Pretend Play, Part 5

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, 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 to play and complex cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind, whether pretend to 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. 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.

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?

reproduction advantage. So what would that be? So for this question, I wanted to look at a really really interesting paper published in twenty seventeen 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 eighteen 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 pre date object substitution,

but object substitution is a big early milestone, usually occurring by around one and a half years old. 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 eleven. I think in the last episode we cited a researcher who said it's around nine or

ten when it starts to wane. Lillard says around the age of eleven 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 sort of in disguise or not so much in disguise. Now, Lillard makes the argument that because pretend play of some form is culturally universal

and it's 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 twenty fifteen 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 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, specifically, like from tragic examples of children who suffered social isolation and 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 their 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.

of them. The criteria or that one we've already talked about this that it's not functional, meaning that 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 quote, is voluntary and pleasurable. It differs in form or some other way from the functional expression. It is repeat 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 in 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. I'm sure you've seen plenty of this in your home.

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.

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 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 various observations made about like what that does. Does that keep a cat in more sort of a semi permanent stage of kitten hood to some degree? Maybe that has an effect on how they associate 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.

with it. And so because of differences like this, Lillard thinks that the treating and inanimate object as life prey is not a great analogy for human play However, there's another thing observed in animals which she thinks 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 locomotive play activity 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 truncated. 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's clearly not what the behavior is intended to produce. 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 to 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 Baitsen 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 sub quote of baits in here quote the play f 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 playfight,

and apparently they do this a lot. Rats playfight. She says, when they playfight 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, she says, they target a 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 and 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 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.

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 out side the realm of play fighting and just in pretend play that the kinds we've been talking about in this 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, an 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 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 that 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 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 notice when we start taking on a pretense, I kind of sound different. I'm doing something with the timing of my speaking and the pitch of my voice and stuff that I'm not normally doing when I'm just playing with my daughter.

one another. But with pretend to 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 that the child doesn't

learn something that's wrong. 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 or 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 experiment she brings up.

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 littermates. Now, with other littermates 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 littermates 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. 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 playfighting 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. 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.

I would imagine. I haven't done research on this either, but I would imagine just in general and the human analogy, like any kind of sharing or relinquishing and relinquishing power over something within a game involves a type of inhibition control.

circuitry for inhibition doesn't really develop fully. So looking over all this research in rats, Lillard says that that playfighting 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 to 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 pick. Sure, 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 to play in humans involves a lot of reading of social information or metacommunication 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 is the meta communication that goes on when you're playing pretend, all the little 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,

Yet this sensitivity alone would not develop the symbolic function. Rather, it is the sensitivity in concert with the fact that the parent is presenting reality at two levels to the child, 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 the

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 root is reading social signals indicating that a behavior is to be interpreted at other than face value.

And then finally, also Lillard goes on to have another section about the connection between 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 pretense scenario. 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 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. I don't know, it's fascinating to imagine just how unpredictable

the development process of a human mind could be. That 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.

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 yeah, 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 a Dungeons and Dragons, says, we didn't stop to describe it, but of course it is 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. And so that is frequently brought up as an example of pretend play that you know, 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 lines up with pretend play in a

number of ways. And then we also touched briefly on Graveside conversations with the Debt 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've hand really helpful article by Alyssa Mwison titled Do grown Ups Pretend Play?

Or I'm sorry, do grown Ups 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 and pretend play, and she explores different imaginative adult activities that arguably match up with the idea of

pretend play. She brings up D and 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 some with a LARPing sword.

think low five visual storytelling as well. Like 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 a mental version of what was happening. That's more akin to say, engaging with a book.

We imagine the monster that's been glimpsed, or we imagine the monster in full than 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 odd audio based storytelling situation. But certainly with a 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, it's going to plant its seeds. But the author some times from beyond the graves, of course, you know, thinking thoughts directly into your active mind, or not directly via the book, but but you know, reading the social work, it's you know, it's not an entirely devoid of personal

imagination or even imaginative choices. I imagine many of you have this, have had this experience where you make a like a mental note of what a character looks like, or you even decide how you will cast them in your imagination. 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 a 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 Dane. Stand. We're just gonna we're just gonna try and streamline this a little bit. And I imagine various folks engage in varying degrees of this, though you know 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,

like via your own mind. You know, it's working off the various models, the various people you've seen and encountered. So there is still this like creative endeavor to 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 to have various experiences you wouldn't have in your normal life, to laugh. And then 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 twenty seventeen study by White at All 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 they 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 I'm working, followed by children who took a third person perspective of the cell 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.

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 or maybe around the maybe on the other side, maybe it makes it more exciting and activity that would otherwise be so easy that it's boring.

get in the zone for what was to come. So that's and that's 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 you know, pretend played to some extent a fictional character in order to make it through some you know, 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, to 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 is it, Like, you know, language is powerful, and if we're engaging in

beast mode, are on on some level? Are we engaging in some sort of imaginablecanthropy, some imagined a hulking out in order to complete a task.

Like you're not just doing a workout, you are, you know, you're crossing some incredible hurdle in some kind of dramatic scenario.

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 has 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 were talking about faking it till you make it, they're talking about I guess it's 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 that 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 than norm.

when I had a young child. I was like, what was the movie The Babba Duke that came out? I think my child was And I was like, no, thank you, I'm not going to skip on the Babba Duke. And I still haven't gotten around to seeing.

and so forth. So I think there are different levels of this depending on you know, I was subjective, you know, whatever 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, or you're not aware of. And then she stresses mastering control in both adult and child models here,

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, and it may just be objectively out of our control, and yet you know, we 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 uh and and I believe that some of the most frequent examples, though, concerned tabletop gaming and especially tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. A hallmark of some of these experiences that that i've I've seen discussed in past papers of I've read is the idea of too of a fixed, 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.

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. You can, 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.

I was looking at that article. The author of this Burn speaks with clinical psychiatrists Raphael Bokemazo, and in this conversation, it's stressed that tabletop role playing games, and I think this is important, 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, opening spaces for patients to explore things like identity, mortality, gender, social skills, you know, overcoming social anxiety and so forth.

therapeutic purposes. I was looking at one paper from nineteen ninety four by Wayne D. Blackmun titled Dungeons and 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 was from twenty twenty three, 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 sixty to ninety minutes of OURPG 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 therapists assisted reflection.

And you know, you'll find multiple examples of this where, if not tabletop roleplaying 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.

is what we like to do. But there is a kind of ongoing like 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 and sustained pretend to play 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.

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 in 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 you could have these laughs while still engaging in the seriousness of the story. I'm not sure.

with social cognition. Like I say, this is kind of a it 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, you know, let's make therapy fun and approachable, but it also seems to have

unique properties undo 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. Now, I mentioned improv as well. I looked at a pair of studies from twenty sixteen

to twenty seventeen. There is a comedic improv Therapy for the treatment of Social anxiety disorder by All Journal of Creativity and Mental Health, and the other one is theraprov a pilot study of improv used to treat anxiety and

depression Kruger at ALL 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, 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.

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 twentieth century, and there have been a number of studies regarding how it can be used to help with

various conditions and ailments. 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 the extent to what extent we're continuing to engage and pretend play throughout our adult lives.

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 to play is maybe the most important kind.

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.