Pretend Play, Part 4
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today we return with the fourth installment in our discussion of pretend play. Play that involves non-literal action and understanding. So when I pretend my fingers are worms crawling up the side of the couch, that's going on in our house this week, by the way. Fingers are worms. Fingers are worms.

Or when I pretend a cardboard box becomes the Castle Greyskull. Or when I change the diaper on a stuffed velociraptor. Or if I go on adventures in the backyard with an imaginary friend. These are all forms of pretend play. Play that takes place within a pretend frame and treats anything in the world or in the situation as other than what it literally is.

Now, if you haven't heard the previous parts in this series, I think this is one where we really would recommend listening in order. We're going to be building on some conversations we had in previous episodes today. But in those previous installments, to refresh, we talked about ways that researchers define and subdivide pretend play into activities like object substitution. So one of our favorite examples is banana is a telephone. They talk about that a lot in the research.

enactment play where you might be, you know, I am cooking dinner in my play kitchen, replica play where you have my toy Triceratops is cooking dinner in the dollhouse, imaginary companions and other things. We talked about possible links explored in the research between pretend play and the development of advanced cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind.

Addressing the question of whether pretending might help children develop some of those important faculties, or at least whether pretending and those faculties might draw on the same underlying neural structures. In part two, we talked in more depth about research on imaginary friends and imaginary companions, how often they manifest within and across different cultures, what forms they take, what children believe they know, and things like that. In the most recent episode, we looked at

more at the question of how adult culture influences pretend play among children, noting that while pretending does appear to be basically universal, there is pretty wide variation in how much children play pretend and in the themes of the pretend play. And in some particular cases, in the framing of whether pretend entities are understood as real in some important way or not.

And then last time we also examined the fascinating phenomenon of paracosms, essentially extending the concept of an imaginary friend to where it is not only a single character or playmate, but an entire imaginary world, maybe with its own geography, culture, populations, and rules. And we discussed links between a childhood tendency to generate paracosms and things like creativity in later life.

Yeah, yeah. And I have a paracosm update here. Oh, really? Yeah, because after we'd record this, I realized, well, my child is 12 and almost 13, which places them toward the end of what is broadly considered the paracosm period for kids. So I asked them the next morning over breakfast, I was like, I know you had some pretend worlds and or have pretend worlds that you sometimes engage with other friends. Tell me about them.

And so they laid it all out for me. They said there are two pretend worlds, both of them social in nature, that they shared with one particular other friend. So one of these with one friend is essentially an extrapolation of Star Wars. They said it's different planets set in the Old Republic era on which Jedis have adventures.

Okay. Which I think that's a pretty good example because it's like clearly it's built upon the Star Wars universe, but a universe like the Star Wars universe is kind of limitless. So, yeah, you can build out other things that draw on the existing Star Wars lore, but generate new ideas as well. And then the other one, I think this was earlier, was a really wild take on Pokemon. Yeah.

that they had with another friend that was super into Pokemon at the time. And they would describe these epic wars between Pokemon factions. Like an evil Pikachu. It was really wild. And at the time, it was like, at times, it was a little much. I was like, Pikachu's an ally, guys. What are you doing? Yeah.

Is evil Pikachu already a thing, or is that purely original? I mean, Pikachu's been around long enough, I imagine. All variations possible have been dreamt of. Pikachu, I'm sure, has played a role in various Paracosms. I am Pikachu. I contain multitudes. Yeah, for some reason these kids didn't like Pikachu. I think they didn't like Pikachu's fame, like Pikachu being the most famous of the Pokemon. But they love Pichu.

um, the Pokemon that evolves into Pikachu. So there you go. Got to take Pikachu down a peg. I guess so. Well, obviously pretend to play is a really rich subject where we just keep finding new angles to examine and things to talk about. I don't know exactly how many parts we're going to go to here. Uh, this will be part four. We, we may actually make it to part five in this series. Uh, but there was something I wanted to address in today's episode. Um,

One reason is that one of the big overviews of pretend-to-play research addressing the links with other cognitive capacities and stuff like that, one of the big overviews we talked about, it's about 10 years old at this point. So I was looking around for some more recent research on pretend-to-play to see if there are kind of updates to any of the stuff we've already talked about. Obviously, there's new stuff coming out all the time, but one thing that caught my attention was

was when I came across an interesting write-up in Nautilus by Elena Rankin from September 2024, which was reporting on a paper published in the journal Cognitive Development the same year. And that paper was by a pair of researchers named Elena Hojka, who is affiliated with the University of Bristol, and Eloise Prutin, who at the time, I believe, was a trainee clinical psychologist at Oxford University.

And this paper is called The Early Pretending Survey, or EPS, A Reliable Parent Report Measure of Pretense-Type Development for 4- to 47-Month Olds. Now, we've already talked about a few different kinds of pretend play and how they don't all emerge at once, but rather come online at different times as a child grows up as the children develop different mental and physical capabilities.

Something interesting that this 2024 paper did was get really granular in that specific regard, breaking pretend play down into lots of different categories, in fact, into 19 different categories of activity. And then they did a large survey of the parents of about 900 kids between the ages of four months old to 47 months, which is just shy of four years old.

to try to get fine detail on when parents observed all these different types of pretend play first manifesting. Now, you might think 19 different types of pretending. Like, how do you get to that? Like beyond the banana phone? I don't know. What else is there? You got imaginary friends, banana phone. I'm a lion. What's left?

And it's true that some of these categories they explore are kind of overlapping or are kind of subdivisions of activities we've already talked about into two different subtypes. But I still thought it was really interesting. And this brought up stuff that I had actually observed previously.

with my own daughter, but had sort of forgotten about in our earlier discussions of pretend play from this series. So I want to look through this list of play activities from the paper, okay? - All right, this will be fun, 'cause yeah, I think we can compare notes in multiple ways here. - So we're gonna start with some we haven't really talked about before.

One category is pretending to be in another state. Now, that's not a state like a geographic region, a state, another state of being like pretending to be asleep or pretending to sneeze when you don't actually have to sneeze. Somewhat similar, but a little bit different is pretending to cry. OK, yeah.

There are different dynamics to all of these because, you know, you can pretend to cry and work yourself up to a real cry. Oh, sure. I don't know if you can do that with a sneeze. Maybe maybe there's been research into this. Likewise, you can pretend to be asleep and fall asleep. But yeah. OK, here's another one. Pretending to do everyday adult activities like cooking or driving. We could think of this as a kind of enactment play. So we've already talked about versions of this.

Pretending this is apparently really big. It sounds very specific, but it's a very, very commonly observed thing. Pretending empty vessels are full. So drinking from an actually empty cup or pour one example I thought of is pouring invisible cereal out of an empty cereal box into a bowl.

And this one can actually split up into three subtypes. So there is pretending empty vessels are full in relation to serving the self. Like I drink from a literally empty cup.

Then there is pretending empty vessels are full on another. I feed my doll from this empty cup or I try to make dad drink from this empty cup. And then finally, pretending empty vessels are full on many others. So I'm feeding many different toys or people in this manner. Yeah, yeah. Looking back, I remember doing a lot of sampling of various food, imaginary food or drinks that my kid had prepared. Yeah.

Another one is what the authors call gesturing an object. This would not be external object substitution, but instead things like my finger is a toothbrush, essentially mentally extending or substituting parts of the body as a pretend external object. Finger guns would count, I imagine. Yeah. Then after that, you got one that will be more familiar to us, pretending to be an object, like I am a tree.

There is pretend. What? I'm just imagining that pretend game. Gotcha. Yeah. It's very, I don't know. It's more complex than you might think. Yeah. For the quiet kids.

There's pretending to be an animal like I am a bunny rabbit. This was huge with my child until really very recently. There would often be requests to play zookeeper at playgrounds where I would have to be a zookeeper doing a British accent like an Attenborough type accent describing nature documentary style what the animal is doing while they did animal pretend play. That's beautiful. There is

classical object substitution, which we've already talked about, but they actually break this down into multiple categories. There is object substitution with nondescript props. So this might be when the literal prop is somewhat generic and versatile, like a toy block is a phone. And then there is object substitution with more specific props that are very different from the thing they're mimicking. So like toy car is a telephone. Yeah.

Interesting. And so this is casual object substitution. So I imagine this is different. This differs from something that I saw later on with my child where they would craft a pretend telephone or a pretend computer or a pretend Nintendo Switch out of like cardboard and stuff.

Like that seems more specific than what we're talking about here. Yeah, that does seem like a different thing if you're building it. That's like a like the play if the play is centered around the fabrication process. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess we get into the example that I already brought up about the lightsabers building a lightsaber help. Yeah. Okay. After this, there is pretending to be another person. This would be a really existing person like I am grandpa or I am mom. Okay.

Okay. I don't think we did that one. And then there are further distinctions about the social context. There's pretending alone versus pretending with somebody else. And I guess those two categories could apply to any of the above categories we mentioned earlier.

Beyond this, there is what the authors call socio dramatic pretending. This means creating not just a single action in pretense, but creating a more elaborate pretend story. So maybe not just like I am grandpa. I pour tea like grandpa.

Instead, it's like I am grandpa and I want to go to the store to buy candy for my doggy. But on the way to the store, I get attacked by pirates and my doggy gets hurt and I have to put a bandaid on my doggy so he can feel better. And then we all go swimming in the lake and so forth.

After that, there is pretending to be fantasy characters already existing in culture. Like, you know, I am Princess Leia. I am Batman. I am Santa Claus, that sort of thing. And obviously we encourage that across the board. Yes. You know, and for children and adults, you know, certainly get into that dressing up as these various characters. So, yeah, I think a lot of us very much encourage this sort of thing.

There is, of course, pretending to have an imaginary friend or companion. We've already talked about that a lot. There is...

I thought this was an interesting distinction. There is pretending to do real activities that are not available to most people most of the time. So real activities, but not everyday activities. And examples of this might be, I am a rocket ship commander. That's a real thing, but most people don't do that. I am a pop singer and I'm on TV in front of millions. That's a real thing. Most people don't do it. So that's distinct from both fantasy activities and

and from everyday activities like driving or cooking. One of my kids' friends would pretend to open their own bank. That's sort of in the category, yeah. They'd make their own money. I think I still have some of their pretend bills around here somewhere in one of my books. It's a bookmark. Called them Daryl Bucks.

That is curious. And then finally, you've got acting out completely made-up fantasy scenarios. You know, I ride a dragon through the sky, and I use magic to transform people into cats and that sort of thing. Yeah. ♪

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So I really liked this granular attention to detail and the different ways that pretend to play can manifest. And this paper actually developed a new tool for asking participant parents questions to track the emergence of these different pretend activities. So the tool the authors developed was called the Early Pretending Survey or EPS. And the authors tested the EPS tool.

for internal reliability, stability over time, inter-observer agreement, and they found it performed pretty well, which they leveraged to argue that the EPS could be, quote, useful for researchers to better understand how pretending relates to other areas of development, e.g. cognition and language.

Now, I can imagine we've already talked in some ways about difficulties with relying on parental reports for understanding childhood play. And those things are here as well. But I can imagine that one advantage of using parental reports in a survey as opposed to directly observing children play in a lab is.

is that the lab setting, for one thing, might change what the children do. And so relying on parental observations gives you access to how children behave in settings that are normal for them, like what they do at home or at school and in places where they normally are. I think we can all relate to the fact that when we go to an unfamiliar and maybe even uncomfortable place, we act different.

Yeah, yeah. And on top of that, this reminds me of an example from some studies we were talking about with imaginary friends.

where it was pointed out that, A, you want to talk to the kid and the adult. But when you ask the kid about their imaginary friends, they might just create one right there on the spot. So that's a great example of where it's also good to chat with the parent and they'll be like, I've never heard of Mr. Bongo's. I think they made Mr. Bongo's up like literally just now. For fun. Yeah. Because you brought up the idea. Yeah. Yeah. You let Mr. Bongo's in.

Right. So the lab, the laboratory observation setting might be a conjuring Captain Howdy kind of thing with the Ouija board.

Another big thing is that obviously having to have researchers directly observe children playing over time in a laboratory setting or any kind of whatever the controlled setting is, is just cumbersome. You know, it's like time consuming. And so a survey format allows you to gather much larger sample sizes than direct observation in a controlled setting. It's because that the latter is costly and time consuming.

So the authors administered this survey to parents primarily in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia across the years 2015 and 2016. And I was interested, what did they find? I can't discuss everything mentioned in the paper, but some of the highlights were

We've been talking. Here's one thing that's kind of surprising based on our previous discussion. We've been talking about a prevailing belief that object substitution, like, you know, banana is a phone, is usually one of the first types of pretend play observed, most often emerging at one and a half years of age or so.

But this survey found, and this agrees with some previous research, that actually there are some other types of pretend play that come even earlier, come before object substitution.

And these would be some of the more specific ones that we were talking about at the beginning of the list. The list I read earlier was roughly, roughly in the chronological order of observance. So remember the empty cups pretend play. The EPS found that this happens early with like half of kids doing it by around 13 months of age.

And then the other thing before object substitution is by around 15 months, half of kids have shown some signs of pretending with their own body, such as pretending to be in a different state, like pretending to sleep or pretending to sneeze or pretending to be something else with their body. Like I am a tiger. I'm growling roar. Right.

And then it's by 17 months of age or so that Half had shown signs of object substitution. So this does agree in part with the schedule we've been talking about before, where object substitution shows up on average about one and a half years old, but finds that some types of pretend play tend to happen even earlier than object substitution.

And though I didn't really think much about either of these earlier examples, now that I reflect on it, I have to question myself because, you know, my memory is involved and who knows what I'm being primed to misremember here. But I think this squares exactly with my own experience as the parent of a toddler. Like I have a two year old right now.

And my memory may be incorrect, but I think before my daughter ever pretended one object was another, she would pretend to sneeze and pretend to be asleep and also pretend to eat or drink things that were not really there. And she thought it was hilarious with most of these. Yeah, I don't remember how this shook out with my own kid, but in general, this does seem accurate. Yeah.

Now from here, the, uh, story-based socio-dramatic play that we were talking about, that starts to happen more when kids are around two years old, usually. And then complex make-believe fantasy concepts tend to take hold when children are around three. And of course it may be that these later play types are dependent on the development of language skills. So as children get better at, uh, using and manipulating language, that also sort of helps them construct these, uh,

abstract or counterfactual scenarios. Now, what about other general findings in this paper? Well, one thing is that within the survey range, like four months to four years, kids pretending scores steadily increased with age, which actually made me wonder, OK, if in this early period is just basically going straight up,

When do we actually see reductions in pretend play? That actually came up in the Nautilus article that I shouted out for pointing me to this research because the author of that Nautilus article cited some commentary by a researcher named Sandra Russ at Case Western.

And Russ says that it is most often around the age of nine or 10 that children start to kind of relinquish their pretend play. But of course, that can vary. And you could argue with most people it never completely goes away. Some people continue to show similar imaginative behavior into adulthood. Even if it's not exactly play like when they were a child, they might have creative hobbies like writing or art or acting, which could be in some ways an allegation.

And of course, some kids continue pretending into older ages. I think we talked about how

you know, with kids that start building paracosms, those, uh, it's, I think fairly common for those to continue from ages like eight to 12 or so. Yeah. Yeah. Like 12 or 13. Um, yeah, somewhere in that range. So, um, and, and I guess that makes sense if you're looking at, this is like a general progression of one's, uh, use of imagination, um, that that would continue a little bit, a little bit further into your development.

Any other broad differences within the children in the survey? One was that girls on average had a somewhat higher EPS score than boys, though it was a small difference. The gender difference was not huge, but it was statistically significant. And also, I thought this was interesting, children of younger parents had higher EPS scores than children of older parents. Yeah.

Now, again, these differences are not huge, but that's interesting. Why would pretending be happening a little bit more, a little bit earlier in girls and in children of younger parents?

In both cases, it's not known with high confidence what explains it, but the authors offer a couple of informed guesses in their discussion section. As to the gender distinction, they relate this possibly to the fact that at both – well, first of all, they say that this sort of correlates to previous findings in other studies that both in the toddler age and in the primary school age, girls have been found to engage in a little bit more fantasy play on average than boys do.

and that they're also a little bit more likely to create imaginary companions. They cite several papers to that regard.

And so like what would be the explanation? Well, it's possible, again, not known for sure that this could be related to language skills. In some cases, girls acquire language skills on a slightly accelerated timeline. And it could be that language development is related to pretending. But again, the differences are not huge and it's not known for sure why this would be.

Similar question with the thing about younger parents having slightly more pretending happening earlier. The authors write, quote, perhaps younger parents spend more time pretending with their children, allowing more opportunities for parents to observe or even scaffold pretending. So that could make sense. Like if there's

more co-pretending between the parent and child happening that could affect the survey results in multiple ways. It could mean that the child is actually doing more pretending because they're getting more practice with an adult present, or it could mean that the children are pretending the same amount, but the parents are observing it happen more and thus they're reporting it more on the surveys. But I guess I'm still kind of foggy as to how this would shake out between younger and older parents.

Not just because I am and was an older parent, but I'm just wondering, what would be the broad difference there? That's a good question. I don't actually know. They didn't mention it this part. Maybe it was somewhere in there that got lost for me, but they could have some data indicating that on average younger parents spend more time pretending with kids, but I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess the most obvious answer

possible explanation for that one might think of would be like work responsibilities. Yeah. But I can just, you know, just shooting from the hip here, I can think of various scenarios in which younger parents would be working more. Um,

But then also examples where maybe younger parents have more free time to spend with the kid. Like, I don't know. It just I guess I'm not sure how the generalities that they're dealing with here would really pan out. But I mean, I'm sure it's based on based on some findings and some statistical information.

Yeah. So it's the the slight correlation having to do with the age of the parents is just what they observed in the sample. I guess the part about that having anything to do with with parents spending time pretending with the kids is just an informed guess. So who knows what the real reason was? I guess the other possibility would be older parents have already had additional children and then therefore there's less attention to go around. Possibly. Yeah.

So as I said, none of these differences were huge. And I guess we don't really know for sure why they manifest in this fairly large sample. But one thing I thought was interesting about the study was just coming back to the kind of granular detail tracking,

these different types of play emergence with a finer attention to the variations in the style of play. Like, I don't think otherwise I would have noticed that it's so common to pretend a cup has something in it. Like, that feels like such a specific thing, but it's interesting that it's observed so often they had to give it its own category. I mean, you could just think of that as a kind of, like, invisible object play, but it...

I guess it's so common that it is different than like I'm using an invisible toothbrush. Like it seems like, you know, tons of kids, maybe, maybe most kids are pretending there's something in a cup when there actually isn't. I'll occasionally do that as a grownup, pretend that there's something in a cup and, uh, and pretend to drink it. Uh,

Mainly if I'm at some sort of like a social function, you know? Yeah. And the cup is not clear. To be clear, the cup has to, cannot be made of translucent plastic. But, you know, I've consumed everything in the cup and I want to continue to have like the gesture of drinking it. Yeah. To do something with my hand. Yeah.

I may engage in that level of play slash deception. Sipping from a cup is part of the rhythm of conversation at a party. Mm-hmm. And if you're out of beverage, I mean, you're out of options, right? Yeah. So sometimes you've got to pretend. ♪

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Well, so anyway, I thought that was an interesting study, but I was thinking more about the fact that they say, you know, most often the real height of childhood style pretend to play, it starts to fade around the age of nine or ten. However, of course, as we know, different types of pretending can go on for a lifetime. And I think that's related to what you wanted to talk about today, isn't it, Rob? Yeah, yeah. I got interested in...

the angle of pretend play and play and creativity in adults and other ages, in addition to childhood and early adolescence. And I, and part of this was my wife's suggestion. She was like, well, that would be an interesting angle. So I was like, yeah, yeah, that sounds, that sounds, it sounds fascinating. And so I'm not really going to get into a lot of like specific studies. I,

Maybe maybe that'll be something I can get into in the next episode, but I ended up looking at material that's really tackling the the idea of pretend play and adults more broadly. So obviously we've been discussing the idea of pretend play as a manifestation of developing creativity.

And I think that's perfectly valid. That's often how it is understood. Childhood psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who lived 1896 through 1934, outlined a three-step creativity development process. Creative imagination in childhood, imagination and thought coming together in adolescence, and finally, the individual enters into adulthood, quote, where experience creativity is directed and used with purpose. Hmm.

I was reading about this in an article by Sinha et al., 2020s, Playing with Creativity Across the Lifespan. This was in Tech Trends, Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning. Hmm.

Now, as you can always already imagine, and we'll get into some of the ideas around this, this is kind of, I think, from our modern perspective, a very limiting understanding of creativity. The idea that it's like, OK, being creative just for the sake of fun. That was all right when you were younger. But now you're a grown up. How is it going to produce funds? How are you going to make money off of that or change the world for the better and so forth? Your creativity has to be put to work.

That horse isn't wild anymore. You need to strap it to the cart. Oh, so that is the meaning of used with purpose here in this quote. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He posited that childhood fantasy and imagination were essentially catalysts for adult creativity, which would be which was seen as more purposeful, you know, like, and, you know, I think there are some some valid arguments for that as well. I mean, obviously, when we become adults and

And we engage in cultures and a society that often puts an emphasis, again, on making money and also legitimately like taking things you're good at and have a passion for and finding professions and callings in life that line up with those. You know, it's understandable. Just solving practical problems that may or may not have a strong economic component.

But yeah, this purpose aspect is interesting and something discussed at length in that paper I just cited. Apparently, some definitions of creativity stress usefulness and effectiveness as criteria for creativity, tying into Vygotsky's take on adult creativity. Other models call for dual aspects of novelty or originality and usefulness or effectiveness. And when you start talking about effectiveness...

And usefulness as well, especially in more more recent understandings of it. There's more room for nuance there. Oh, yeah. OK, so I guess this is going to the question of how do we actually define creativity? If we're trying to study it scientifically, you need a very clear and strict definition. And instead, it's one of those things that we kind of we feel it out. We know when we see it, some activity is just seems creative or doesn't.

Like writing a story is creative, but is writing a memo for work creative? Not usually. It could be. It could be, usually. That's your creativity challenge for the day. Make it a creative exercise.

I mean, I guess there's something, yeah, like these definitions mention something about novelty. So creativity is something that's kind of different or unexpected. It's not just kind of going through the motions or engaging in habits. It's doing something different and novel. But the other half of this in these definitions is kind of stressing that it's not just novelty in a kind of random sense. It's novelty that is useful or effective in some way. It does something right. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's interesting when we get into, like, what does that mean for it to do something right, to do something useful? As discussed in this paper, childhood psychologist Dr. Sandra Russ proposes a slightly different definition for creativity and with a different emphasis on what some of the key aspects mean. So she defines it as it needs to be novel, it needs to be effective, and creative.

It needs to be whole. So she argues that especially with children, we can't put much weight on the importance or usefulness of any of this, right? Like how useful is a child's paracosm? How useful is a child's imaginary friend? But the big thing that she stresses is play is the product. It is an output of how they think and feel. Multiple aspects of a child's being are involved in the act of play.

And I believe that is what's meant by wholeness here. The idea that an act of creativity is not just this like,

leakage of energy from your psyche. And I think this holds true for children and adults, as we'll discuss. When you're engaging in creative output, it's like the output of your being. Not to get too poetic about it, but it's like a light shining out of your soul and your mind. It's not just this...

Well, that is beautifully put. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you're right. Sorry, but sorry, my mind was just divided in two different places because I just realized while you're saying that also that you were citing the work of Sandra Russ, who was the same person that I just cited in my section about...

about most pretend to play tending to fade around the age of nine or 10 years old. Yeah, I believe she's a pretty big name in this field. Yeah, but of course with a lot of variation. But that's an interesting criterion that I don't think I would have gotten to this concept of wholeness.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and looking around, I'm not sure how often she uses the term wholeness, but they reference whole, they kind of sum wholeness up as being an aspect of her definition. Okay. And I do think that that plays out with what she's stressing here. But, you know, even in adults, though, the way we think of usefulness or to, you know, to use Russ's model, usefulness or effectiveness, it varies from field to field.

In this paper, they broadly address different forms of creativity, invoking the 4C creativity model by James C. Kaufman and Dr. Ronald Begetto. Have we talked about this before? I don't know. We've been doing the show a long time, so I can't always recall. Yeah, I forget whole episodes sometimes. I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Yeah.

It feels fresh to my mind. So basically the way the 4C creativity model plays out is that you have four different modes of creativity. First of all, you have big C creativity.

This is landmark work that changes a field or changes the world. So like big C creativity would be like I have invented the steam engine or I have I present you with a new religious model and spiritual model for your way of life. Something like that. Huge impact. General theory of relativity or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Then you have little c creativity. And this is still, this is work that has strong interpersonal value. It's additive, it's cumulative. And we can think of various examples of this as well. I mean, I think like a great book, but not a book so great that it changes the world might fit under little c creativity if I'm understanding the concept correctly. Or I would say not even, don't even think about greatness, but a book you like has, you know,

strong personal value and you know you share that with others and so forth then you have pro c creativity this is not game changing but it's effective and beneficial within a given field uh so you know a new means of doing something uh some new uh innovation within a given field okay

And then you have mini C creativity. And this is intrapersonal creativity that is a part of the learning process. So my understanding on this, like to draw an example from like our daily work pretty much, is like sometimes when we run across a new concept, we kind of have to make sense of it ourselves. And we'll sort of turn to some sort of a personal novel metaphor for how it works, you know, like compare it to a Santo movie or what have you, you know.

So we're engaging in mini-C creativity, according to this model here. You know, it's not going to change the world. It's not trying to change the world. It's not really innovating anything, but it's helping us in a learning process. Like, it does have value within the way that our mind is working. It's helping us roll around various concepts and so forth. The kind of creativity we engage in, we all engage in basically every day, coming up with analogies or ways of thinking about or explaining things. Yeah.

But an important thing they stress is that any kind of creativity is going to start out novel and personal.

Um, so, you know, a mini C creativity project could become a pro C, could become a little C, could become a big C, uh, and so forth. Uh, so I think it's a pretty useful idea, uh, for, and certainly gives it a little more nuance to the idea of like, what is the enterprise of creativity and what role does it play?

So applying all of this to adults, the idea that Russ and the paper proposes here is that, yes, childhood creativity has an influence on adult creativity. But we can't just think about creativity in adults as, you know, just just in terms of its usefulness, like in the workplace or for a career. Again, we can't just think of it as strapping that horse to a cart.

in particular, they stress for children and adults allows us to process challenges and emotions while also supporting other forms of creativity. So again, a mini C exercise could transition into a pro C or any of the other forms of creativity, you know, to quote Lawrence of Arabia, big things have small beginnings. And I think often this is sort of a cliche at this point, but how often in history do

You see, people who do, I don't know, make big creative leaps that are often categorized as the useful sort. You know, people who make big scientific breakthroughs or people who, you know, do great works of art or something are often also engaged in what we might think of as a lot of

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the big ideas here is that most of us are not going to engage in big C creativity. Most of us are not going to create a new religion, create some sort of new technology that changes the world. We're not going to, you know, write the great American novel or what have you. But those little C and mini C exercises, they're still novel, they're still useful, and they're still whole. So in this

This paper, they make several observations about adult play during COVID-19 lockdowns, you know, taking us back to that time in which, you know, we can, I think everyone listening can probably remember that, you know, you had many adults suddenly dealing with more free time, but also, you know,

expressing themselves through play and even process emotions and even trauma through that play in addition to nurturing joy. You know, so suddenly people who had the ability to do so, you know, they might suddenly they're playing more Dungeons and Dragons than usual or they're turning back to an old hobby. And yeah, part of that is like maybe they had some extra time. They were trapped in their home and so forth. But additionally, like,

the creative process gave them a way to work through what they were feeling. So in this paper from Sinha et al., they write the following, quote, as human beings, we are programmed to use play and creative expression to connect and work through the difficulties. Creativity is not just about finding solutions to problems. It is about expressing emotion and processing change. Now, does it involve pretend play? Coming back to the overarching theme of these episodes, quote,

Subjectively, my argument was yes. You know, I was thinking about various games, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or otherwise, various creative endeavors one might engage in. But I've also found literature that lines up with this, too. Oh, OK. I was looking at a paper. This is by Gonku et al., published in Topoi, an international review of philosophy from 2005, titled Pretend Play as a Lifespan Activity.

And the authors here argue that pretend play is an adaptive human activity of adulthood as well as childhood. They point out that a lot of the early work in childhood psychology created a view in which childhood is playful and fanciful while adulthood is all logical and productive. We touched on that already, the idea that, okay, you're grown up, now put your creativity to work. Mm-hmm.

Again, creativity in adults was seen as useful almost always in a big C or at least little C aspiring manner. The authors here, though, argue the opposite, that pretend play can be found throughout adult life as well. And they point to adult improv theater as a key example of this. Now, granted, not everyone engages in improv theater, but it has been interesting in recent years to see improv theater is often brought into, say, business spaces and so forth.

realizing that it is a fun and helpful skill set to bring into some sort of a work environment. Yeah, okay. So I was thinking of ways that pretend play can continue into adulthood, and it made me wonder,

Does something count as pretend play if you are sort of trying to hide the fact that you're doing it, if it's just sort of a private game with yourself and maybe you're not really thinking of it as pretend play and you don't necessarily tell other people about it? But I don't know what's coming to mind is that I think probably a lot of adults are.

go about their business with this model we've talked about before, where they're kind of seeing themselves as a character in a narrative. You know, they're not like, I am Luke Skywalker, but they are...

framing the events of their life in a kind of, uh, in a modified, not very realistic way that, that paints them as like the hero of an important story. Does that count as pretend play? I mean, it's, I don't, I don't know if it's like altering the literal facts of reality, uh, but it's, it's putting their life within a frame, a frame that is, uh,

probably not the way an objective observer would describe what they're doing. Does that make sense? No, there's at least a patina of pretend play involved here. Yeah. Whereas in an improv class, you might literally be pretending to be a dump truck in a way that most non-improv adults are not doing, but very much in line with the kind of pretend play a child might engage in. Yeah, yeah.

And there is something kind of freeing about that. You know, when you watch improv, there's like a there's a feeling of cutting loose that's very exciting that you don't see even in a lot of otherwise creative adults. Now, this paper does not get into it. But of course, I'm also reminded of various observations about other forms of acting in which there can be kind of a.

a contagious aspect to the part one is playing and one's own thoughts and actions. So, I mean, I guess you, especially when adult, I mean, to a certain extent when kids pretend play, you know, sometimes animal simulations can get a little out of hand and mom and dad might get scratched or bitten. But on another level, there's always that possibility with adult actors as well.

Now, I think it's an interesting comparison between improv theater and childhood theater.

pretend play. I think kids are sometimes not as good at the yes and aspect of improv that's, you know, central to the philosophy of improv. But, you know, I think that's on another level, that's often one of the big lessons that they learn when they play with others. I mean, there's a lot of research on this as well. We didn't really got into this, but you have like parallel play with kids where, you

It's like little Susie and little Bobby. They're not really playing together. They are both playing with dump trucks in the sand, but they're just kind of playing alongside each other. And thank goodness they both have dump trucks because otherwise there would be a fight.

Yeah. And I can see yes and as a form of sharing. I mean, it is a way of give and take and of sharing not the physical props of play if you have to share your one dump truck toy, but of sharing the direction of the play, sharing the narrative. Yeah. For example, if you're engaging in an imagined shared world in a paracosm, you have to share that narrative.

one person can't just be the god of this realm. I guess there's room for maybe a 40-60 split there on creative control of the Paracousins. Yeah.

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Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. But another way that the improv theater example I think is interesting is that it's an example of

where adults often, or at least sometimes, have to relearn how to engage in pure imagination play. You know, a lot of, you hear plenty of accounts of adults who take an improv class and it's like they're won over by it. You know, it transforms them. Like they're able to reconnect with this creative energy that they hadn't had perhaps since they were kids. And this all kind of ties into that whole idea of creativity as being this expression of the whole. You know, it's not just

this thing, you know, you do in this one exercise, like it is, you know, it is a way that you're able to process things and let things out. Now, another example that they bring up, this one was really fascinating in part because we already kind of stumbled over this a little bit when we were talking about imaginary friends.

We were talking about, okay, what do adults engage in that are akin to imaginary friends? And we talked about things like speaking to angels and shouting at the devil and so forth. But the example brought up in this paper is that you will have the situation of adults engaging in conversation with the dead, right?

at a gravesite, for example. Adults essentially engaging in a conversation with an imagined or simulated mind. And this was an idea that was apparently discussed in a paper by I.E. Josephs in 1998 titled Constructing Oneself in the City of the Silent. Oh, wow. This is interesting because just last night I was reading sort of a biographical article about the life of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and

And she apparently had an extremely important relationship with her mother's grave, essentially. Her mother was an important writer in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft. And she would visit her mother's grave and apparently had a strong, powerful, emotional relationship with her mother's tombstone and would sort of talk to and relate to her mother who died after giving birth to her.

Wow. Yeah. And I feel like a lot of us can speak to examples of this.

The way that Ganku et al. sum this up, they say, quote, these conversations enable the grieving survivors to reinterpret their joint past with the deceased as they also help them prepare for the future, a finding that is corroborated by other clinical studies. Yeah. So, yeah, I feel like a lot of us can speak to this on some level. I've certainly engaged in this before, like speaking to the dead, reaching for the dead, particularly at a grave site. Yeah.

Yeah, and I want to stress again, as we've touched on this many times on the show, that we as humans are capable of juggling multiple and even contradicting ideas about, say, the persistence of consciousness. Have, you know, contradicting ideas in your head, multiple of them at once. So, you know, standing at the grave of a loved one, you might at once feel as if you were speaking to a person who is in the past.

You know, you're speaking, you're a person who only exists in memory. You may also feel on another level like you are speaking to the ghost of a loved one that is spiritually present, like in a movie about a ghost.

Or someone who is there but invisible, like in other movies about ghosts. I mean, you really can't discount the power that, say, ghost movies have on these sort of like almost subconscious ideas about the deceased and the role that they have in our lives. You might see them as a spirit of a loved one that is now residing in another realm of existence. You know, the idea that, well, they're looking down on me and so forth.

You also on some level, maybe even like front loaded, you might be thinking, well, this is just an empty corporeal vessel. Like there's there's nothing here. I am just engaging in this idea of the person that has passed. And then, yeah, ultimately, you might think of it. Oh, I'm dealing with a mental simulation of the deceased via theory of mind.

Yeah. And for something as deeply personal and emotional as a graveside conversation with the dead, I think it's fair to accept that any number of these can be in play and we shouldn't be dismissive of any of them, at least from an emotional standpoint, you know? But I think it's a great concept concerning the power of human imagination and our engagement with simulated realities as a means of processing and evaluating feelings and as an expression of wholeness and creativity, you know? So, you know, it is...

It is ultimately a kind of pretend play, but pretend play that has very high emotional stakes. But at the same time,

It's not useful in the in the sense that it is going to change the world or generate income, but it can be highly useful, depending on the individual, obviously, in the situation, like for their their their own feelings and for their own sense of well-being. Well, this actually makes me reframe one of the ways I was thinking about childhood pretend play.

In the first part, we briefly discussed a definition of play, which is that it's non-instrumental activity. It's activity that is not put toward any kind of external purpose. It's often described as purely for enjoyment. And that makes it sound like anything that is play or by extension pretend play should be for fun, right?

But actually, I mean, obviously, I think it makes sense in a way to call this kind of interfacing with the dead a form of pretend play, except the word play sounds wrong because play is supposed to be fun. But then when I think of

Oh, yeah.

And that almost strikes me as somewhat similar to the graveside conversation. I mean, in a way, that still has to be play. That is play, but there's no laughter involved. It's not fun. And the main emotion seems to be sympathy and sadness. So I don't know. There are many, many ways, obviously, in which those things are different. But it does seem to drive home that there's maybe something that is

missing when we think of play as an activity that is strictly for fun instead it's something that's like usually for fun but it also can sometimes be something else it's something we're doing for kind of intrinsic motivations but they're not really related to like pleasure or laughter or excitement yeah yeah

So at any rate, yeah, these, like I say, I thought I was going to get more into sort of granular discussions of, you know, adult imagination play and like the benefits of engaging maybe in something like improv theater. And yeah, I realized this all ended up being a little bit broader and a little bit more philosophic. But I thought it was really fascinating. It made me sort of rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about creativity. Yeah, totally.

All right. Well, I think we're going to go ahead and close this episode out. And we're thinking we're going to be back with one more of these.

because there's still plenty to talk about. And in the meantime, we'd love to hear from all of you. I know we have some people out there who are improv actors or certainly have taken an improv class or two or done a little improv, maybe in a college acting class. Tell us about it. How do your experiences line up with what we've been discussing here? Any other of your thoughts, experiences and so forth concerning this episode or the previous episodes?

in the pretend play series, write in. We would love to hear from you. And oh, and as always, if you want what you share to not be shared in a future listener mail episode, let us know and we'll honor that. Likewise, if you would like to use a pseudonym, just let us know as well. Just tell us what to do with the copy you send us.

With the understanding that if you don't give us any instructions of that sort, we will use your first name and consider it fair game to read on air. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Just a reminder, Stuff to Well Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you're on Instagram, follow us at stbympodcast.com.

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Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

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