12: Imaginary worlds and creativity

to have Michelle Ruth Bernstein on the podcast. Michelle is a creativity researcher, writer, Kennedy Center teaching artist, and adjunct faculty member at Michigan State University. Her new book is called Inventing Imaginary Worlds from Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts and Sciences. First of all, thank you so much for being on the show. A huge fan of your work, well, thanks for asking me, and I

loved your new book. I mean I followed your work for a very long time and was it very excited to see you put a lot of it into this book summarizes I think, probably over a decade of your research. Would you say that's correct, Yeah, I would, because I've been working on the book for yeah, ten ten or more years in one way or another. Yeah, So I was first excited just by the title, and then and then I got a chance to read the book, and

it very much lives up to the title. You know, I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a big personal interest in this book. I invented lots of imaginary worlds. I think that my whole childhood was one big imaginary world. I can't remember, thinking back my childhood of anything, any aspect of reality that I remember. All I remember or my fantasies. Weird. Is that weird? Yeah? Well, I don't know if it's weird. It means that you were important to you and they actually obviously fulfill some

kind of function for you. They very much did, They very much did. That's correct. How did you get interested in this topic and how did observations of your own children maybe play a role? Oh? Yeah, they played a big role, I think. First of all, you know, I had written with my husband the book Sparks of Genius, and we were looking at various imaginative thinking skills and one of them was play and I really enjoyed doing the research on that and it was one of my

favorite tools, so to speak. And I remember when I was doing the research that a lot of the we were reading a lot of memoirs, autobiographies, interviews what people creative people had to say, and a lot of them were talking about how important their childhood play was in

one way or another. And that really stuck with me, and I thought, wouldn't it be interesting Because these people, various people were bringing it up so consistently, it seemed to me, whether they were artists or scientists or whatever, that play really had something to do with adult creativity that I was kind of interested in that potential link. So there was that, you know, kind of curiosity about that.

And then I realized sort of at the same time, but my daughter was playing in a very complex way, which I didn't do as a child, so it was very new to me, and I was fascinated by what she was doing, and I paid a lot of attention and asked her a lot of questions, and basically around the age of nine, she made up a language, which is kind of typical for that age group to make

up secret languages and things like that. Well, she just sort of kept at it, and then I would start asking her, well, who speaks this language, you know, or

you know, where do they speak this language? And Eventually she started writing little stories, you know, maybe one line stories, but and she would It was a pictogram language, so she drew the she drew the pictogram that meant, you know, the word, then she would translate the word underneath into you know, letters, and then she would, you know, tell you how you would pronounce it. I mean, so she was very involved in the language. And from there she

just kept going. I think because we were interested in supportive she, she just kept going and started writing a lot of stories, and then she drew pictures, and then it was this whole world that she was, you know, involved in developing. And as she grew older, you know, she did it for about nine or ten years, so that's like nine to nineteen. Everything she was learning in school, in particular, she'd come home and she would transpose it

into her world. So if she was learning about holidays in fifth grade, she'd come home and so, well, what are the holidays that my people have? You know, and she'd make them up. And she was enamored with those eyewitness books. I don't know if you've ever seen them. They're kind of visual dictionaries or visual encyclopedias for children, and she would write down what she had decided about her holidays in the same way that the eyewitness books did.

So there'd be pictures and a little bit of text, and more pictures and a little bit of text explaining the holidays. And she did that with many, many, many subjects that caught her interest in school. Now it gowns on me that you said that you know, you're like, you know, as children do. But I mean, I'm not convinced that this is a typical behavior for a nine year old. Is this really typical to do such elaborate complex It seems pretty special to me. Oh no, I

didn't mean that that was typical. What I meant was well typical, maybe not even for making up languages. But there are around the age of nine children, I don't know what percentage. I think we probably don't have any clue. We'll make up language, you know, to have a secret language, and it might not go any farther than that in some cases, and in my daughter's case it did go farther. And yeah, I don't think that's as typical as you know,

other forms of play. Definitely not. But also I think that from the kinds I did try to determine rates of worldplay amongst you know, college students who would have been kids around they would have been children, you know, in the seventies and eighties, maybe, And yeah, I think

I've got that right. And I found that, you know, given a basic definition of world play, I had about twelve percent of students whom I felt I could I could see from their responses that they and they filled out a questionnaire that yes, that looked recognizably like world play. So twelve percent is it's not negligible, It's maybe not fifty percent. It's not, you know, really typical. But I think more children do it than we realize or than

we recognize. Yeah, and you make a lot of really interesting points here book about implications for identifying various potentialities, so to speak. I'm dancing around the word giftedness, but I'll just say, in particular, you use a phrase in the book called child centered giftedness. Could you unpack that phrase a little bit? I find that a really interesting phase. And how does that differ from do you think that's the predominant way we viewed giftedness in the school system

as child centered? Did I use that phrase? Oh, I don't even remember using that phrase. I think what I was trying to tease on, you know, saying creative giftedness is different than intellectual giftedness, and very interesting, Well, that seems to be the case. I mean, maybe I'm making a pronouncement that other people would dispute, but I agree, I would agree with you for what it's worth. It's it's very difficult for us to know who's going to

be creative. I mean, we've try all sorts of things, we have all these tests that don't seem to work, and we don't really know who's going to end up, you know, being the adult genius or or even just a regular good creative person. So I tried to look at what we know or don't know about creative giftedness as something separate, like not I cur related, just they have the ability or the potential to be to make things,

to make new and novel and effective things. And so looking at that, I thought, you know, having read a bunch of the literature that looks at prodigies and stuff like that, and prodigies aren't necessarily creative either, although they do start very young to you know, to develop a high level of skill in a discipline, and an adult discipline.

But even prodigies don't necessarily end up being creative. So seeing a child who's like really great at writing or really great at the violin or something as a child doesn't mean they're going to be creative either. And I came across someone saying, you know, maybe we should be looking at things that are germane to childhood, and I said, yeah,

but I had a different twist on that. I said, let's look at play, because all children play, and we can maybe look at the way they play and determine, you know, Okay, this child's playing in such a way that I think they have potential to be creative when

they're adult. Absolutely. So I mean what you're doing as a consequence of that making that argument is you're really highlighting creativity is something different than other skills that we tend to We do tend to highlight in education and educational context and talk about a lot of things maybe we're neglecting. So do you think that that can play be developed? Tough question because I I know the answer. Yeah. Play is by definition, you know, goalless has no goal,

it's spontaneous, it's self generated. So that is a very good question. So I do try to look a little bit at how if, if this kind of play, world play, if this kind of thing is already in some ways in the schools, And I found that some kinds of curriculum do try to imitate what it means to make up a world. But of course the children may or may not be interested in what's that world because it's not necessarily their world. It's you know, it's a curricular world.

It's it's a teacher said let's do this. So it's a balancing act. But I think that I think that children can become engaged, you know, depending on who they are and the time of day and whatever. Children do get engaged and things that go on in the classroom, and you you, you could, you know, you could introduce worldplay in such a way that you would also allow them their own scope for pursuing and just giving them the idea and maybe they'll go with it, and maybe

they won't. You use the word world play just now nowep in mind that my audience, probably for most of them, it's the first time they ever encountered in such a word. Yeah, that's because I made it up, because right, I'm not saying because my audience is stupid, I'm saying it. Oh yeah, I made it up, because I made it up exactly what ye word mean? Okay, well, I think it means to invent an imaginary world, playful invention of an imaginary world,

And so I gave it the name world play. And I was thinking about this because when I first started reading what literature was out there, I came across the word paracosm, and I thought, oh, that sounds so clinical, and and I thought, well, you know, I was trying to put a word to what I was doing, and so, but then I realized later that paracosm was actually coined by one of my heroes, who you know, preceded me in the field of this research, was Robert Silvey from

the middle of the century, and he jumpstarted the study of imaginary worlds as a form of play, not as a form of you know, a clinical mental illness or something which had been heavily I think up to the time when he started doing his work, there was a lot of prejudice against this kind of play. People weren't sure what it is. It's sort of like they had the same kind of over tones as imaginary companions. You know,

if he did that kind of thing. There was really something wrong with who you weren't socialized properly or whatever. So so really, when I realized that my hero was he's one who coined paracosm, and I thought, Okay, it's not such a bad word. But so what I what I tend to do is use the word paracosm for imaginary world. It's like a synonym for imaginary world. And world play is to me more of a verb sort of thing, you know, the act of inventing an imaginary world,

the act of playing in an imaginary world. So I use both words, and I also use inventing imaginary worlds. So just to give you know a little bit more, a few more ways of discussing and thinking about about the subject. Do you do any creative writing yourself? You're a terrific writer in this book, you know, there's so many quotes that I just love. I'm just curious. Do you do any creative writing? Yeah? I do. I do,

and my daughter does too. Yeah. Actually, you know, when she was doing all this world play when going through junior high in high school, and I thought, oh my gosh, she's going to be a writer, you know, she's just pouring out these stories, and I thought they were terrific. Of course I would, I was her mother. But you know, she was getting a live practice in writing and I and she was writing for a child at a quite

a high level. And but interestingly enough, what happened in college was she got very interested in well, she was first very interested in where language comes from, and so she started studying that, you know, in the social sciences. But then also she started getting into biology and looking at evolution of communication in animals, et cetera. So she is now a zoologist and a conservationist. But she she did pursue poetry through college, took some classes, got a

couple of poems published in The New Yorker. In fact, what yeah really definitely Yeah, two poems in there. But will you send me links to them and I can put them on the show notes. Okay, I'll try to find them. Yeah. Yeah. So she had that capacity, but she chose science. So I mean, in some ways she

validated my whole point. One of my major points was to say, okay, you know, previous research says that if you intent imaginary world as child, as a child, you're going to want to be a novelist or a poet or something like that, or maybe an artist, but that was about as far as they'd go. And I thought, well,

that doesn't make sense, you know. And in fact, with my MacArthur's study, I demonstrated that you can find world play in the background of creative people, no matter what they're doing what they end up doing, and I thought that there were elements that would prepare you in good ways for science too. So some ways she validated my my my hypothesis because she went into science absolutely, I you know, I was. I started off in music as

an opera singer. You did ainger. Yeah, I did not get accepted into the psychology program because in my SAT scores were not high enough. So I got accepted into this school. I wanted to study psychology, and I got accepted in the opera program and then transferred in. But I to this day, I don't know if it makes any sense to say this, but I feel like I have an artist, an artist's soul. Yeah, I'm doing science, but I don't, uh. I don't only get excited by

by discovery. I love discovery, but I feel like discovery without constantly thinking of possibilities for future worlds is not, you know, without without the opportunity to do that, I feel like I don't feel complete. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think too. You know, I'm sure I've read that people have argued that the pool of individuals that art draws from and science draws from is really the

same pool of individuals. You know, It just they for some reason in there, you know, they have the same kind of interest in self sustained discovery and process and learning, and they either for one reason or another, going towards the sciences or they go towards the arts. But there they've got a lot of the same personality traits or whatever you want to call them, or maybe we should

say creative artists and creative scientists. I've noticed that if you'll get the difference between professional artists and professional scientists, you actually notice huge personality differences. Yeah. Well, yeah, there are there are differences, I mean, and I don't really want to go into them because it's not the subject. I mean, I hear a lot about it because my husband's research and he's a scientist. Bob's a scientist and an artist, and it's written a lot about You're talking

about Bob honestine. Yeah, if I've written, you know, a couple of books with and we're planning on writing some more. Really, you guys have more in store for you guys. Yeah, we're trying to get back to it. And it just took me. This detour was a little long for me to write this book. But any today just started up again, just started up again. Yeah, we get into some of the niggaray details of your studies, particularly your MacArthur Genius

Award or MacArthur Fellowship study. What prompted you to study play among MacArthur grantees and what did you find? Okay, well that was at the very beginning of my research into imaginary World. So it was, you know, it was twelve years ago already something like that, and I was thinking, okay, what's gonna you know, I had I had read a little bit. There wasn't that much there was Sylvie's work on.

It was just focused on children, and I had this idea that you know, as I said before, that there could be a relationship between the way you play or some kind of connection, some kind of felt connection between the way you play as a child and what you end up doing as an adult because you know, creative individual are often talking about childhood play or so I said, well,

so I should be able to find a group. Maybe I could find a group that I could you know, I could query them about their play when they were young, and ideally a group that was you know, a creative group somehow we feel that they were creative, and ideally also a group that wasn't just artists made up of artists. So I mean, the MacArthur group was practically, you know, handmade for my study. And I knew about them because my husband had a MacArthur and so I just thought, oh, okay,

maybe he could help me contact all these people. And so that's why the first paper I wrote, which was based which you know, looked at this study, was written with Bob because he was instrumental in getting me access to the MacArthur fellows and also instrumental in working out the statistics with me. So absolutely, okay, so what did you find? So basically what I found, I think is that well, first of all, yeah, well I was looking at I wanted to get a sense of rate and

such and such. But I found that well, I got at least somewhere around one hundred MacArthur's to fill out my query. Yeah, that's tough. That's tough. And I thought that was a really good response rate, you know, for something coming out of the blue. And I think what I found basically is that MacArthur and I MacArthur fellows had world play. Those who said they had world play were, you know, across the board in all the different fields. You know, it kind of it didn't matter. It wasn't

more artists than scientists. It was just a smattering and all. And in the proportions you would expect considering the purpose ortion of MacArthur's that were in those fields, the proportions matched up pretty well. That you know, I was just kind of across the board there was worldplay, which was something I was hoping to find, and I did find that instead of finding just only artists wrote back to me,

but it was a mix of everybody. And then I compare them, of course to another group, and I compared them to Michigan State University students. So I did the same kind of querying with them and found some interesting differences between the two groups. And I think that's where something you know, worthy of looking at crops up. I mean, because for instance, students expected world play to the artists.

The students who were artists expected to have world play in their lives, did have worldplay in their lives, expected to do it professionally. And the students who were scientists were studying to be scientists, did not expect it. And that was like almost completely you know, tip topsy turvy from from what the Macarthurs were. So I had high rates of of you know, compared to the students. The rate of worldplay amongst amongst the MacArthur's scientists was highly significant.

So that's the kind of thing. I found that the significance was very high in all the fields, not necessarily the arts. So because and I you know, I had a smallish group. So I'm not saying this is like you know, the end statement about about the relationship between the different disciplines or between you know, creative adults and students. But but it just sort of said, oh, there's something

here that we need to look at. Absolutely only you find did they report that they that this was a contribute to their adult creativity, Like do you think there was a causal link there between because that's just an association, right, what kind of evidence did you find for maybe a causal link. Well, of course, the way I the way that study was conducted, the evidence for causal link would have simply been people's you know, there's statements about they

saw a link, you know, they saw a connection. So I did ask one of the questions was, do you see any connection between the way you played as a child and the way you where you work as an adult? And you know, I forget what it was, but some some some subset of the MacArthur said yeah, there's a connection,

and they sometimes yeah. I mean if I hadn't, you know, I would have the study would have gone off in a different direction completely because a lot of what it did subsequently was built on trying to understand what I got out of MacArthur's. But I also ended up being able to inner view a number of people who said interesting things in the query and found that, yeah, for some individuals there was a very close connection of some sort, you know, between the way they played and what kinds

of things they were trying to do as adults. I mean, one example is Laura Otis, whom I talk about in my book at some length, and she was kind enough to give me several interviews I've actually met her and done some things with her subsequently. But you know, she had an imaginary world, really, you know, definitely, no doubt

about it. Imaginary world when she was young, and she would tell stories to herself, auto stories when she was quite young, and then around age of nine or ten, she would she started writing them down, and she drew some pictures and maps and things like that as well. And as an adult she studied science. She would thought she was going to be a scientist, a neuroscientist, but then she went back to school and went and got

a degree in literature. And so now she's a professor of literature, but her specialty is looking at the literature of science, and and she writes novels. I mean, I don't know that. I don't know that she's gotten any of her novels published, but she's quite serious about She's written more than one, and she's you know, so she's she's doing in some ways the same thing. You know, maybe it's not part of her it's her avocation at this point rather than her vocation, but it's very serious

for her. And so she's she's, you know, in some ways recapitulating what she did as a child writing stories. But she also expressed and I have, you know, talked about it in the book, you know, other aspects of the two enterprises that seem to be the same for her or similar excellent. Do any of these imaginary worlds involve some sort of grandiose like like a future self version of the person? So it's it's it is an invention of imaginary world, but that imaginary world is like

that person as an adults, really successful and famous. Because I believe you defined it that way, you'd actually get higher incidences of world play among you mean, like a Walter Mitty sort of thing, maybe Walter Mitty or I mean I personally had in my imaginary world where I was a speaker or an inspiration. I literally had fantasies and I remember I remember being in the shower and thinking about myself as an adult giving inspirational talks to people.

What in the world that is that? What is that? Yeah? Uh, you know, I didn't come across a lot of that, but there's definitely definitely instances of that. And I'm thinking, for instance, of Jerome's singer you know, oh yeah, fired psychologist, but he's written himself in some of his books about his early world play, and and it involved alter egos like that, very strongly conceived alter egos. That because I bring this up because one of E. Paul Torrence's key

findings in his longitudinal study of creative achievers. But he started he studied them when they were in elementary school and then followed them up to see what differentiated the creative achievers from those who were lower in creative achievement as well as personally meaningful creative creative behaviors. He found that one of the things that was most distinguishable was the extent to which these children fell in love with

a future image of themselves as children. And so I'm trying to I'm just wondering if that can be a subset of your world play, where children who have a very elaborate imaginary world, but that imaginary world involves their future self, if that could be part of your role playing. It certainly was for me, and I think it significantly helped create the kind of person I am today because I held on to that future image of myself despite

my reality, which was unfavorable because I special education. So I'm just wondering, Yeah, now that's really interesting. I didn't. I didn't come across enough of that to pique my interest in following that particular line. But what I did find, which I think might be related, is that, I mean,

I found this over and over again. I found this in uh, you know, memoirs, historical Figures in Current People, and also in the Robert Sylvie book, which is the developer, what is it called the Development of Imagination, where they that book basically consists of giving you case studies, you know,

the information from all the case studies. And I put over that book and found lots and lots of the individuals that he talked to or interviewed the children felt they had a very strong sense of themselves in childhood as a creator, the sense of the self as a creator, and so that's kind of a strong sense. They often use the word like God like, godli like or you know. The Brontees were had that same sense of themselves, and they called themselves genies, you know, the kind of genies

that come out of a lamp, so to speak. And they when they played together, these siblings, the Bronte siblings had these imaginary worlds that lasted from through childhood through young adulthood, and when they played together. Initially they were

playing together a foresome they were they were genies. They they their role in the play was as the genies, so they could make you know, they could come in as gods and if someone had died that they wanted to resurrect, they could do that and blah blah blah. Not every child has that same kind of ego involvement, I guess what you might call it, because and that's interesting. The Sylvie book they did try to look at that,

and they found, you know, a variable response. Some children would be ego involved that way, they would be a character in that world or a god in that world or something, and others would be removed. So that was a variable that you could say, well, you know, okay, in this instance they're ego involved, and they are very naturalistic in their approach, and you know, in this case they're not ego involved and whatever. So they had kind of a few scales which they tried to use to

kind of understand the different types of imaginary worlds. My mom would definitely agree with you with that expression ego involved. I was a child. I think I was only child. I think it might have some aspect of this story, this part of the puzzle. I think, you know, do you do you find higher incidences of worldplay among only children by any chance? Well, you know, I didn't have

I didn't have the information to ask that question. But that's that's a good question because I think one of the a fairly basic characteristic of world play is that it's solitary play. Now, sometimes it's you know, with one or two others that are very in so I call that like intimate play. You know who those people are. They're always the same couple of people that you share this world with, you know, usually siblings or very close

friends or something, but not a large group. If the group gets too large, you lose control of the world, you know, it becomes something else. So it's not playground stuff. It's so it's either solitary or small group get together. And whether that means that they're more likely to be only children, I have no idea. My don't is not an only child, because I did. She was the oldest, and her brother, who was a year and a half younger, uh, never did get interested in worldplay, although she tried at

least once I know of, to get him involved. Her world was called car kar nothing to do with the vehicles, but that was what she called them. And so she got him to be involved for like one day and he invented the world of truck and that was like he really wasn't into it, so that it didn't last further,

It didn't last long. He played with her a lot of other things, and I talk quite a bit about the way they played, which I thought, you know, was interesting, but no, he you know, some kids just don't go there, they're not interested. Do you think that this could be a way of identifying creative giftedness and children that could be supplemented alongside the use of i Q tests, I do, I really do. I think More generally, I'd say, take

a look at how they play spontaneously. No not not in school necessarily, but what they do on their own for play, and see how complex it is, See what's going on in that play. It doesn't always have to be what doesn't have to be the same kind of you know, there are lots of kinds of imaginary worlds. So I mean, some children may write stories about the same place over and over again, the same characters and develop that world in that way. Some kids, you know,

might make up. Well, I don't know what they in the past they would do. They would make big train systems or ship systems or whatever, you know, whether they would do you know, they had this kind of focus on a system, on developing a I don't know what else to call it, you know, a kind of organism, a social organism, thing that works, and there's not that

many people. That was another thing that Sylvie found. You know, sometimes there are people orient a lot of people in the world, and sometimes there are no people in the world. So I'm sure there are differences in terms of autistic tendencies and other individual differences like schizoid tendencies, and I bet they're all sorts of fascinating individual differences predicting content of world play. I'm so interesting. I bet narcissism as well,

probably predicts the ego involvement. You know, that might be true. You know, I didn't go into some of those things. I mean, I'm not trained as a psychologist, so I said, okay, I'll open I'll see what I can do to get people interested in this, and then you know, they're going to have their own They're going to have their own point of view and their own things they're going to

want to and they're going to want to study. Wouldn't that be interesting though, to really look at different individual differences predictors of the content there, the flavor of the world, or or the kind of structure of it. Yeah, really interesting. Sure there's there might be some kind of relationship there, you know, but I wouldn't I wouldn't know what it is at this point. Yeah. Well, it makes me want to do more research on that myself. Good. That's really

good stuff. So do you think that in an increasingly wired and collaborative age, that privately constructed worldplay has a future? Yeah, I'm a little right from your book, by the way. Yeah, well, I you know, I thought I can't not look at

video games and you know, online realities. I again, I'm not an expert in any of that, but I mean it's just so it's just something that has to be you know, looked at and kind of get a handle on, because a lot of what video games seem to be delivering to kids is this sense of being in an imaginary world and if they can if that's you know, I'm going on the premise that Okay, around certain age, around nine years old, ten years old, this kind of

this kind of thing becomes very very fascinating to children. I mean you can find studies of fork building and things like that. You know, it starts happening around that age. So kids are coming more interested in this kind of sense of creating their own world in some way away from the home base, you know, whether they build forts or find special places and then have big play scenarios around them. I mean I used to do that, but I think that's more typical playing outside, you know, in

a fourth that you've built. So I said, okay, so with video games and things, now we're handing these kids these things on a plate in sense, I mean they

can buy the game. They don't have to go outside and make a ford anymore because they can do all this stuff online and it's got the same flavor, the same adventuresome flavor, and a lot of the kids I did, you know, I did try to interview a number of kids who were very interested in who did play video games and told me that they what they liked about

it was like feeling like they're in another world. So so I, you know, I have a chapter looking at what they were experiencing, what they were getting out of out of the play with the video games and the online the online encounters, the online realities, And I think basically what I what I ended up thinking was that, you know, there are elements that are very much the same, you know, as far as the whether it's online or whether you made it up yourself, But the crucial difference

is you didn't make it up yourself. Yeah, it's pretty packaged imagination. Yeah, it's prepackaged. So no matter what, even the kids, I mean, some kids think that they have

they have unlimited choice et cetera in the games. But as I talked to them, as the kids I talked to got older and older, like the high schoolers, they began to realize, no, you know, it's kind of constrained by whoever built the game, you know, and then you know you have so although there seems to there is a lot of choice, et cetera, you're still constrained by someone else's imagination. So so bottom line was it's not

exactly the same thing as making up your own. But on the other hand, I thought that there are ways of you know, just like with anything else, there are ways of using the games too, as jumping boards, you know, for your own imaginary worlds, especially if you're not allowed to play with them twenty four to seven, you know, and you're really fascinated by it, and their mom says, you know, you've got to turn it off. You know, you're only allowed to play with it for an hour

or whatever it is. So a lot of the kids I was talking to were not allowed to play constantly, so away from the game, they would they would still play it, but now they would be making it up themselves, you know, And I thought that was that's I thought, that's the interesting part. That's the part where we can

can use the technology. And then I thought, you know too, if kids can make up their own imaginary if they can make up their own video games, then they can make up their own imaginary world as a video game, you know. And there are you know, forays into doing that. It's still very difficult because it's a tough it's a tough thing to master's degree programs. That there's a mester program at Cardika Melon you can create your own creating

video games. Yeah. Well, I mean like as a child, I know what I'm saying that there could be a continuity between that. Yeah, as a child and as an adult. You know, there's this we tend to treat as though like this plaque stuff is only for kids. Well that's the interesting thing about them. But what I was thinking like, there are programs like the Scratch program out of MIT where they're trying to make it possible for children who are not programmers and can't be can't be programmers at

a very young age, but they can learn to. They get sort of like the building blocks and they can put them together and start, you know, making things, making videos. Yeah, I'm going to look at I go, I'll put a link to the Scratch program and we'll look into that a little bit more. Yeah, you know, what it looks like is going to change. I mean, how children choose to build their worlds will change as our technologies change, as our technologies of expression change. That's just you have

to expect that, you know. So they're going to use paper and pencil to write a story, then they're going to use the computer to write the story. Then, you know, it depends how we as adults. You know, what kinds of expressive forms, are artistic forms or whatever are really important to the culture, and that's what the children will

be using. I think to develop their imaginative you know, their imaginary worlds, and so I think we have to expect that they would change what it looks like, but not necessarily what goes into the making of it, the imagination and the making of it and doing it yourself and that kind of thing. Do it your self imagination. I like that for you. Yeah, well, yeah, we need I like it. Just that that phrases this end of my head. So let's end this just the interview talking

about implications for education. You know, you talk about ways that worldplay can be harnessed for classroom objectives or could be integrated into the classroom seamlessly. Do you think society like education has created this false dichology between learning and play. Yeah, I think so to some extent. I know, it's a really it's a really complex issue how best to train

children for the for the grown up world. But if we're serious about training them to have or trying to develop in them as much creative potential as we can, and the behaviors and the attitudes and the understandings that always being creative, and I think we have to at least make some room for that in our curriculum because we're not you know, it's not just going to happen if we need more of it, and people say, yeah, we need more people who are who are able to

be flexible and change and you know, take on new problems throughout their lives and and be creative about it. So I think I've done. How can teachers do that? Well, I'm no pundit about this stuff, but I think that I think it's I think it's too bad that there is when there's no room in the curriculum for some

kind of playful learning. And I don't mean just whatever you want to do, but there you know, there's there's stuff you can do with that's playful, that that taps into the child's you know, interests, the interests and their play needs as well and allows them to use them in the classroom at times, not all the time. I mean, you have to part of education is transfer of knowledge, you know, and we have to do that too, but we could also try to transfer the behaviors and attitudes

of creative imagination. And that takes a different you know, it's not like, you know, you can't read the manual and learn how to do it. It's not you can't read the manual learn how to ride a bike. You have to do it. Yeah, that's how you learn to be creative by doing things that are creative at your you know, at your level, you know, as appropriate to where you are, and when you're very young, especially playful. Being playing is when children are at their most you know,

personally creative. I think love that you say and relate to that you see of this quote. Children who cannot play do not develop the impulse control, the negotiating skills, the problem solving tools, or the collaborative capacity is necessary seed in modern society. So there are some deepiplications here of not encouraging these capacities, right, right, And that's just generally, that's just out and that's just the literature, you know,

that's not my contribution necessarily to understanding. Summary. Yeah, it's a summary of what people. Yeah, and I really love this other. I just have to say another juicy quote in the private country of the mind, this might be one of my favorite quotes of all times, you know, up there with JFK quotes or in the private country of the mind. You create visions of the way things were, in the way they might be. You enter into imagined realms and shape an alternative space and time. To one

degree or another, we all do. Yeah, is there anything you want to add or any last words you want to say for this interview? Well, I think feeding off of that that quote, which I think comes from the beginning of the book, what I'm really trying to say is, although we haven't necessarily recognized it yet, world play or however you want to call it, in venting imaginary world is something that we do throughout our lifetimes. But as adults, we tend to think that it's not play anymore. We

don't understand it as play. It becomes part of our work. Those of us who are engaged in creative problem solving, maybe not, or maybe those are the ones who do understand that they're playing still, and the rest of society thinks no play is no good. When you're an adult, you shouldn't be playing. You should just be working hard. And what I'm saying is when when we're at our creative best, where we've got this sense of play, and

it permeates what we're doing throughout our lifetimes. And I guess part of what I tried to do with the book was to help us recognize that wonderful I highly recommend people read the book, and I hope it gets in the hands of lots of educators and policy makers as well. Thank you so much for the important work you do and for being on my show today. Well, thank you very much for asking me. Thanks for listening

to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as informative a foker listen if I did. If you don't like, to read the show notes for this episode or her past episodes, if you go to the Psychology Podcast dot com