Pretend Play, Part 5
01:05:00 Share

Hey, everybody. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything, music, TV, even cat food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost.

With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

With the Redfin app, you'll know the moment your next place hits the market, whether you're looking to buy your dream home or rent a sweet apartment. Give Redfin your gotta-have-it wish list of property features, and you'll receive real-time notifications tailored just for you. Ready to see it up close and personal? Scheduling a tour is just a tap away. Don't wait to find your perfect match. Download the Redfin app and start searching today.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

People, my people, what's up? This is Questlove. Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season. But, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Marr, Eve, Jonathan Schechter, Billy Porter, and so many more. And I want to thank you all for being here.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with the fifth and for now the final part in our series on pretend play. Now, sometimes when we do a longer series like this, we say, you know, devour in whatever order you like. But this really is one series where we do recommend listening in order because today we're going to build on and refer back to stuff we talked about in some earlier episodes from this series. And we're going to talk about

But to refresh briefly in those earlier parts, we talked about definitions and subdivisions of pretend play, play that involves non-literal action and understanding.

We talked about which aspects of pretend play appear to be universal and which appear to be culturally variable. For example, the evidence is pretty strong that all children around the world engage in pretending, even in environments where it is actively discouraged, and it emerges on a pretty consistent developmental schedule.

Though there is wide variation across cultures and within cultures across like home conditions and different types of parental influence in how much time children spend on pretend play and in what its themes and contents are. Some cultures have more fantasy themes like talking animals. Others are more realism bound in their pretend games and so forth.

We also talked about the specific issue of imaginary companions, where those come from, how they usually work, what patterns manifest within and across cultures. We talked about possible links between pretend play and complex cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind, whether pretend play may help children develop these capabilities or whether it makes use of common neural structures with them.

We talked about the idea of the paracosm, which is an extension of the idea of an imaginary friend or imaginary companion into a whole imaginary world, maybe even with its own geography, inhabitants, its own history and rules and customs. And we looked at how paracosms develop and whether they're associated with other things later in life, like an adult capacity for creativity, etc.

And then finally, we also talked about ways in which imaginative play could be said to carry on into adult life, often in different guises. That's right. And we're going to continue on in this episode to continue.

rollout discussion on some of these themes, but I guess we should stress that there is so much out there and there's so much ongoing research into not only pretend play, but also childhood imagination, adulthood imagination, and so forth. This is really one of those series where we could just keep going and going and find new angles, new studies to discuss each time. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've just come across so many interesting things. I keep...

new fascinating stuff I wasn't even aware of when I first decided I wanted to do this topic on the show. So it just keeps unfolding and there's more and more and the more and more is so good. But we are going to have to cut it off after today. Maybe we'll return to this topic in some form in the future. But one thing I wanted to come back to in today's episode, now that we've looked at a lot of the different cultural environments and varieties of play expression, is the

question of the biological basis for pretend play is pretend play a culturally contingent activity you know something that we just kind of like made up and didn't have to be a part of what human life is something like i don't know parades you know a lot of different cultures have parades but that's probably not a biologically mandated behavior that's just something culture made up

Or is pretend play actually biologically mandated? Is it biologically programmed in the human animal? And if it is the latter, that sort of implies that it confers a survival or reproduction advantage. So what would that be?

So for this question, I wanted to look at a really, really interesting paper published in 2017 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences called Why Do the Children Pretend Play? By an author named Angeline S. Lillard, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and she runs a research center there called the Early Development Laboratory.

I'm not going to cover everything Lillard gets into in this paper, but I wanted to give kind of a sketch of her main argument and pick some interesting things to pull out and talk about.

So at the beginning of this article, Lillard reviews a lot of the same evidence we've already looked at earlier in the series, pointing to a pretty standard schedule for development of pretend play in childhood, saying pretend play usually begins by around 18 months of age, often with object substitution, though in the last episode we looked at a few

kind of very specific types of pretend play that are often observed to predate object substitution. But object substitution is a big early milestone, usually occurring by around one and a half years old. Uh,

And then talking about how pretend play seems to peak around the age of three to five and most often stops around the age of 11. I think in the last episode we cited a researcher who said it's around nine or 10 when it starts to wane. Lillard says around the age of 11 is when it usually ceases, though.

The question of whether it actually ceases is also debatable. And in some cases, kids keep pretending longer and you can make arguments that activities sustained into adulthood are actually continued types of pretend play, maybe maybe sort of in disguise or not so much in disguise. Mm hmm.

Now, Lillard makes the argument that because pretend play of some form is culturally universal and its development schedule is fairly regular and predictable, it's probably an evolved biological trait and not just a contingent behavior that we happen to create through culture.

And I think I would agree that this seems likely based on that information. So Lillard asks the question that I brought up a minute ago. If it is a biological trait of our species, and if it's not just an epiphenomenal byproduct of some other capacity like symbolic thinking, what evolutionary advantage does pretending provide?

As an aside, we already looked at some possible answers to this question in that 2015 paper by Weisberg that we talked about in earlier parts of the series. So it was brought up that maybe pretend play helps facilitate the development of counterfactual reasoning, symbolic understanding and theory of mind. Though, as you'll recall, Weisberg highlighted that these correlations are different.

difficult to study in a way that's practical, rigorous, and ethical. So while some studies do provide hints in support of all three of these links, the evidence is fairly weak. It's mostly just establishing correlations.

Lillard's paper also notes how difficult this is to study and the indirect quality of much of the evidence available to us. We have some indications from specifically like from tragic examples of children who suffered social isolation in infancy.

that early deprivation of normal interaction with human caregivers can lead to noticeable deficits in pretend play later in childhood. So like children who don't have enough human social interaction when they're babies tend to play pretend much less when they're older, suggesting some kind of link between pretend play and socialization.

However, Lillard's paper makes use of a very interesting, totally separate line of evidence for the biological function of pretend play, and that is the analogy of non-human animals.

Hmm. Yes. Yes. Whether animals play, this is probably a question that has already been bouncing around people's minds as they listen to these episodes. Yes. Well, and so specifically it'd be the question of whether animals play pretend, because I think it's pretty widely agreed by, by researchers in the relevant fields that animals do play, uh, in this paper, Lillard refers to one particular definition of play that has been popular, uh,

used in a lot of research and it comes from a psychologist named Gordon Burkhart and Burkhart's criteria for play. I think he had five of them. The criteria are that one, we've already talked about this, that it's not functional, meaning that it's, it's not activity that is necessary for survival in any direct way. So even if you enjoy chopping wood, chopping wood is not considered play.

To use Lillard's summary, "...is voluntary and pleasurable. It differs in form or some other way from the functional expression. It is repeated, and it tends to occur under conditions of abundance, not stress."

Now, if you look at those criteria, I think it's widely agreed that many species of non-human animals, especially a lot of vertebrates and mammals, engage in play. But do these animals play pretend? This is more controversial, but Lillard makes the case that at least some forms of animal play should be considered examples of pretense. And both of these are fortunately going to be familiar to us and to listeners because we can see them in our pets.

I think, in fact, it's maybe not even a coincidence that play would be especially common among the animals that we happened to make our domestic companions. So first example is playing with inanimate objects as if they were live prey. You can see this in cats. You can see this in dogs, right?

I'm sure you've seen plenty of this in your home, Rob. You know, a cat will often any little furry thing or maybe doesn't in some cases, maybe doesn't even have to be all that furry. It could be an aluminum ball or it could be a piece of string or something like that. They will play with it and treat it as if it were a mouse or some other kind of prey animal. They will bat it around. They will bite it. They will chase it and so forth.

Yes. Yeah, we see this all the time. Yeah, ranging from what we call the most dangerous game of finger mouse. This is where you move your finger underneath a blanket. Not recommended because it's an easy way to get your finger scratched and or bitten.

But yeah, all manner of toys, laser beams, you name it. Oh, I didn't even think of the laser pointer. Yeah. But I used to do the same thing when I had cats. You know, you move your hand or your toes around underneath the blanket. Yeah. And that drives you absolutely nuts. Yeah. And my cat does not need any encouragement to attack body parts. She attacks my feet all the time.

Now, there's an interesting finding that Lillard notes, which is that apparently in like formal studies of this type of play behavior in cats, apparently as cats become older, on average, the object needs to be increasingly similar to an actual prey animal to induce the playing response. This will obviously vary from cat to cat, but on average, cats

More often a kitten will attack anything, you know, will play with string, will play with aluminum balls, whatever, you know, it's all a mouse to the kitten. But an older cat, as it matures, will increasingly only be enticed into this type of game by something that resembles in some way an actual prey animal. Well, my cat, I can safely say, is not average. Yeah.

Um, she's, uh, she's quite old at this point, but her, she still plays and some of her favorite items just recently have been things like a plastic milk cap, uh, like off of an oat milk, um, jug. Um, how did she had a great time with that? Um,

buttons, things like that. Anything she can get her claws on. So it doesn't seem to necessarily... We have other toys that do resemble rodents or birds or whatever, and she's into those as well. But otherwise, she doesn't seem to discriminate. Now,

not making this an episode about cats, but I think obviously there's something to be said here too about the domestic like in-house cat, like a fully indoor cat versus a cat that's going indoors and outdoors. This is a fully indoor cat. And I know there have been, you know,

various observations made about like what what that does does that keep a cat in sort of a semi-permanent stage of kittenhood to some degree maybe that has an effect on how they associate with with toys maybe you see more of this average situation that's laid out here if the cat actually has physical access to normal prey animals on a regular basis

Yeah, that seems quite plausible to me. Though an interesting thing that Lillard notes here is that there is the opposite observation in humans, that as children get older, it's usually less important for the play object to resemble the real object in order for them to play pretend with it. And so because of differences like this, Lillard thinks that the treating an inanimate object as live prey is not a great analogy for human play. However, there's another thing observed in animals, which she...

is maybe a good analogy for human pretend play, and that is play fighting. We've probably all seen this before in dogs, but in the scientific literature, play fighting is characterized as a social locomotor play activity that

where animals try to gain temporary physical advantage over one another in a way that somewhat resembles the behavior of those same animals as adults in violent competition, but is different in that the animals typically take turns being the aggressor and that the fight behaviors are

So the dog might in a play fight, it might put its jaws around the other dog's body, maybe put the jaws around the neck, but it does not bite down or it doesn't usually. And if it does, that's a you know, that that's clearly not what the behavior is intended to produce. Yeah.

Lillard argues that play fighting could be viewed as an analog for pretend play in humans and gives a number of reasons. For example, both of these activities, pretend play in humans and play fighting, involve creating an as-if scenario where the play activity appears to be a modified representation of a real activity, but with limits put on it, like the play fighting stops before the bite pressure is too much and so forth.

Lillard writes, quote, as Bateson also pointed out, an animal that is engaged in play fighting must read a behavior as denoting a behavior different from the behavior it resembles. And then the subquote of Bateson here, quote, the playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.

In other words, the playful nip is a pretend bite, just as a child can pretend talk into a pretend phone to symbolize really talking into a real phone. In this way, both pretend play and play fighting behaviors are symbolic. They mean something other than what they are.

She also calls attention to the fact that both pretend play in humans and play fighting in other mammals rely on the exchange of specific ritualized gestures and indicators that the activity is play and not real. And I don't think I was aware of a lot of this. For example, she talks about a bunch of observations in rats that when rats play fight, and apparently they do this a lot, rats play fight,

She says when they play fight, they don't bite at or target the same areas of the body that they do when rats are actually fighting in real violent competition. So when they're play fighting, they she says they target and nuzzle like the nape of the neck, whereas real fighting and tends to involve attacks on the flanks and the lower back.

And apparently they also emit high-pitched ultrasonic vibrations when they're play fighting, which other rats can hear, which seems to help the rats avoid mistaking a bid for a play fight with the threat of a real fight.

Now, understanding those kinds of gestures and social communication in rats might not be very intuitive to us, but we can easily see the same kind of thing in dogs with the famous play bow. Now, if you've ever seen dogs doing play fighting, you will...

quite frequently, often at the beginning of the encounter and then at certain moments throughout the play fighting session, the dogs will kind of back up and then they will bow the front of the body down and spread their paws apart and put their head down with the back of the body up with the haunches, the butt raised up. And I've got a picture here for you to look at, Rob, though I'm sure you're familiar with this on your own as well. Well, I mean, now that it's pointed out to me, I have seen dogs doing this.

And, um, I guess I'm realizing for the first time that this must be why we call the pose in yoga down dog. Um, because we are creating a pose that looks like this. I always just thought like, well, okay, it's just, I'm, I'm on all fours. I'm sort of like a dog right now, but I guess this is the namesake. So in yoga, it's the butt is up. The head is down. Correct. Yeah. Okay.

Though usually in the picture you're showing here, the dog's forepaws, forearms are on the ground. And that's usually not the case with down dog, though there are versions of down dog where you do have forearms down. I guess it's more, it gets into like dolphin and so forth. But anyway, enough animals. We're talking about dogs. Right. So studies show that play...

play bows are, they really are used for social communication. Like you can see that they're most common right after a candid play fight has sort of pushed the limits or has for some reason become ambiguous. So for instance,

when a play bite just got pretty rough, you know, like a dog, they're playing, but one bit the other kind of hard. It seems then the play bow would be deployed. It's used to regulate the shared understanding of the activity and to signal kind of, sorry about that. We're still in play mode. This is not a real fight.

And in this way, this would be considered a form of meta communication, allowing all the participants in an activity to continually understand the correct frame in which the shared activity should be interpreted. It's the signal. This is play. This is not real.

And it turns out that with pretend play, humans do this too. There are specific kinds of gestures and signals that have been observed within human play fighting, but even outside the realm of play fighting and just in pretend play that the kinds we've been talking about in the series so far, maybe cooking in a play kitchen or using a banana as a telephone or using a little block as a car, you know, object substitution, enactment play, any of these things.

The signals used to communicate pretend to play might be more culturally variable in humans than in dogs, but.

But for example, research in the United States has particularly found that when mothers play pretend with young children, they use specific body language cues such as strong eye contact, mistimed movements, and a smile immediately following the pretend behavior.

And so, like, I can imagine all these kind of things, kind of like exaggerated, weird movements, kind of looking at the child, making eye contact and then smiling after you say, like, here's the phone. Also, this is not mentioned in the in the study, but I really thought about, like, using a different voice. You know, we've talked about.

about parental voice modulation on the show before. I think we did a whole episodes on this of like the, you know, the baby voice, the way parents tend to speak to children and like what kind of purpose that serves, where it comes from. But I think there's a version of this with pretend to play too. Like I, I noticed when we start taking on a pretense, I, I kind of sound different. I'm doing something with the timing of my speaking and the, the,

pitch of my voice and stuff that I'm not normally doing when I'm just playing with my daughter. Yeah. And that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, we often don't think about it, but we are sort of conveying that, okay, we're shifting over one degree to the left or the right here into the imagination space. Yeah. Oh, this book is a boat now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And so you can think about different reasons for this metacommunication within the play itself. So like in play fighting, metacommunication is important for physical safety. You know, like you don't want the fight to you don't want the play fight to escalate to a real fight. So metacommunication literally helps dogs and rats and humans avoid hurting one another.

But with pretend play in human children, it strikes me that it's probably important for something we talked about earlier in the series, information quarantining, to prevent children from drawing incorrect lessons about reality from a game of pretend. You know, so the child does not end up thinking that a remote control can actually place phone calls. We're showing this is play so the child doesn't learn something that's wrong. ♪

Hey, everybody. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything, music, TV, even cat food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost.

With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners.

like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungvaluwa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it?

It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed. On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters. The one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love.

It's not about perfection. It's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn. Listen to The One You Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So in this paper, Lillard looks at studies of play fighting in animals to see what, if anything, can be established about its survival and reproduction value. What does it do for the animals? This section involves a lot of discussion of the difficulties and limitations in designing these experiments. And the paper is worth a read if you want to learn more about that. But to mention one prominent example type of type of experiment she brings up is

It is an experiment where you take a baby rat and pair it in its enclosure only with a single adult female rat and no litter mates. Now, with other litter mates present, a baby rat will typically engage in play fighting as it matures.

But when it is paired only with an adult female rat, the baby rat will receive socialization from the adult. So it's not like total social isolation or deprivation. But adult female rats specifically will not engage in play fighting.

So this seems to reasonably well isolate and remove play fighting on its own. But it's important to note that this is not a perfect isolation of the variable because having litter mates is the norm for baby rats. So this is not just like a perfectly normal baby rat with only play fighting taken away. It's just getting as close to that as researchers can. All right.

Are there any differences in rat development from this setup? Oh yes. A few examples. Rats that grow up with socialization but without play fighting have trouble interpreting social signals later in life. For instance, later if another rat tries to initiate play fighting, the deprived rat will often misinterpret it as a bid for real fighting.

They also have difficulties with other types of social communication. They have difficulties with mating and with copulation. And it seems that across multiple domains, rats that don't have experience with play fighting just have trouble reading social signals from other rats.

Also, the lack of juvenile experience with play fighting seems to change the development of the medial prefrontal cortex in a rat's brain. And the behavioral result of this is a difficulty with the inhibition of impulses. And I thought this part was really interesting. Lillard infers that

play fighting helps develop a rat's inhibition skills because play fighting is an exercise in inhibition. You are sort of fighting, but you're not really going all the way you have to. In fact, one of the key skills of play fighting is to stop yourself from really biting the other rat hard and

So counterintuitively, when we see, you know, animals or children play fighting, we often think of this as like, you know, you might have feelings like, oh, are they developing aggression? I mean, it's possible that that could be happening, too. But counterintuitively, play fighting seems to be a way to get experience holding back aggression. Yeah.

This is also a topic that may tie into some things I've read about domestic cats and whether, like to what extent a given cat has been exposed to other cats. I'm to understand this can have an impact on say how, how likely they are to, to bite if they are, you know, perturbed or wishing to express something like, you know, have they had enough of, I guess the, the, the feline equivalency of the, the play fighting model.

Wow. I've never heard of that. But if I'm understanding you right, are you saying it's the idea that if a cat has grown up around other cats, they are more likely to inhibit or hold back the expression of aggression with, say, humans in the household? That is what I've heard. Now, I did not go into research on this for this episode, so it's entirely possible.

Sometimes when I get it the most wrong, it's in cases like this where it's nothing I researched. It's just something floating around in my head. So I would say don't take that to the bank, but it's out there at least in the form of like cat owner folk wisdom. And it may have scientific underpinnings as well. Well, I feel like if that's true, that would line up exactly with these findings and that would be really interesting. My cat is here, but she's asleep. So I can't I can't get any follow up. Ask her. Yeah.

But anyway, in the conclusion of this section, uh, Lillard says, quote, taking turns at being dominant also involves inhibition. You think about it that way. So it's not just like, you know, when you, when you get the better of another, uh, animal and play fighting and you bite down on them, but you don't really bite down all the way that's inhibition. You have to, uh,

have the executive function to hold back but also taking turns involves a type of holding back i would imagine i haven't done research on this either but i would imagine just in general in the human analogy like any kind of sharing or relinquishing and relinquishing power over something within a game involves a type of inhibition control yeah that makes sense

So Lillard says maybe play fighting is really important for strengthening the neural circuitry behind inhibition. And if you don't have play fighting in these animals where it's common, that circuitry for inhibition doesn't really develop fully.

So looking over all this research in rats, Lillard says that play fighting is probably important for the development of a rat's ability to read social signals from other rats, to coordinate social activity with other rats, to regulate stress and exercise inhibition or holding back behaviors. Now, the question is, of course, could pretend play serve similar functions in human development?

Lillard argues, yes, and though she's cautious to say, you know, we shouldn't conclude too much on the basis of analogies with other animals, but in the absence of stronger experimental designs on humans, which are probably not going to be forthcoming for very understandable reasons, this is a really interesting, if only partial piece of the picture.

So essentially, her idea is that pretend play in humans might be important for understanding social signals and for emotion regulation.

I mentioned earlier that pretend play in humans involves a lot of reading of social information or meta communication between parents and children or at older ages between children and other children. So we had those things like the strong eye contact, the smile after the pretend action. You know, we alluded to the kind of pretend play voice. These signals let the child know that what is taking place is play and it is not to be taken literally. This

This also reminds me of some of the research we've discussed in the past concerning laughter. Laughter is a social cue. Oh, yes. Potentially to let other individuals know that there is not a risk and so forth. Totally. I think that could fit right in the suite there.

So anyway, from here, Lillard goes on to analyze a number of other experiments that have tried to establish links of this sort between early pretend play and and specifically with theory of mind, which is heavily involved in social communication and understanding. So there's some big overlap there. And Lillard proposes a possible causal model called.

It goes something like this. So early pretend to play sensitizes a child to social signals. This is the meta communication that goes on when you're playing pretend all the little like eye contact cues and the changes of voice and the little things you do to let the child know that the banana is not really a phone. We're playing a game right now. This is a separate reality.

And so that makes the child sensitive to those social signals. This sensitivity, in part, helps a child develop the capacity for symbolic understanding. Lillard writes, quote,

where one level serves as a symbol for the other. Thus, both parental pretend and the child's sensitivity to social signals are postulated to undergird the symbolic function, which is also used in language and the interpretation of other symbols.

And then finally, after this, the symbolic understanding in turn helps the child with theory of mind. Now, how would symbolic understanding lead to theory of mind? Lillard says that it is crucially, quote, learning that reality can exist at two levels, the nip and the bite, the banana and the telephone, the false belief and the reality.

So this ties into theory of mind. So like the symbolic understanding that there can be two different realities, like what I know to be true versus what I know Sally incorrectly thinks to be true. It is this ability to think at multiple levels of reality that leads to typical adult social functioning in large part through theory of mind.

So Lillard writes about this in the end, quote, there might be continuity then with pretend play and play fighting. In both cases, metacommunication is key and fundamental. In humans, this ties into a symbolic capacity that is not well developed in other species. But a common route is reading social signals indicating that a behavior is to be interpreted at other than face value. Hmm.

And then finally, also, Lillard goes on to have another section about the connection between pretend play and self-regulation or inhibitory control, like we already talked about. And that one also seems plausible, too, because the very act of pretending is in a way an exercise in holding back.

It could be in play fighting, holding back aggression. But in the case of just say like playing pretend, playing in a play kitchen or playing banana as telephone, you are holding back the exercise of what you know to be really the case. It's an inhibition type of impulse that allows you to say, actually, I will not act on what I know to be reality. Instead, I will act on this secondary pretend scenario. Yeah.

So anyway, I found this model very interesting, and especially in the way that

I don't know, it highlights just how convoluted human development can be. Like if Lillard is correct about this, say about the, about the, the pathway that sort of starts with a child being sensitized to social signals and metacommunication through pretend to play in the same way that animals probably are through play fighting. And that's somehow leading to like all of these complicated adult capacities through the mediating capacity of symbolic understanding and

I don't know. It's fascinating to imagine just how unpredictable the development process of a human mind could be. You wouldn't necessarily make that connection without having all of these pieces of evidence to establish in between, make that connection between, you know, like reading gestures and body language in pretend play to the final conclusion of adult socialization and theory of mind. ♪

Hey, everybody. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything, music, TV, even cat food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost.

With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

John Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm A.J. Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungvaluwa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it?

It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed. On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters. The one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love.

It's not about perfection. It's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn. Listen to The One You Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think one of the really interesting takes on pretend play and creativity in general that we've been looking at is this idea that, you know, you can sort of look at it as this scaffolding that is used to sort of construct the mature psyche, you know, and our sort of

semi-completed adult forms. And yet, the other interesting side of the coin is to look at ways in which we continue to engage in creative endeavors, including pretend play, and

the possibility that, okay, all that scaffolding is still there and perhaps it can be reutilized to help us with problems and challenges that we face as adults. And so I talked more broadly about creativity in general and pretend play, specifically in adults in the last episode.

We touched on some examples such as Dungeons and Dragons, a tabletop role-playing game. I imagine most people listening to the show know what Dungeons and Dragons is. We didn't stop to...

to describe it. But of course, it is, you know, pen and paper, sometimes miniatures, whole books of rules. And of course, sometimes it has digital components. But at the core, it is a scenario that's taking place within the heads of the players. It is a shared storytelling, creative endeavor. Mm-hmm.

And so that is frequently brought up as an example of pretend play that kids engage in and adolescents engage in, but also plenty of adults do. We also have the example of improv theater as a big one that has that lines up with pretend play in a number of ways.

And then we also touched briefly on graveside conversations with the dead as an example of adult humans speaking to an imagined mind state, something that you could almost compare to speaking with an imaginary friend, you know, with all the caveats that we discussed in that last episode. So today I wanted to follow up.

On all of that, with a look at some additional literature that gets a little more in-depth about the benefits of adult pretend play. But I do want to drive home again that this is certainly an example where there's so much material out there. And our understanding of how imagination play and creativity factors into adult lives and what the benefits are, you know, this continues to develop.

So I found a really helpful article by Alyssa Mewison titled, "Do Grownups Pretend Play?" Or I'm sorry, "Do Grownups Play Pretend?" And her primary focus professionally is on mental childhood development. But in this, she also lines things up with the adult experience of engaging in pretend play.

And she explores different imaginative adult activities that arguably match up with the idea of pretend play. She brings up D&D, of course. She brings up cosplay, which we briefly touched on, I think, you know, the idea that you might dress up as a favorite fictional character and to certain extents act as that fictional character at, say, some sort of a convention.

She brings up LARPing, live action role playing, which also crosses over into the realm of play fighting, of course, you know, on stage fighting and so forth, which is interesting. You're not actually trying to kill somebody with a LARPing sword. Hopefully not. Yeah. And then she also brought up an example that I hadn't really thought of that much in terms of predisposition.

pretend play, but engagement with fictional media, especially books, but also movies and TV shows. And I think that this is something that might not line up with every definition of pretend play, but it's food for thought, especially so far as written fiction goes. I was thinking about this. And we might throw non-visual works in there as well, audiobooks, podcasts, certainly. And also, I think, lo-fi visual storytelling as well. Like, I'm

I'm thinking, you know, that sweet spot of like retro role playing games where the visuals on the screen gave you a representation of what things were and where they are. But then you might have this additional mental image and mental version of what was happening that's more akin to, say, engaging with a book. And do you make this distinction because something like engaging with a book is more of a participatory imaginative action than, say, passive media like watching a TV show?

By and large, but at the same level, I have to acknowledge that even like it's easy to say be dismissive of cinema and say, well, the movie is giving you everything you need. It's giving you the visuals, the sound, and then it doesn't leave anything to the imagination. But certainly not every scene is laying it all out there. There are plenty of moments where we as the viewer have to imagine what is being seen by the protagonist. We imagine the monster that's been glimpsed.

Or we imagine the monster in full when we only see its feet. Or, you know, various scenes where characters are describing something and we don't see it. They're just telling a story. And it's essentially more of an audio-based storytelling situation. But certainly with the work of written fiction, you know, okay, it's going to tell its story. It's going to describe thoughts and action. And it's going to guide you along its course, right?

it's going to plant its seeds. But the author, sometimes from beyond the grave, is of course, you know,

thinking thoughts directly into your active mind or not directly via the book. Um, but, uh, but you know, reading social work, it's, you know, it's not entirely devoid of personal imagination or even imaginative choices. Um, I, I imagine many of you have this, have had this experience where you make a, uh, like a mental note of what a character looks like, or you even decide how you will cast them in your imagination. Um,

I used to do this a lot when I was a younger reader. And I'll occasionally lean on this technique if I'm reading something that has a confusing cast of characters or I'm having trouble keeping track of everyone. I'm like, okay, what's this person's last name? And then I'm like, okay, you're Harry Dean Stanton. We're just going to try and streamline this a little bit. And I imagine various folks engage in varying degrees of this, though it's not always the case.

But even if you don't actively decide how you're going to interpret something visually when you're reading, your mind is still visualizing the information that has been conveyed to you via your own mind. It's working off the various models, the various people you've seen and encountered. So there is still this creative endeavor that's entirely a product of your mind.

as a particular story is coming to life in your head. Now, some of that is me just spitballing there, but she argues that adults engage in such activities as these for many different reasons, and that these reasons generally line up with some of the reasons that children engage in imagination play.

to learn, to have the experience of traveling somewhere, to have various experiences you wouldn't have in your normal life, to laugh. And all of these experiences can be empathetic, they can be personally empowering, and much more. Now, Mewison mentions the importance of mastery and psychological distance in play.

For children, we see both of these, of course. Children tend to pretend to be older, more experienced individuals when they're playing. There are, of course, counterexamples to that. But she refers to something that has been dubbed the Batman effect, where children will stick to a task longer if they're pretending to be someone else, generally someone with a greater degree of mastery.

In this term, the Batman effect stems from a 2017 study by White et al. published in Child Development, Batman effect improving perseverance in young children. You can probably guess what this consists of. I've heard of this. Yeah. Yeah.

So in this study, they looked at six and four-year-olds, and they found, quote, children who impersonated an exemplar other, in this case, a character such as Batman, spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective.

So, you know, creating that psychological distance and embodying like a person of mastery, the extreme, of course, being Batman. Well, yeah, this makes me think about about the nature of enjoyment in an activity and and flow states and such. You know, it's often said that you are essentially in a flow state when you are.

engaging in an activity that's sort of maximally challenging, but also still within your ability to do and you're getting consistent feedback that you are doing it correctly. So like an activity that's too easy can be boring. An activity that is too hard, if you feel like you're just failing at it over and over, it becomes frustrating. And so I wonder if assuming a kind of exemplar character mind state allows you to

simulate flow even if like for you this activity you neither you maybe don't have actual mastery of it you are continually making mistakes but it's part of the game to just not acknowledge that and say like i'm doing it perfectly um or maybe around the maybe on the other side maybe it makes it more exciting an activity that would otherwise be so easy that it's boring

Yeah. Or, I mean, you're just, you're becoming Batman. You're taking on grim determination to finish a task. Like would Batman stop, um, sweeping the floor halfway through? No, he would buckle down and finish the job because that's how Batman does it.

But you never see Batman finish the job, do you? It always cuts away right after the most exciting part. Do you see Batman like making the handoff to the police and all that? I guess occasionally. He often leaves them, right? Hanging by Batarang in an alley. Yeah. So interesting to think about. And I would, of course, I would be game to hear any examples of the Batman effect from anyone's lives or the lives of children in someone's life.

But the question then emerges, do adults do this as well? Well, Mewison mentions an acquaintance of hers who she says channeled something she's dubbing the Buffy effect. So this individual was preparing for childbirth and channeled Buffy the Vampire Slayer to sort of find the, like, I don't know, to get in the zone for what was to come. Yeah.

So that's interesting. And I would love to hear from any listeners out there who have some version of this. Like if you ever embodied or pretend played to some extent a fictional character in order to make it through some big or small trial in your life. Maybe it's sweeping the floors. Maybe it's childbirth.

very different endeavors. But you can imagine where, yeah, you can sort of like psych yourself into it a little bit. Like it reminds me of, this is a much, I guess, more casual version of this, but you hear people talking about like engaging in beast mode or something, you know, just sort of like beast through a particular challenge or a workout, et cetera. And, you know, I mean, on one level, yeah, it's just a saying, but

But is it? Like, you know, language is powerful. And if we're engaging in beast mode, on some level, are we engaging in some sort of imagined lycanthropy, some imagined hulking out in order to complete a task?

I can speak from personal experience that sometimes a difficult like workout, physical workout task is easier if you make the kinds of noises that are not polite to make at the gym. You know, if you like really roar or grunt. I mean, I understand why gyms would prefer people not do that, but it kind of does help.

I kind of forgot that there's like a no grunting, no sound effects rule in some gyms. I don't know if they all have that. But yeah, I think some places are like, please, please don't scream at the person on the machine next to you. But no, I think it does kind of help. And I wonder, I don't know, maybe there's a totally different mechanism at play there. But one could see how it could also just be part of like imagining yourself in some room.

more dramatic kind of scenario than you actually are. Like, you're not just doing a workout. You are, you know, you're crossing some incredible hurdle in some kind of dramatic scenario. Well, even if...

you are not like on any level pretend playing that you were a beast during your workout. You still might be entering into like a slightly different mindset and a slightly different version of yourself, you know, like, like, and you're not just Jim, now you're workout Jim, um, you know, or workout Jane or, or, you know, whatever the case may be. Um, you know, and, and I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, we, we often think of a cohesive self, but, um,

we know that under close scrutiny, this doesn't

you know, completely pan out. We, the person we are changes over time and there are often sort of like different versions of ourselves depending on what our environment is, you know, what time of day it is and so forth. So, you know, you may have a, you know, a workout self that is, you know, a little bit to the left or the right of who you were before you came into that workout. And then hopefully the person after the workout is yet another person that is maybe a couple of degrees removed from your starting point.

Mewison also mentions in passing the fake it till you make it mantra. I believe she kicked off the article sort of bringing this up, you know, sort of like, hey, is this imagination play? And I think maybe there is something to go on there as well. You know, the idea of

You know, generally when people are talking about faking it till you make it, they're talking about, I guess it's not unlike the Batman idea. It's like, you're not saying I'm going to be Batman. I'm going to be, you know, the professional that I think I should be in this situation or the parent I think I should be, the spouse I think I should be and so forth. And engaging in that until on some level that becomes more the norm. Why?

Why do I have a negative feeling about that phrase? I guess it's perfectly fine in some scenarios. For some reason, I'm associating it with like engaging in fraud. Yeah, there has been, you do see pushback against that turn of phrase in part because it can be interpreted, I think, to sort of discount hard work and actual striving for change in your life. And the idea that, oh, just fake it and you'll eventually, you know, it's,

I don't think we should maybe take it too literally. The charitably interpreted version of it is fine. Yeah. Yeah. Now, again, the Batman effect entails a certain amount of psychological distance. And Mewison also points out that we see elements of this in adult imaginative choices.

She says that, you know, one may wish to engage with media that offers a subjectively preferred level of psychological distance from whatever your reality might be. The example she gives is that of parents wishing to avoid media in which children are in danger. You know, I can speak to that, you know, especially when I had a young child. I was like, what was the movie? The Babadook that came out, I think, when my child was very little. And I was like, no, thank you.

I'm going to skip on the Babadook and I still haven't gotten around to seeing. Oh, it's really good. But yeah, I saw it before I had a child. I can absolutely speak to this. Like, yeah, becoming a parent completely changed what my sensitivities in media and storytelling were and like certain types of things that wouldn't really have bothered me before. Like children in danger suddenly became very difficult to watch.

Yeah. An example that came to my mind reading this article was, of course, during the height of the pandemic. I know a lot of us maybe chose not to watch plague oriented media, you know, like it seemed like maybe a time to skip on the zombie apocalypse scenarios and so forth. So I think there are different levels of this depending on, you know,

highly subjective, you know, whatever's going on in your world and more importantly in your life, because there could be things going on in your world that are just not weighing particularly on your, your, your psyche, uh, or you're not aware of. And then she stresses mastering control in both adult and child models here. Uh, and I think this is, this is pretty straightforward, you know, there's so much in our lives as adults that feel out of our control, um,

And it may just be objectively out of our control. And yet, you know, we have these responsibilities and you want to at least have this feeling of control. And so you sometimes find it in large acts, but often in small acts. And also these are the things you can find via involvement in various imaginative games. I think many video games fit this. And, and,

And I believe that some of the most frequent examples, though, concern tabletop gaming and especially tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. A hallmark of some of these experiences that I've seen discussed in past papers that I've read is the idea, too, of a fixed game

small-scale universe, you know? I mean, you think of so many different sandbox video games. There is a corner to the screen. Like, there is a limit to the world. And so, you feel like you can master it in a way that you cannot be a master of reality. I think that's a really insightful point when

People talk about like video games or RPGs being, I don't know, freeing or empowering in a way. I think they're usually focusing on the.

on the power of the characters played like that it can be a an empowerment fantasy in that you play as someone who is very capable and can do a lot of things and i'm sure that is part of it as well but i think it's absolutely right what maybe what is maybe even more important is that within video games or within a tabletop rpg you can understand what all the rules are

And that's never true in reality and in life. We're all living our lives playing a massive game, a massive RPG where the rules are not clear and maybe they're changing. Yeah. And, you know, very often in our video games and our imaginative media, there's often a very clear line between good and evil. You know, it's zombies or invading robots or aliens, whatever the case may be. Like, there's a clear distinction between

at least on some level, in terms of how you were supposed to tackle adversity and so forth. Yeah, there are clear ways to know how to play, which in reality, it's confusing. Yeah. ♪

Hey, everybody. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything, music, TV, even cat food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost.

With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners.

like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungvaluwa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it?

It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed. On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters. The one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love.

It's not about perfection. It's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn. Listen to The One You Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, transitioning out of Mewison here, she does mention embarrassing therapeutic use of tabletop role-playing games. And she references a 2022 Wired article by Cam Burns, how therapists are using tabletop games to help people.

And I was looking at that article. The author of this, Burns, speaks with clinical psychiatrist Rafael Bocamazzo. And in this conversation, it stressed that tabletop role-playing games, and I think this is important to note, they're not therapy in and of themselves. And, you know, you can't like

realistically look at your own Dungeons and Dragons night and say, I am going to therapy. Rather, they can be used as a tool in therapy by trained professionals who

opening spaces for patients to explore things like identity, mortality, gender, social skills, overcoming social anxiety, and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. I think in the same way that sports are not therapy, but could in some scenarios be therapeutic. Yeah. And could you tap into some of those therapeutic effects on your own? Certainly, but not to the degree that

that a trained professional would be able to utilize it with specific aims, with the right patients.

Now, there's been quite a lot written on the possibility of using Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games for therapeutic purposes. I was looking at one paper from 1994 by Wayne D. Blackmun titled Dungeons & Dragons, the use of a fantasy game in the psychotherapeutic treatment of a young adult. The adult in question had schizoid personality disorder. And more recently, you see this rolled out as a tool in specially aimed therapy groups.

I found a nice article on Johns Hopkins University's website by Claire Goudreau titled Tabletop Therapy, How Dungeons and Dragons Can Improve Mental Health. This is from 2023. And it highlights a session in which players engage. This is not like, you know, this is just one example of how one particular therapy group handles it. But you might have 60 to 90 minutes of RPG time. Granted, that's you're packing a lot in, but I trust the professionals here.

followed by a session in which, quote, the players take a step back to reflect on the session and see how it relates to their own lives. And I thought this was interesting because it reminded me of the pivotal integration step in some models for psychedelic-assisted therapy, where you engage in some sort of an altered state, and then you top it off with therapist-assisted reflection.

I can see that comparison as well. Yeah. So engaging in this imaginative pretend play gaming scenario, but then, you know, couching it in a discussion of how this relates to where you are in your life and whatever your current obstacles might be. Yeah. The other big thing that, of course, is stressed in this article and in other places as well is

The goal is also making therapy fun and approachable for target patients. So generally that is part of the scenario as well. Like perhaps someone is a little adverse to a therapy environment, but it's kind of like a great icebreaker. Well, we're not going to

just get in and start talking about our feelings or our problems, we're going to play a game. And, you know, you'll find multiple examples of this where, if not tabletop role-playing games, sometimes just other games, card games, board games, and so forth, are used to sort of, you know, break that ice down a little bit. I wonder how this interacts with... Rob, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here, that at least in my limited experience with tabletop RPGs, there is...

Kind of a difficulty adults have taking it too seriously. And so there's often a lot of joking involved where like, you know, it's not like we're embarrassed to be playing D&D, but, you know, we all came here for fun. This is what we like to do. But there is a kind of ongoing like.

uh rhythm of being in the game and then moments of stepping back and kind of meta commentary and joking about what's going on and then changing the subject and talking about something in the real world and then getting back to the game and at least that's my experience and i wonder if that's there's just a difficulty i think for a lot of adults to engage in sustained pretend play like

like a tabletop RPG in the way that kids can, where kids can just, you know, like really take it seriously, stay in character and keep it going. Yeah, it's been my experience that this is very hard to come by with adults, even if you kind of like set a goal for yourself.

And I mean, I would also stress just, you know, casually, whatever your gaming environment is. Yeah. It's like, you know, you don't want to force anything on your group. Maybe your group is, does lean more serious. Maybe it's a bunch of goofballs. If it's a bunch of goofballs, maybe don't go for that super grim, dark, serious scenario. Unless, unless,

I don't know. I think sometimes you can find a nice balance, though, where, like, for instance, when I recently ran alien RPG stuff with my group, we're generally more on the goofball spectrum. But for some reason, we were able to do that one in a way which felt appropriately serious, but we still had a lot of, like, goofball moments doing it. And maybe there was a certain... Maybe to a certain extent, it had to do with, like, distance from the character. So it's almost like you were watching a movie play out, and you could have these laughs there.

while still engaging in the seriousness of the story. I'm not sure. I mean, to be clear, I wasn't trying to say people should do it one way or the other. It's just my observation of how these things usually go is there's a lot of kind of

A lot of stepping back and almost, almost maybe deliberate kind of signals of we're not taking this too seriously. We're joking now. Ha ha. Oh, yeah. I mean, getting it's like play fighting, right? Yeah. Because you are often dealing with these themes of mortality and and failure, you know, rolling a natural one, missing your shot and then getting run through by a goblin sword or something. And, you know, and if you're

if you're not careful, you can let emotions run high in those situations. Now, I've seen other studies that highlight the potential for tabletop role-playing game-assisted therapy with autistic adults to help with social cognition.

Like I say, this seems like a rich area of therapy where folks are exploring different potential uses. On one hand, play seems to certainly be that spoonful of sugar that can help the medicine go down, like let's make therapy fun and approachable, but it also seems to have unique properties unto itself.

You know, again, kind of comparing it to some degree with the idea of engaging in a psychedelic experience and then having a therapist help you integrate that into your life. You know, like let's use some of that mental scaffolding that we talked about earlier and see how we can get to where we're looking to go with therapy. Mm-hmm.

Now, I mentioned improv as well. I looked at a pair of studies from 2016 and 2017. There is a comedic improv therapy for the treatment of social anxiety disorder by Sheely et al., Journal of Creativity and Mental Health. And the other one is TheraProv, a pilot study of improv used to treat anxiety and depression, Kruger et al., Journal of Mental Health.

The former highlighted, quote, a novel treatment for social anxiety disorder by harnessing the following therapeutic elements, group cohesiveness, play, exposure, and humor, while the latter article explored a brief therapeutic group-based intervention model for patients with symptoms of anxiety and depression.

So I'm not going to get into all the beats of these two studies, but both articles expressed a great deal of optimism for the use of these techniques alongside other treatments, other treatment methods and tools. I've also looked at some papers exploring the potential for integrative play therapy already used for children more in adult situations. Hmm.

And of course, there are other play-based therapy tools that are used with adults as well, including a big one that I completely spaced on, and that is art therapy. Oh, I'm aware that exists, but I don't really know anything about it. Right, right. I mean, it's one of those things where I'm mostly familiar with it from seeing it in passing in films, obviously.

Like, for instance, there's at some point in Stranger Things, there's a scene where you see people engaging in art therapy and or, you know, you'll I think I've watched TV shows where the characters involve do something with art therapy. But, yeah, you can definitely loop art therapy in with other play based therapy models, you know. So perhaps this is a topic we could come back to at some point, the idea of play based therapy or more specifically art based therapy.

because it's been around since in some form or another since at least the mid-20th century. And there have been a number of studies regarding how it can be used to help with various conditions and ailments. Hmm.

Well, you know, as we close out this five-episode look at pretend play, I do feel like I have a more well-rounded understanding of what children are doing when they engage in pretend play, as well as to what extent we're continuing to engage in pretend play throughout our adult lives. Yeah. It really makes me think about when...

We see these games children play that seem so funny that I think sometimes adults are tempted to think of play as frivolous or to think of pretend play as especially frivolous. You know, these like silly scenarios that kids are making up is something that's just sort of frivolous.

You know, not an important human activity. And it seems to me that that couldn't be further from the truth, that play really is like the important work of childhood and pretend play is maybe the most important kind.

Yeah, children's play is serious. It's building the person they will become. And then, like, the scaffolding's not just abandoned after that. You know, like, we're still using it to varying degrees, sometimes kind of invisibly to ourselves as we go through our daily life as adults. Yeah. Play is building minds. There you go. That would look great on a bumper sticker, T-shirt, what have you.

But all right, I guess that does do it for the series for now. That's right. Again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We're getting some great feedback from listeners. I'm sure we're going to have a listener mail in the very near future where we begin to roll through some of this examples of

of imaginary friends and paracosms and so forth. So yeah, write in. We'd love to hear your thoughts on all of this, either from your own personal experience as a pretender or observations you've made of children in your life that are pretending or animals. Certainly, we already mentioned dogs and cats. Write in about your dogs and cats and their possible pretend play and play in general.

Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a little short-form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our regular audio producer, J.J. Posway, but also big thanks today to our guest audio producer, Andrew Howard. Thanks, Andrew.

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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Thank you.

With the Redfin app, you'll know the moment your next place hits the market, whether you're looking to buy your dream home or rent a sweet apartment. Give Redfin your gotta-have-it wish list of property features, and you'll receive real-time notifications tailored just for you. Ready to see it up close and personal? Scheduling a tour is just a tap away. Don't wait to find your perfect match. Download the Redfin app and start searching today.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

People, my people, what's up? This is Questlove. Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season. But, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Marr, E., Jonathan Sheckner, Billy Porter, and so many more. And I want to thank you all for being here.

Look, if you haven't heard these episodes yet, hey, now's your chance. You gotta check them out. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Happy holidays from me, Michael Rappaport. And my gift to you is a free subscription to the I Am Rappaport Stereo Podcast, where I discuss entertainment, sports, politics, and anything and everything that catches my attention. I am here to call it as I see it. And there's a whole lot of things catching my eyes these days. Listen to the I Am Rappaport Stereo Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.