed with my
Speaker 3: own daughter but had sort of forgotten about in our
Speaker 3: earlier discussions of pretend play from this series. So I
Speaker 3: want to look through this list of play activities from
Speaker 3: the paper.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, this will be fun, because, yeah, I
Speaker 2: 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
Speaker 3: asleep or pretending to sneeze when you don't actually have
Speaker 3: to sneeze. Somewhat similar but a little bit different is
Speaker 3: pretending to cry.
Speaker 2: Hmm, okay, there are different dynamics to all of these,
Speaker 2: because you know, you can pretend to cry and work
Speaker 2: yourself up to a real cry. Oh sure, I don't
Speaker 2: know if you can do that with a sneeze. Maybe
Speaker 2: there's been research into this. Likewise, you can pretend to
Speaker 2: be 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 empty cup. Then there
Speaker 3: is pretending empty vessels are full on another, I feed
Speaker 3: my doll from this empty cup, or I try to
Speaker 3: make Dad drink from this empty cup, and then finally
Speaker 3: pretending empty vessels are full on many others. So I'm
Speaker 3: feeding many different toys or people in this manner.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, looking back that I remember doing a lot
Speaker 2: of sampling of various food, imaginary food, or drinks that
Speaker 2: my 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 2: Okay, finger guns wouldnt imagine Okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Then after that you got one that will be
Speaker 3: more familiar to us. Pretending to be an object like
Speaker 3: I am a tree.
Speaker 2: There is pretend what I'm sorry, I'm just imagining that
Speaker 2: pretend gang, gotcha.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very Yeah, I don't know, it's more complex
Speaker 3: than you might think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for the quiet kids.
Speaker 3: There's pretending to be an animal like I am a
Speaker 3: bunny rabbit.
Speaker 2: This was huge with my child until really very recently.
Speaker 2: There would often be request to play zookeeper at playground
Speaker 2: where I would have to be a zookeeper doing a
Speaker 2: British accent, like a like an Attenborough type accent, describing
Speaker 2: nature documentary style what the animal is doing while they
Speaker 2: 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 2: Interesting, all right, And so this is casual object substitution,
Speaker 2: So imagine this is different. This differs from something that
Speaker 2: I saw later on with my child where they would
Speaker 2: craft a pretend telephone or a pretend computer or a
Speaker 2: pretend Nintendo switch out of like cardboard and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah yeah, And I guess you get into the example
Speaker 2: that I already brought up about the lightsabers building a
Speaker 2: 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. Okay, I don't think we
Speaker 3: did that one. And then there are further distinctions about
Speaker 3: the social context. There's pretending alone versus pretending with somebody else.
Speaker 3: And I guess those two categories could apply to any
Speaker 3: of the above categories we mentioned. Beyond this, there is
Speaker 3: what the authors call socio dramatic pretending. This means creating
Speaker 3: not just a single action in pretense, but creating a
Speaker 3: more elaborate pretend story. So maybe not just like I
Speaker 3: am Grandpa, I pour tea like Grandpa. Instead it's like
Speaker 3: I am Grandpa and I want to go to the
Speaker 3: store to buy candy for my doggie. But on the
Speaker 3: way to the store, I get attacked by pirates and
Speaker 3: my doggie gets hurt and I have to put a
Speaker 3: band aid on my doggie. So he can feel better,
Speaker 3: and then we all go swimming in the lake, and
Speaker 3: you know, and so forth after that. There is pretending
Speaker 3: to be fantasy characters already existing in culture, like you know,
Speaker 3: I am Princess Leiah, I am Batman, I am Santa Claus,
Speaker 3: that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And obviously we encourage that across the board, yes, you know,
Speaker 2: and for children and adults, you know, certainly get into
Speaker 2: that dressing up as these various characters. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: think I think a lot of us very much encouraged
Speaker 2: 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
Speaker 3: is I thought this was an interesting distinction. There is
Speaker 3: pretending to do real activities that are not available to
Speaker 3: most people most of the time, So real activities but
Speaker 3: not every day activities. And examples of this might be
Speaker 3: I am a rocket ship commander. That's a real thing,
Speaker 3: but most people don't do that. I am a pop
Speaker 3: singer and I'm on TV in front of millions. That's
Speaker 3: a real thing. Most people don't do it. So that's
Speaker 3: distinct from both fantasy activities and from everyday activities like
Speaker 3: driving or cooking.
Speaker 2: One of my kids friends would pretend to open their
Speaker 2: own bank.
Speaker 3: That's sort of in the category.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'd make their own money. I think I still
Speaker 2: have some of their pretend bills around here somewhere in
Speaker 2: 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. You know, I ride a
Speaker 3: dragon through the sky and I use magic to transform
Speaker 3: people into cats and that sort of thing. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: I really liked this granular attention to detail in the
Speaker 3: different ways that pretend to play can manifest. And this
Speaker 3: paper actually developed a new tool for asking participant parents
Speaker 3: 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: report 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. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And on top of that, this reminds me of
Speaker 2: an example from some studies we're talking about with imaginary friends,
Speaker 2: where it was pointed out that, ay, you want to
Speaker 2: talk to the kid and the adult, but when you
Speaker 2: ask the kid about their imaginary friends, they might just
Speaker 2: create one right there on the spot.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that's a great example of where it's also good
Speaker 2: to chat with the parent and they'll be like, I've
Speaker 2: never heard of mister Bongos. I think they made mister
Speaker 2: bongoes up like literally just now for fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you brought up the idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, you let mister Bond 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 do 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 cups pretend play. The EPs found that
Speaker 3: this happens early, with like half of kids doing it
Speaker 3: by around thirteen months of age, and then the other
Speaker 3: thing before object substitution is by around fifteen months, half
Speaker 3: of kids have shown some signs of pretending with their
Speaker 3: own body, such as pretending to be in a different
Speaker 3: state like pretending to sleep or pretending to sneeze, or
Speaker 3: pretending to be something else with their body like I
Speaker 3: am a tiger, I'm growling, roar, And then it's by
Speaker 3: seventeen months of age or so that half had shown
Speaker 3: signs of object substitution. So this does agree in part
Speaker 3: with the schedule we've been talking about before, where object
Speaker 3: substitution shows up on average about one and a half
Speaker 3: years old, but finds that some types of pretend play
Speaker 3: tend to happen even earlier than object substitution. And though
Speaker 3: I didn't really think much about either of these earlier examples,
Speaker 3: now that I reflect on it, I have to question
Speaker 3: myself because you know, my memory is involved, and who
Speaker 3: knows what I'm being primed to misremember here? But I
Speaker 3: think this squares exactly with my own experience as the
Speaker 3: parent of a toddler, Like I have a two year
Speaker 3: old right now, and my memory may begin correct, But
Speaker 3: I think before my daughter ever pretended one object was another,
Speaker 3: she would pretend to sneeze and pretend to be asleep,
Speaker 3: and also pretend to eat or drink things that were
Speaker 3: not really there, and she thought it was hilarious with
Speaker 3: most of these.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't remember how this shook out with my
Speaker 2: 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 imaginative, 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 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 2: Yeah, yeah, like twelve or thirteen, Yeah, somewhere in that range. So,
Speaker 2: and I guess that makes sense if you're looking at
Speaker 2: this as like a general progression of one's use of imagination,
Speaker 2: that that would continue a little bit, a little bit
Speaker 2: 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, again,
Speaker 3: these differences are not huge, but that's interesting. Why would
Speaker 3: pretending be happening a little bit more, a little bit
Speaker 3: earlier in girls and in children of younger parents. In
Speaker 3: both cases, it's not known with high confidence what explains it,
Speaker 3: but the authors offer a couple of informed guesses. In
Speaker 3: their discussion section as to the gender distinction, they relate
Speaker 3: this possibly to the fact that at both Well, first
Speaker 3: of all, they say that this sort of correlates to
Speaker 3: previous findings in other studies that both in the toddler
Speaker 3: age and in the primary school age, girls have been
Speaker 3: found to engage in a little bit more fantasy play
Speaker 3: on average than boys do, and that they're also a
Speaker 3: little bit more likely to create imaginary companions. They cite
Speaker 3: several papers to that regard, and so like, what would
Speaker 3: be the explanation, Well, it's possible, again not known for sure,
Speaker 3: that this could be related to language skills. In some cases,
Speaker 3: girls acquire language skills on a slightly accelerated timeline, and
Speaker 3: it could be that language development is related to pretending.
Speaker 3: But again the differences are not huge, and it's not
Speaker 3: known for sure why this would be. Similar question with
Speaker 3: the thing about us younger parents having slightly more pretending
Speaker 3: happening earlier the author's right quote. Perhaps younger parents spend
Speaker 3: more time pretending with their children, allowing more opportunities for
Speaker 3: parents to observe or even scaffold pretending, So that could
Speaker 3: make sense, like if there's more co pretending between the
Speaker 3: parent and child happening. That could affect the survey results
Speaker 3: in multiple ways. It could mean that the child is
Speaker 3: actually doing more pretending because they're getting more practice with
Speaker 3: an adult present. Or it could mean that the children
Speaker 3: are pretending the same amount, but the parents are observing
Speaker 3: it happen more and thus they're reporting it more on
Speaker 3: the surveys.
Speaker 2: But I guess I'm still kind of foggy as to
Speaker 2: how this would shake out between younger and older parents,
Speaker 2: not just because I was am was and was an
Speaker 2: older parent, but I'm just wondering, like, what's what would
Speaker 2: 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 there was somewhere in
Speaker 3: there that got lost from but they could have some
Speaker 3: data indicating that, on average, younger parents spend more time
Speaker 3: pretending with kids. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I guess the most obvious
Speaker 2: possible explanation for that, one might think, I would be
Speaker 2: like work responsibilities, But I can just you know, just
Speaker 2: shooting from the hip here, I can think of various
Speaker 2: scenarios in which younger parents would be working more. But
Speaker 2: then also examples where maybe younger parents have more free
Speaker 2: time to spend with the kid, Like, I don't know
Speaker 2: it just I guess I'm not sure how the generalities
Speaker 2: that they're dealing with here would really pan out. But
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure it's based on some findings and
Speaker 2: some statistical information.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so it's the slight correlation having to do
Speaker 3: with the age of the parents is just what they
Speaker 3: observed in the sample. I guess the part about that
Speaker 3: having anything to do with parents spending time pretending with
Speaker 3: the kids is just an informed guess, So who knows
Speaker 3: what the real reason was.
Speaker 2: I guess the other possibility would be older parents have
Speaker 2: already had additional children and then therefore there's less attention
Speaker 2: to go around.
Speaker 3: Possibly. Yeah. So, as I said, none of these differences
Speaker 3: were huge, and I guess we don't really know for
Speaker 3: sure why they manifest in this fairly large sample. But
Speaker 3: one thing I thought was interesting about the study was
Speaker 3: just coming back to the kind of granular detail tracking
Speaker 3: these different types of play emergence with a finer attention
Speaker 3: to the variations in the style of play, Like, I
Speaker 3: don't think otherwise I would have noticed that it's so
Speaker 3: common to pretend to cup has something in it. Like
Speaker 3: that feels like such a specific thing. But it's interesting
Speaker 3: that it's observed so often they had to give it
Speaker 3: its own category. I mean, you could just think of
Speaker 3: that as a kind of like invisible object play. But
Speaker 3: I guess it's so common that it is different than
Speaker 3: like I'm using an invisible toothbrush. It seems like, 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 2: I'll occasionally do that as a grown up, pretended there's
Speaker 2: something in a cup and pretend to drink it, mainly
Speaker 2: if I'm at some sort of like a social function,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, And and the cup is not clear
Speaker 2: to be to be clear, the cup has to cannot
Speaker 2: be made of trans translucent plastic. But you know, I've
Speaker 2: consumed everything in the cup, and I want to continue
Speaker 2: to have like the gesture of drinking it. Yeah, to
Speaker 2: do something with my hand. I may engage in that
Speaker 2: level of play slash deception.
Speaker 3: Sipping from a cup is part of the rhythm of
Speaker 3: conversation at a party.
Speaker 2: And if you're out of out of a beverage, I mean,
Speaker 2: you're out of options, right, Yeah, so sometimes you've got
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah. I got interested in the angle of pretend play
Speaker 2: and play and creativity in adults and other ages in
Speaker 2: addition to childhood and early adolescents. And part of this
Speaker 2: was my wife's suggestion. She was like, well, that would
Speaker 2: be an interesting angle. So it's like, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 2: sounds that sounds sounds fascinating, and so I'm not really
Speaker 2: going to get into a lot of like specific studies.
Speaker 2: Maybe that'll be something I can get into in the
Speaker 2: next episode, But I ended up looking at material that's
Speaker 2: really tackling the idea of pretend play and adults more oddly. So,
Speaker 2: obviously we've been discussing the idea of pretend play as
Speaker 2: a manifestation of developing creativity, and I think that's perfectly valid.
Speaker 2: That's often how it is understood. Childhood psychologist lev Vygotsky,
Speaker 2: who lived eighteen ninety six through nineteen thirty four, outlined
Speaker 2: a three step creativity development process creative imagination in childhood,
Speaker 2: imagination and thought coming together in adolescence, and finally the
Speaker 2: individual enters into adulthood quote where experience creativity is directed
Speaker 2: and used with purpose. I was reading about this in
Speaker 2: an article by Sinha at All twenty twenties, playing with
Speaker 2: creativity across the life span. This was in tech trends
Speaker 2: linking research and practice to improve learning. Now, as you
Speaker 2: can always already imagine, we'll get into some of the
Speaker 2: ideas around this. This is kind of, I think, from
Speaker 2: our modern perspective limiting understanding of creativity, the idea of
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, being creative just for the sake of fun.
Speaker 2: That was all right when you were younger, But now
Speaker 2: you're a grown up. How is it going to produce funds?
Speaker 2: How are you going to make money off of that?
Speaker 2: Or change the world for the better, and so forth.
Speaker 2: Your creativity has to be put to work. That horse
Speaker 2: isn't 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 2: Yeah, okay, Yeah, he positive that childhood fantasy and imagination
Speaker 2: were essentially catalysts for adult creativity, which would which was
Speaker 2: seen as more purposeful, you know, like and you know,
Speaker 2: I think there are some valid arguments for that as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously when we become adults and we engage
Speaker 2: in cultures and a society that often puts an emphasis
Speaker 2: again on making money, and also legitimately like taking things
Speaker 2: you're good at and have a passion for, and finding
Speaker 2: 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 2: But yeah, this purpose aspect is interesting and something discussed
Speaker 2: at length in that paper I just cited. Apparently, some
Speaker 2: definitions of creativity stress, usefulness and effectiveness is criteria for creativity,
Speaker 2: tying into Vagotsky's take on adult creativity. Other models call
Speaker 2: for dual aspects of novelty or originality and usefulness or effectiveness.
Speaker 2: And when you start talking about effectiveness and usefulness as well,
Speaker 2: especially more recent understandings of it, there's more room for
Speaker 2: 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 2: Not?
Speaker 3: Usually it could be Usually.
Speaker 2: That's your creativity challenge for the day, make it a
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, and it's good. It's interesting when we get into
Speaker 2: like what does that mean for it to do something right,
Speaker 2: to do something useful? As discussed in this paper, childhood
Speaker 2: psychologist doctor Sandra Russ proposes a slightly different definition for
Speaker 2: creativity and with a different emphasis on what some of
Speaker 2: the key aspects mean. So she defines it as it
Speaker 2: needs to be novel, it needs to be effective, and
Speaker 2: it needs to be whole. So she argues that, especially
Speaker 2: with children, we can't put much weight on the importance
Speaker 2: or usefulness of any of this, right, like how useful
Speaker 2: is a child's paracosm, How useful is a child's imaginary friend.
Speaker 2: But the big thing that she stresses is play is
Speaker 2: the product. It is. It is an output of how
Speaker 2: they think and feel. Multiple aspects of a child's being
Speaker 2: are involved in the act of play. And uh, and
Speaker 2: I believe that is what's meant by wholeness here. Uh
Speaker 2: the idea that like that, yes, with an act of
Speaker 2: creativity is not just this like leakage of energy from
Speaker 2: your psyche, you know. And I think this whole this
Speaker 2: holds true for children and adults as well. Discussed like
Speaker 2: when when you're engaging and create a creative output like
Speaker 2: that is it's like the output of your being, you know,
Speaker 2: it is like not to get to you know, wax
Speaker 2: too poetic about it. But I mean, it's like a
Speaker 2: light shining out of your soul and your your mind.
Speaker 2: It's it's not just this shadow that happens to be
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, I believe. I believe she's a pretty big name
Speaker 2: 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 to this concept of wholeness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And you know, and looking around, I'm not
Speaker 2: sure how often she uses the term wholeness, but they
Speaker 2: reference whole. They had kind of some wholeness up as
Speaker 2: being an aspect of her definition. Oh okay, And I
Speaker 2: do think that that plays out with what she's stressing here.
Speaker 2: But you know, even in adults, though, the way we
Speaker 2: think of usefulness or to you know, to use Russ's
Speaker 2: model usefulness or effectiveness. It varies from field to field.
Speaker 2: In this paper, they broadly address different forms of creativity,
Speaker 2: invoking the four C creative creativity model by James C.
Speaker 2: Kaufman and doctor Ronald Baghetto. Have we talked about this before?
Speaker 3: I don't know. We've been doing the show a long time,
Speaker 3: so I can't always recall.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I forget whole episodes sometimes.
Speaker 3: But I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels fresh to my mind. So basically, the
Speaker 2: way the four C creativity model plays out is that
Speaker 2: you have four different modes of creativity. First of all,
Speaker 2: you have big C creativity. This is landmark work that
Speaker 2: changes a field or changes the world. So like big
Speaker 2: C creativity would be like I have invented the steam engine,
Speaker 2: or I have I present you with a new religious
Speaker 2: model and spiritual model for your way of life, something
Speaker 2: like that, huge impact.
Speaker 3: General theory of relativity or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Then you have little C creativity and this is
Speaker 2: still this is work that has strong interpersonal value. It's additive,
Speaker 2: it's cumulative, and we can think of various examples of
Speaker 2: this as well. I mean I think, like a great book,
Speaker 2: but not a book so great that it changes the
Speaker 2: world might fit under little C creativity if I'm understanding
Speaker 2: the concept correctly, or I would say not even they
Speaker 2: don't even think about greatness. But a book you like
Speaker 2: has you know, strong personal value and you know you
Speaker 2: share that with others and so forth. Then you have
Speaker 2: pro c creativity. This is not game changing, but it's
Speaker 2: effective and beneficial within a given field. So you know,
Speaker 2: a new means of doing something, some new innovation within
Speaker 2: a given field.
Speaker 3: Okay, and then you have many.
Speaker 2: Creativity, And this is an interpersonal creativity that is a
Speaker 2: part of the learning process. So my understanding on this,
Speaker 2: like to draw an example from like our daily work
Speaker 2: pretty much is like sometimes when we run across a
Speaker 2: new concept, we kind of have to make sense of
Speaker 2: it ourselves, and we'll sort of turn to some sort
Speaker 2: of a personal novel metaphor for how it works, you know,
Speaker 2: like compare it to a Santo movie or what have you.
Speaker 2: You know, So we're engaging and many see creativity according
Speaker 2: to this model here. You know, it's it's not going
Speaker 2: to change the world, it's not trying to change the world.
Speaker 2: It's not really innovating anything, but it's helping us in
Speaker 2: a learning process, Like it does have value within the
Speaker 2: way that our mind is working. It's helping us roll
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, but an important thing they stress is that any
Speaker 2: kind of creativity is going to start out novel and personal.
Speaker 2: So you know, a many create many C creativity project
Speaker 2: could become a pro C, could become a little C,
Speaker 2: could become a big C, and so forth. So I
Speaker 2: think it's a pretty useful idea for and certainly gives
Speaker 2: it a little more nuanced to the idea of like
Speaker 2: what is the enterprise of creativity and what role does
Speaker 2: it play? So applying all of this to adults, the
Speaker 2: idea that Russ and the paper proposes here is that, yes,
Speaker 2: childhood creativity has an influence on adult creativity. But we
Speaker 2: can't just think about creativity in adults as you know,
Speaker 2: just in terms of its usefulness like in the workplace
Speaker 2: or for a career. Again, we can't just think of
Speaker 2: it as strapping that horse to a cart play in particular,
Speaker 2: they stress for children and adults, allows us to process
Speaker 2: challenges and emotions while also supporting other forms of creativity.
Speaker 2: So again, a mini C exercise could transition into a
Speaker 2: pro s or any of the other forms of creativity.
Speaker 2: You know, to quote Lawrence of Arabia, big things have
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And one of the big ideas
Speaker 2: here is that most of us are not getting gauge
Speaker 2: and big C creativity. Most of us are not going
Speaker 2: to create a new religion, create some sort of new technology.
Speaker 2: It changes the world. We're not going to, you know,
Speaker 2: write the great American novel or what have you. But
Speaker 2: those little C and many C exercises they're still novel,
Speaker 2: they're still useful, and they're still whole. So in this
Speaker 2: paper they make several observations about adult play during COVID
Speaker 2: nineteen lockdowns, you know, taking us back to that time
Speaker 2: in which you know, we can I think everyone listening
Speaker 2: can probably remember that. You know, you had many adults
Speaker 2: suddenly dealing with more free time, but also expressing themselves
Speaker 2: through play and even process emotions and even trauma through
Speaker 2: that play in addition to nurturing joy. You know, So
Speaker 2: suddenly people who had the ability to do so, you know,
Speaker 2: they might suddenly they're playing more Dudges and Dragons than usual,
Speaker 2: or they're they're turning back to an old hobby. And yeah,
Speaker 2: part of that is like maybe they had some extra
Speaker 2: time they were trapped in their home and so forth.
Speaker 2: But additionally, like the creative process gave them a way
Speaker 2: to work through what they were feeling. So in this
Speaker 2: paper from Sinha at All, they write the following quote
Speaker 2: as human beings. We are programmed to use play in
Speaker 2: creative expression to connect and work through the difficulties. Creativity
Speaker 2: is not just about finding solutions to problems. It is
Speaker 2: about expressing emotion and processing change. Now does it involve
Speaker 2: pretend play? Coming back to the overarching theme of these episodes? Subjectively,
Speaker 2: my argument was, yes, you know, I was thinking about
Speaker 2: various games, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, or otherwise various
Speaker 2: creative endeavors one might engage in. But I also found
Speaker 2: literature that lines up with this too. Oh okay, I
Speaker 2: was looking at a paper this is by Gungku at
Speaker 2: All published in Topoi, an international review of philosophy from
Speaker 2: two thousand and five, titled Pretend Play as a lifespan Activity,
Speaker 2: and the authors here argue that pretend play is an
Speaker 2: adaptive human activity of adulthood as well as childhood. They
Speaker 2: point out that a lot of the early work in
Speaker 2: childhood psychology creative view in which childhood is playful and fanciful,
Speaker 2: while adult adulthood is all logical and productive. We touched
Speaker 2: on that already, the idea that okay, you're grown up
Speaker 2: and now put your creativity to work again. Creativity and
Speaker 2: adults was seen as is useful almost always in a
Speaker 2: big sea or at least little sea aspiring manner. The
Speaker 2: authors here, though, argue the opposite, that pretend play can
Speaker 2: be found throughout adult life as well, and they point
Speaker 2: to adult improv theater as a key example of this. Now, granted,
Speaker 2: not everyone engages in improv theater, but it has been
Speaker 2: interesting in recent years to see improv theater and it's
Speaker 2: often brought in to say, business spaces and so forth,
Speaker 2: realizing that it is a fun and helpful skill set
Speaker 2: 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: 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 2: Now, there's at least a patina of pretend play involved here. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Whereas in an improv class you might literally be pretending
Speaker 2: to be a dump truck in a way if that
Speaker 2: most most non improv adults are not doing, but very
Speaker 2: much in line with the kind of pretend play a
Speaker 2: child might engage in.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. And there is something 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 2: Now that this paper does not get into it, but
Speaker 2: of course I'm also reminded of various observations about other
Speaker 2: forms of acting in which there can be kind of
Speaker 2: a contagious aspect to the part one is playing and
Speaker 2: one's own thoughts and actions. So, I mean, I guess
Speaker 2: you especially when adults, I mean to a certain extent,
Speaker 2: when kids pretend play. You know, sometimes animal simulations can
Speaker 2: get a little out of hand and mom and dad
Speaker 2: might get scratched or bit But but but on a
Speaker 2: on another level, there's always that possibility with adult actors
Speaker 2: as well. Now, I think it's an interesting comparison between
Speaker 2: improv theater and childhood pretend play. I think kids are
Speaker 2: sometimes not as good at the yes and aspect of improv.
Speaker 2: That's you know, central to the philosophy of improv. But
Speaker 2: you know, I think that's on another level, that's often
Speaker 2: one of the big lessons that they learn when they
Speaker 2: play with others. I mean, there's a lot of research
Speaker 2: on this as well. We didn't know I haven't really
Speaker 2: got into this, but you have like parallel play kids
Speaker 2: where it's like little Susie and little Bobby. They are
Speaker 2: not really playing together. They are both playing with dump
Speaker 2: trucks in the sand, but they're just kind of playing
Speaker 2: alongside each other. And thank goodness they both have dump trucks,
Speaker 2: because otherwise they would be a fight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I can see, yes. And as a form
Speaker 3: of sharing, I mean it as a way of give
Speaker 3: and take and of sharing, not the physical props of play,
Speaker 3: if you have to share your one dump truck toy,
Speaker 3: but of sharing the direction of the play, sharing the narrative.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If it's for example, if you're engaging in an
Speaker 2: imagine shared world, in a paracosm, Yeah, you have to
Speaker 2: share that, like one person can't be just be the
Speaker 2: god of this realm. I guess there's room for maybe
Speaker 2: a you know, forty sixty split there on creative control
Speaker 2: of the paracosm.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But another way that the improv theater example I think
Speaker 2: is interesting is that it's an example where adults often
Speaker 2: or at least sometimes have to relearn how to engage
Speaker 2: in pure imagination play. You know a lot of you
Speaker 2: hear plenty of accounts of adults who take an improv
Speaker 2: class and it's like they're one over by it. You know,
Speaker 2: it transforms them, like they're able to reconnect with this
Speaker 2: this creative energy that they hadn't had, perhaps since they
Speaker 2: were kids, and this all kind of ties into that
Speaker 2: whole idea of creativity as being this expression of the whole.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not just this thing you know, you
Speaker 2: do you know in this one exercise like it is
Speaker 2: you know, it is a way that you're able to
Speaker 2: process things and let things out. Now another example that
Speaker 2: they bring up. This one was really fascinating in part
Speaker 2: because we already kind of stumbled over this a little
Speaker 2: bit when we were talking about imaginary friends. We were
Speaker 2: talking about, Okay, what do adults engage in that are
Speaker 2: akin to imaginary friends? And we talked about things like
Speaker 2: speaking to angels and shouting at the devil and so forth.
Speaker 2: But the example brought up in this paper is that
Speaker 2: you will have the situation of adults engaging in conversation
Speaker 2: with the dead had a grave site, for example, adults
Speaker 2: essentially engaging in a conversation with an imagined or simulated mind.
Speaker 2: And this was an idea that was apparently discussed in
Speaker 2: a paper by I. E. Josephson nineteen ninety eight titled
Speaker 2: constructing Oneself 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 extremely important relationship with her with her mother's grave,
Speaker 3: essentially with her mother was an important writer in her
Speaker 3: own right, Mary Wollstonecraft, and she would visit her mother's
Speaker 3: grave and like apparently had a strong, powerful emotional relationship
Speaker 3: with her mother's tombstone, would sort of like talk to
Speaker 3: and relate to her mother who died after giving birth
Speaker 3: to her.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, and I feel like a lot of us, yeah,
Speaker 2: can speak to examples of this the way that gunku
Speaker 2: at All sum this up, They say, quote, these conversations
Speaker 2: enable the grieving survivors to reinterpret their joint past with
Speaker 2: the deceased, as they also help them prepare for the future,
Speaker 2: a finding that is corroborated by other clinical studies.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I feel like a lot of us can
Speaker 2: can speak to this on some level. I've certainly engaged
Speaker 2: in this before, speaking to the dead, reaching for the dead,
Speaker 2: particularly at a gravesite. Yeah. And I want to stress again,
Speaker 2: as we've touched on this many times on the show,
Speaker 2: that we as humans are capable of juggling multiple and
Speaker 2: even contradicting ideas about say the persistence of consciousness. Have
Speaker 2: you contradicting ideas in your head, multiple of them at once.
Speaker 2: You know, standing at the grave of a loved one,
Speaker 2: you might at once feel as if you were speaking
Speaker 2: to a person who is in the past. You know,
Speaker 2: you're speaking you're a person who only exists in memory.
Speaker 2: You may also feel in another level like you are
Speaker 2: speaking to the ghost of a loved one that is
Speaker 2: spiritually present, like in a movie about a ghost, or
Speaker 2: someone who is there but invisible, like in other movies
Speaker 2: about ghosts. I mean, you really can't discount the power
Speaker 2: that say, ghost movies have on these sort of like
Speaker 2: almost subconscious ideas about the deceased and the role that
Speaker 2: they have in our lives. You might see them as
Speaker 2: a spirit of a loved one that is now residing
Speaker 2: in another realm of existence. You know, the idea that
Speaker 2: well they're looking down on me and so forth. You also,
Speaker 2: on some level, maybe even like front loaded, you might
Speaker 2: be thinking, well, this is just an empty, corporeal vessel,
Speaker 2: like there's there's nothing here. I am just engaging in
Speaker 2: this idea of the person that is passed. And then yeah,
Speaker 2: ultimately you might think of it all, I'm dealing with
Speaker 2: a mental simulation of the deceased via theory of mind.
Speaker 3: Hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for something as deeply personal and emotional as
Speaker 2: a grave side conversation with the deata, I think it's
Speaker 2: fair to accept that any number of these can be
Speaker 2: in play, and we shouldn't be dismissive of any of them,
Speaker 2: at least from an emotional standpoint, you know. But I
Speaker 2: think it's a great concept concerning the power of human
Speaker 2: imagination and our engagement with simulated realities as a means
Speaker 2: of processing and evaluating feelings, and as an expression of
Speaker 2: wholeness and creativity. You know. So you know it is.
Speaker 2: It is ultimately a kind of pretend play, but pretend
Speaker 2: play that you know, has very high emotional stakes. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, it's not useful in the in
Speaker 2: the sense that it is going to change the world
Speaker 2: or generate income. But it can be highly useful depending
Speaker 2: on the individual obviously in the situation, like for their
Speaker 2: their their own feeling, and for their own sense of
Speaker 2: 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 wounds of her toys, and she she
Speaker 3: gets kind of sadness in her boy, you know, she's like,
Speaker 3: oh he you know, dinosaur, her need feel better. And
Speaker 3: that 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. 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 for 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 2: Yeah. Yeah, so at any rate, Yeah, these, like I say,
Speaker 2: I thought I was going to get more into sort
Speaker 2: of granular discussions of you know, of adult imagination play
Speaker 2: and like the benefits of engaging maybe in something like
Speaker 2: improv theater. And yeah, I realized this all ended up
Speaker 2: being a little bit broader and a little bit more philosophic,
Speaker 2: But I thought it was really fascinating and it made
Speaker 2: me sort of rethink a lot of what I thought
Speaker 2: I knew about creativity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I think we're going to go ahead
Speaker 2: and close this episode out, and we're thinking we're going
Speaker 2: to be back with one more of these, because there's
Speaker 2: still plenty to talk about and in the meantime, we'd
Speaker 2: love to hear from all of you. I know we
Speaker 2: have some people out there who are improv actors or
Speaker 2: certainly have taken an improv class or two, or done
Speaker 2: a little improv maybe in a college acting class. Tell
Speaker 2: us about it. How do your experiences line up with
Speaker 2: what we've been discussing here, any other of your thoughts, experiences,
Speaker 2: and so forth concerning this episode or the previous episodes
Speaker 2: in the pretend play series right in, We would love
Speaker 2: to hear from you. And oh and as always, if
Speaker 2: you want what you share to be to not be
Speaker 2: shared in a future listener mail episode, let us know
Speaker 2: and we'll honor that. Likewise, if you would like to
Speaker 2: use a pseudonym, you know, just let us know as well.
Speaker 2: Just tell 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.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, absolutely all right, Just a reminder. Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Core
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Speaker 3: Content huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
Speaker 3: JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
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