Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on fun. Of course, we all roughly know what fun is. You know fun when you see it, you know fun when you're having it, so you got a gut level understanding. But fun is actually rather difficult to define and to differentiate from other related concepts like pleasure, happiness, and entertainment. So we've been trying to to tease out some of the studies about fun and some observations people can make about fun and what its unique characteristics are. Now, in the last episode we talked a bit uh Rob. You had a section about what particular features make a game fun, and I thought one of the most interesting things you brought up there was the suggestion of a natural association between learning and fun, which is in a way kind of funny because you can think about very painful attempts to to make wrote learning quote fun in some way, you know, adding games in school that are of questionable fund value sometimes but that could in a way still be onto something because there may, in fact be um a major role for fun in the kind of learning that we do in a non structured way, in a non school environment, when we're just learning through free exploratory behavior. Yeah. Yeah, it is fascinating to think about because it made me think back, certainly on school days and at various age points and thinking like, well, when did this? When did it become fun to engage in this quest for learning? And you know, those are the learning experiences that that do tend to stand out the most. Yeah, I have similar experiences. A lot of what I remember most from school are the things that were the most fun in school. Uh. And So I wanted to talk about a paper that I came across that I found pretty interesting. I think, again, this only addresses one facet of the issue of funds is it's not going to give you a total view. But it was a really interesting child psychology paper from two thousand seven addressing the relationship between toys, fun, and a child's ability to control natural experiments. So this paper was by a couple of authors named Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonna Wits. Now for some context, I was checking out, particularly some of the other research by Laura Schultz. She actually has a a pretty good TED talk where she explains sort of the arc of her career. It's from a few years back, but Schultz is a professor of cognitive sciences at m I T and a lot of her research is focused on the question how do children learn so well? Because children are able to learn how the world works in a relatively short time, with relatively limited experiences. I mean, people often phrase this question about language in particular, I think because language acquisition is just one of the most amazing things. Yeah, it's it's astounding, Like the way children acquire language, Like how do you learn to put together infinitely variable, grammatically functional sentences just by listening to adults talk for a few years, Like you don't even have to be taught the rules of grammar, you know, when you learn grammar in school. The grammar you're learning there is basically just an analytical tool or maybe an attempt to kind of regularize or normalize exactly the way you construct sentences. But you're you're already able to do so in a functional way, I mean, where people can understand you. Yeah, the neural plasticity of children is just absolutely amazing. I know we've we've touched on it a few times over the over the years, and yeah, it's it's fascinating to learn about. It's it's mind blowing to experience in real life and real time that you sort of lose some of the mystery at times by being so close to it. But but yeah, like that they have to acquire so much data in such a short period of time. And I think another weird thing thinking about this and thinking about it too for this episode in terms of fun and also you know, talking about games and toys and the imagination, as we'll get into, is that we we live in a time now where I feel like we we definitely have more understanding of what children are and when, what they're not, and what they're doing, and that all these things have a purpose. But it's so easy to sort of fall back in this older way of thinking and look at a child playing, a child having fun, and then well, of course they having fun. They don't have anything else to do, they don't have a job. Uh, look at these look at these bumps. But this is frivolous activity, right, It's it's for some reason, it's still easy to think think that way, But of course we know better now, we know that the reality of it is that part of what makes ldren children is that they are these sponges. They are absorbing all of this information and then processing it, uh, coming to terms with it. And so a lot of the the ideas that they were discussing in this episode, uh, you know, some of the ones that I'm going to get into are certainly not the only theories out there, but a lot of them do involve this this more nuanced vision of the child and what the child is doing in the world. Yeah, play is a child's job. It is them that they're going to school, but in an unstructured way. Play is how they not just you know. Uh. You mentioned it's important for them to gather a lot of data, and that is true. But another way of thinking about it, children are able to generalize inferences about how things work, uh, with way less data than you would expect to say, a computer to need a certain kind of program to need in order to learn how something works. So how do children make such powerful general inferences? How do they figure out rules about how the world works on the basis of so little experience? I think play is a big part of this um and so the paper I wanted to look at again. This is by Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonowitz. It's called serious fun. Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded. This was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in the year two thousand seven. And this study looks at a concept that it calls causal knowledge, meaning an understanding of cause and effect relationships in the environment. Another way of thinking about it is just understanding how things work. Now, obviously a major part of child development is this formation of general causal knowledge. Learning that if you set a spherical object down on a table and you let go of it, it can roll off the edge, or learning that if you turn a door knob it will open a door, or learning that if you pet the cat too roughly, the cat might hiss and scratch you. The world is full of these cause and effect relationships, and to learn how the world works, you have to not only learn, but you have to learn how to learn. You have to, to some extent, understand when a relationship between two events that you observe is causal and when that relationship is just random or safe to ignore. So you have to learn how to tell the difference between Okay, I pet the cat too rough and it gets angry. That's clearly causal, Like that not being gentle with the cat is what made it angry versus, oh, I'm plucking at the carpet and then a bird lands on the window sill. Somehow a child usually figures out that that is not actually causal, that's just random. So how does a young child master all of this complex inference? Uh? I think I was just thinking about this, and I think some inference might be helped along by maybe instinctive heuristics like physical proximity, like how close is what I did to the effect that it might have produce boost? Are they physically connected in some way that I can see? Obviously, this wouldn't always be the case, especially in a world full of you know, remote electronics and stuff like that, but that would help a little bit. Another way of sifting through inferences to separate the good from the bad is just by repeating experiments. Whatever you just did, do it again and see if the same result happens. Of course, this is useful in in actual scientific experiments. You know, you want to repeat experiments to see if you get the same result. But you can observe children naturally doing this all the time. They'll do something and look for a result, and then they'll do it again, and they'll do it again. Of course, in general, children just love repetition. Yeah. Well, and you might you might plausibly argue that there's a kind of built in science module in in the child's brain. I mean, it's not going to be as refined as a as a carefully scrutinized scientific method planned by adults, But you could say that there's some kind of instinct for repetition that might be based on the fact that repeating experiments gets you better data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe that's what's going on when when generally, if there's something funny, I've noticed that with with kids, like they figured out a joke that works, whether they're going to keep telling that joke, keep telling that joke, and then I guess part of the learning experiment is realizing like how far how many times can you tell about joke and it's still elicits a response, Uh, what are the hard limits to it? So the authors of this developmental psychology paper are talking about children's acquisition of causal knowledge, and they write that since basically since Jean Pig, psychologists have mostly accepted that children construct their causal model of the world through exploratory play, like this is not something having. Having causal knowledge is not usually something that has to be explicitly taught by adults, though and of course in some limited cases it can be. And it's not something that just comes was fully built in hardwired instinct. It's something that children learn through experimenting with the world on their own. So under this model, a major function of play is learning, specifically learning to predict cause and effect relationships in the world. Now, if this model is true, you would expect to see evidence of that if you just observe the natural patterns of exploratory play behavior in children. And the authors isolate one major finding which does seem to back up this model of the acquisition of causal knowledge, and that is children's preference for novel stimuli. So the authors don't phrase it this way, but just my interpretation, I think it would connect to the idea of like, why do children want a new toy when they already have toys at home? I think you could argue that, at least in part This could be because they already know how the old toy works. They've used it in a hundred different ways. They've figured out all the different things that it can do and what it does when you do different things to it, And a new toy provides opportunities to learn new things about something else, something different. Yeah, this of course is frequently a parental comment about the ephemeral interest in toys. Right, you get the fancy new toy, it's played with for a day and then it's on the floor, and then we quite hypocritically, will say well, why aren't you still playing with that toy? And if if the child was savvy, they might say, well, you have top Gun on VHS. Why aren't you still watching that? Why did you stop watching that movie? Why isn't that you just go to movie? You like to watch movies, you own one, watch it? Um, you know, we're we're not that that different in that regard. Another big one, of course, is there's the there's the old toy versus new toy. But it's something that's always more interesting other kids toys. Whenever you take the child out, then you're you're I don't know, you're a friend's house. Or or at a park and somebody's brought a toy like the toy of the other child is instantly interesting for this very reason because it is the new toy. It is the novel toy. Well, that seems like it might have a double appeal because not only is it novel, so it has the appeal that all new things do, but it also has been sort of pre vetted, like if some other kid is playing with it, that shows like, okay, there probably is something good about this toy and it would be worth my time, right and yeah, and then also there's the social dynamics of this thing is also desired, and ownership maybe up in the air on it. But this is all fascinating thinking about about something about the novel factor here, because once again makes us think of fun and uh and the idea of learning from the last episode. So even if you're just thinking about an object right like it's there's something even if it's just a tactile experience, you're interested in in what does it feel like, what happens when I throw it against a wall, etcetera. And of course all of this reminds me once more about the connection that we're looking at between fun and learning, right, because this paper is looking at a connection between learning and exploratory play behavior. This is beyond the scope of the paper itself, but I think it is a totally reasonable inference to believe that the primary intrinsic motivating factor driving exploratory play is fun. So like fun is the is the wages that are paid for the work of play? Yeah, I thinking of a biblical parallelism, is the wages the wages of play is fun. It's gonna be the singular, is right. Yeah. But anyway, so coming back to the author's introduction on this paper, they say, you know, at the time this paper was written, there was actually not a whole lot of evidence for consistent patterns that have been observed in the exploratory behavior of children. Uh, And so they're they're going to uh study one pattern in this experiment they're setting up. But as as preface to that, they write, quote moreover, considerable research suggests that even older children and naive adults are poor designing causally informative experiments and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would support or undermine causal hypotheses. And then they cite a whole bunch of studies to back up this assertion. Um. They write, quote, such findings pose a challenge for the constructivist account. The number of events children might explore in principle is vastly greater than the number of events they can explore in practice. If children's exploratory play is largely unsystematic, how might they generate the type of evidence that could support efficient causal learning. So this is a really interesting paradox. It seems very likely that children learn causal knowledge by exploratory play, and yet children don't seem by and large to be very good at designing causally informative experiments like that they they have double separating out variables and stuff like that. Nevertheless, children might have some instincts about how to sift some different types of evidence. Uh and the authors hypothesized that exploratory playing children might not only be drawn toward novelty such as here's a new toy or two perceptual complexity, but also to what they call the quality of evidence. They observe that there might be a relationship between a child's desire to play with something and what type of evidence they are getting from it or have already gotten from it. Maybe even young children who are not so great at designing experiments can in in some senses, tell the difference between informative evidence and uninformative evidence. They can make predictions based on those differences, and they're driven to continue playing based on those differences. So what would be the experiment to test this? Well, they tried this out on a group of sixty four preschoolers between forty eight and seventy months of age. This was an experiment staged at a at a children's museum, and the experiment goes like this. You've got a special toy built for the experiment, and the toy takes the form of a box with a slot at the top and two levers on the sides. In reality, each lever when you press it causes one of two different figures to pop up out of the slot at the top of the box. There's a puppet figure operated by one lever and a little duck operated by a different lever. Now, there were several experimental conditions. One was what they called the confounded evidence condition UH, and the others were all three different types of unconfounded evidence conditions. The difference being that in the unconfounded conditions, the child would one way or another get to witness or experience unambiguous evidence of how the box worked, so they would see the levers being operated separately and they would figure out which lever may which little figure pop up. But in the confounded condition there would be unresolved ambiguity after their initial experience with the box, so the difference was that like in the unconfounded conditions, UH, there would be a procedure where the child and an adult experiment or would count to three and then each press a lever at the same time, and then after that they would take turns counting to three and pressing or operating one or the other lever independently for a total of three presses, but in the end the child would get to see how what each one did. In the confounded condition, the child and the experiment or would always each press their lever at the same time on the count of three, so it would never be clear to the child which lever did what. Either lever could operate each of the figures, or one lever could operate both of them, or maybe both levers had to be pressed at the same time to make them pop up. There would be no way to know bay st on pressing them at the same time as the experiment er anyway, So you have these different conditions, and then at the end of each one, the experimenter would walk away and tell the child it was okay for them to play with whatever they wanted. And so then they had the option to keep playing with the box from the procedure or reach for a novel box that was also within arms reach that hadn't been part of the experiment yet. So what did they find. Well, the previous findings from other studies about children's preferences for novelty came through. The kids very often reached for and spent more time playing with the new toy instead of the toy they had already played with. But whether or not there was lingering causal ambiguity about the original box made a big difference. In the unconfounded conditions, where it was clear how the box worked, they spent more time playing with the novel toy, but in the confounded condition, where the original toy remained a mystery, they spent more time playing with the original box that they had already played with, And this suggests that a lack of good evidence about how an object works is a strong motivating factor driving children towards spending time in exploratory play with that object, and in some way, most children can tell when the evidence that they're aware of is sufficient to understand the workings of the box or not. Now, there was one funny little note in their results section where they write that in the confounded condition where the child hadn't been able to see the levers operated independently, so didn't know how it worked. Um, they write quote, in the course of their free play with the familiar box, children often manipulated the levers simultaneously critically. However, twelve of the sixteen children or seven also manipulated each lever separately, fully disambiguating the evidence. So I thought that was funny that they would they would be curious about Okay, there would I'm part of them would know I haven't yet figured out how this box works. And yet what they would do when they got hold of it often was initially repeat the same thing that they had already seen happen, which is pressing both lovers at the same time, which doesn't tell you anything more than they already learned. So like like they know that something's wrong, but they don't always immediately figure out how to disambiguate the confounded evidence. Yeah, this is fascinating and made me made me think of like just of course, just sort of basic toy interactions like it made me think for some reason of the panic, Pete. Did you do you remember the panic Pete? I'm not sure, not yet. Describe it to me. A little pink, sort of limbless clown from outer space, and if you squeeze him, then the red balls that are in his nose and at your holes pop out, and also the blue eyes of his the blue balls of his eye sockets. Yes, I understand, Panic Pete. Now I seem to recall a scene in Jurassic Park where Wayne Knight squeezing one of these, chatting with Mr Hammond. Right, Oh, you may be right. I forgot about that, but yeah, but you know, it's one of these things where if you if you bust out this toy in front of a child and you squeeze it, you know what the child is going to want to do. The child needs to squeeze that toy as well to witness this, to to to to to have the feeling of of being the the individual in power over the pete doll uh and then it's and then of course this would not be a treasured toy for all eternity. They would squeeze it, however, many many times, and then you abandon it because it's it's been used. Panic pete has fulfilled all your curiosity. And even as a an adult, like that would basically be your experience with a panic pete. Um someone gave you one, you would be like, Okay, I'll squeeze this a few times. Interesting, I have now consumed all of the necessary data, and I may set the panic pete aside, well, even thinking about like seeing somebody else squeeze the panic pete and then um, wanting to squeeze it yourself. I mean, I do think there is there are some interesting mysteries that like could fill the child's mind before they get a chance to try it out, which is like, Okay, would just squeezing it normally make it make the eyes pop out and the ears pop out and everything? Or do I need to squeeze it a special way? Is it possible I could squeeze it and it wouldn't work? And then what would I need to figure out how to do? Yeah? Could I what if I have pushed the eyeballs in while squeezing the body, what would that do? You know? They're all these these sort of different ways. It's almost like a you know, sort of a play testing on it, you know, like like what what are the what are the limits of the design? How can I sort of break the design? Like children want to do that naturally? And I mean that's one of the ways that toys get broken because the child doesn't doesn't know the limits of the design. Yet that's a great point. Yeah, the play the toy is often played to extinction. Uh, and the you know, they like the bounds of science go too far out, like only an adult would say, well, don't squeeze panic pe too much. Um, if we wanted to look good on the shelf. No, no, it's not the child play. But so anyway, to come back to the study, it's I think this result is really interesting that children seem to be more motivated to play with a familiar object if they haven't yet been given evidence of how all the different parts of that object work. And this appears true, so they can figure out some things about what the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence is. At the same time, there are all these findings that suggest that children have at least poor metacognitive ability to design experiments and explain concepts like confounded evidence, and yet at some gut level they do they are able to make stuff like that work in practice. Uh. And the author's right quote, the exploratory play of even very young children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry. And so, of course, coming back to the idea of what is the intrinsic motivation driving most exploratory play, I would say overwhelmingly it is fun. So I think this is a really interesting piece of evidence that not only is fun in young children, probably related to learning how things work. A sense of fun can be generated to some extent by making the evidence of how something works remain obscure or ambiguous. And this reminds me of play patterns I remember from my own childhood, when, like, especially with certain kinds of electronic toys. You know, like a toy that would play one of a number of horribly annoying prerecorded sounds or sayings, um, if it would just play them in the same orders, like you could cycle through them and they'd always be in the same order. Instead of randomized. I remember being kind of disappointed once I realized that I knew the whole cycle of sounds by heart, and this kind of meant the fun was over. Like I'd figure it out and they'd be like, oh, kind of satisfying feeling, and then it's like, well, this toy is dead now. Uh, you know it's all It's like the feeling of fun I got from pressing the button and making the noise was part of a drive for discovery of causal knowledge, and once I had the knowledge firmly in hand, there was not much more fun to be had with that thing, except maybe by making other people react to it. M interesting. Yeah, yeah, Like I think back on on my own play patterns. I remember like G I Joe figures, the old G I Joe figures, and I remember reaching a point where it was, you know, I did a lot of imagination play with them, but also got to the point where, oh, I have this tiny screwdriver, and so now I can take them all apart, and I can put them together in different ways, and of course you end up with just a tub of parts and a few assembled uh the soldiers, and I see pretty much it's a very similar thing with with my son's a lego obsession is you know, he'll he'll build the thing. Uh, he'll make his own changes to it. If it's particularly special, it may live on a shelf and and sort of have its shelf life as being a decoration. But generally, even if it's on the shelf, it may be stripped for parts to create some new thing. And so you know, it's it's it's easy for me to come in and be like, well, what happened to this thing about now it's pieces um, but like that's part of the process, that's part of playing with it. It's the one once you've built it and played with a little bit, it's no longer novel. It's let's move on to the creation of the next thing. So anyway, I thought that study was very interesting and though this is beyond the scope of it, it also makes me think about the link, even in adults, between fun and concepts like surprise and mystery. I think there's often a strong connection there. Yeah, yeah, that like anything you would you know, any kind of you know, movie, you're watching, book, you're reading, whatever that has like a sense of surprise or mystery in it. In a way, that's sort of keeping you in the fun spirit, even like a childhood with a novel toy, because you haven't yet figured out all the mechanics, like it's not clear how it works. Yeah, I mean, dude, to come back to video games, for example, I mean, there's there's completing the game, right, there's completing the story. There's there's also finding the easter eggs, finding the hidden things in it um and then perhaps getting into the glitches, finding ways, figuring out where the seams are, where the imperfections are, and whatever your level. Like, it's it's ultimately all about figuring out the thing, understanding the thing, learning the thing. Now on the subject of fun and toys there you know, there's of course that additional layer of the imagination we've alluded to already. You know, it's one thing to figure out the physical properties of say a stuffed teddy bear and how it interacts with the world. Very young children often seem kind of limb into this. You know, you hand them the stuff bear and what do they do. Well, they throw the bear against the wall, where they throw the bear across the car, and then you hand it back to them and they do it again. It's just endless fun. Um. And if you were I and if you're expecting a child like that to spend more time snuggling the bear or or or giving the bear a little picnic, you might be disappointed because nothing is as fun as throwing the bear against the wall. But I mean, let's you know, let's not under I mean, throwing is fun. I like throwing too, Yeah, yeah, And of course it's in a social engagement like this too. You're also you're not just playing with the bear, You're also playing with the adult. You're getting a rise out of the adult, like they're running to get it. It's a big fun right in a way the other person there is also the toy, right. But but then there is the level of the teddy bears picnic. There's the level of of teddy bears battling each other, battling of their stuffed animals. Um, the various battles, discoveries, adventures that toys may go on. And so there's a whole domain fun and with toys, and certainly even fun without physical totems as well, that I think we might well consider fun. I mean, it's just it's fun to engage your imagination in these scenarios and um, and these aren't really games per se. Like if teddy bears are having a picnic, unless the child I don't know has a has just a very gifted mind for game design, there's probably not a game mechanic to what's going on. Likewise, if teddy bears are battling each other or action figures are exploding all over the living room, right. And in fact, I would say children often have very poor instincts about how to design a fun game. Oh good god, yes, I've occasionally there will be a game that has been designed and I'll be asked to play it, and um, I mean it's great, it's great that the mind is already going there. But you know, early game design is often a bit clunky, So they have better examples than than than I feel like I did as a kid. Like I remember designing horrible games as a as a child out but I had horrible examples to go off off for the most part. Yeah, So these activities, you know, they're not really games again, they lack any uh, you know, rule structure. Instead, they seem to be orchestrated dramas of the mind that use physical totems and idols. And this is interesting because, unlike some of the previous examples, it seems at least like there's less of a firm connection to learning, right, at least at first it may seem that way because what is being learned at the Teddy Bears picnic? You already know what the bear is. You're not unlocking some mystery of the object, right. Uh, it's But on the other hand, if it's not learning as fun than what's going on here, why is the child doing it? This child who again is this sponge that has to take in all of this data about the world and and and essentially a form an adult mind out of it all. Well, yeah, but I see what you're saying about that. Even though it's harder to see exactly how imagination plays about learning, I would probably liken it too. You know, the difference between imagination play and playing with the physical object like a toy that has mechanics is kind of the difference between a thought experiment and a physical experiment. A thought experiment can still be informative, it's just it's just an informative in a looser way, like it relies on you having good intuitions about what's plausible and what would happen without checking against the laws of physics. Yeah, yeah, that I think that does get to some of what seems to be going on here. And now I want to drive home that we're not doing an exhaustive look at imagination play here. There's a lot of scholarship out there about imagination play and early childhood learning. But so I'm just essentially carving out like a few thoughts on this here that I think play well with what we've been discussing in these these fun episodes. But in the context of humor on the past episod oades of stuff to bow your mind, we've discussed incongruity theory before, or more formally and clearly, incongruity resolution theory. Some incongruity in the world is observed, and by resolving it, and if we're talking about humor, we're talking about cracking a joke or you know, or or engaging with humor of some kind, we reduce the tension that that incongruity created, and in doing so we release a feeling of joy. Just a quick reminder that in that uh, fun, fun, fun study that we talked about in the previous episode where people were asked to remember a fun situation and then later circle all of the words that described it accurately. The number one word circled was happiness or happy, but the number two was laughing. So there's clearly a strong natural association people have between the idea of fun and between and humor. Yeah. Yeah, So it would be natural that there would be some overlap between these these areas of study. So in particular this time around that I was looking at a book by by Dorothy G. And Jerome L. Singer from two thousand nine titled The House of Make Believe that I thought, that's some insightful content in it. One quote from the book here quote playful interactions between self and others, or in the case of pure fantasy, play self and symbolic others, or between self and objects usually results in a somewhat reduced level of novelty or incongruity that evokes joy. So the idea of tackling novelty here this is This is interesting because it does seem like more we focus on in these episodes, seems like we're driven to understand something to the point of making it mundane, where like, give me that novelty. So I can destroy all of its allure, and once the allure has been drained from it, then I will discard it, or I'll put it on the shelf, etcetera. Yeah, it's like I want to suck all of the fun out of this thing and make it not fun anymore in the process, Like the fund is almost a you know, it's it's not actually a physical abstance in the object, but it might as well be. And once you have drained it by extracting all of the novel information that you can get from it, you've done all the experiments you can. Now you've taken the fun and it's gone right. So it's easy to understand that with the object like the panic pete. You know, you squeeze it, squeeze it until it's not no longer fun anymore than you get rid of it. But the world is full of novel and incongruous things, situations, feelings and more. Um So these are all things that the child has to has to has to make sense of and to process. There's a lot of data coming in and they get has to deal with it. Uh So this is just one theory, naturally, but the idea here is that examples of imagination play dip into the world of simulation and control of incongruous realities that help us help better prepare us for those realities. And the control factor is key here as well, because we're generally considering incong reality in the adult world that children certainly have no control over. Like there's something there's something strange in the adult world that you don't fully understand, um, and you certainly don't have control over it. But then by engaging in imaginative play, you sort of create a model of it, a model of what might be going on or what you've come to understand is going on, and and it's one that you can control and manipulate. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the imaginative play behaviors of children are uh, creating and trying to mimic scenarios that they would have observed in the adult world, either you know, in person or in media some way that they don't fully understand that they partially but don't fully understand, and trying to act it out or imagine it out maybe too somehow better grasp how it works. Yeah. Yeah, they The authors here also point out citing Diana Schmuckler's work. They point out that brief story, be they real stories or fictions or myths, etcetera. They assist children in the creation of schemas or scripts, which, when matched with previously formed schemes or scripts, can help to reduce fear or confusion brought on by novelty and incongruity in the world. And I found that really interesting because it reminds me of a lot a lot of what what I would hear as a parent, especially early on with our son hearing uh, like the doctor asked about imagination play, and like, well, what is the imagination play consists of? And so forth and and and certainly parents can think of all sorts of strange or in hilarious examples of this too. It's not just a situation where the children are going to just carry out the same story over and over again that they've heard. No, there will be tweaks, there will be changes, and and in to to the parents mind, it might be strange like, okay, you're doing you're reenacting this battle from our wars, but the Pokemon are here as well, and of course they're just you know, or they're probably better examples of that, and probably more like sort of personally poignant examples of that. But it's the taking of these scripts, these schemes, and combining them with other schemas, putting twists on them, and and and then control. It's like little thought experiments carried out over and over again. And I think sometimes it's observed where like there'll be something like a death, and a child will take death and introduce death into the imagination play of a given scenario, and like that's clearly a part of processing what this means. Like, here's this this huge, um alarming, potentially traumatizing thing that happens, and and you know, perhaps you haven't been been that well prepared for it. Where can you test that out? Where can you process that? Where can you take some of the edge off of that? But in play, introducing the unfamiliar into the play makes it fun, It keeps it fun. Yeah, Yeah, that's another That's that's another important thing to think about. Like there's this we're drawn to novelty. Well, if you begin to employ your imagination, you can keep making something novel. You can keep interjecting the injecting the novel into the scenario, into the into the toy itself, even and the game that reminds me to coming back to games. Uh, like, what is what? What do you do when you have a successful game that resonates with people? Well, it's you gotta bust out some some DLC, right, You gotta bust out some expansions for your board game. You gotta bust out eventually a sequel, and you you you stay true to some extent, but you add new features, You add new you make the familiar novel again, and that's the key to success. Well, I mean, I think about the ways that when I was a kid, we would take a familiar game with physically familiar mechanics such as Tag and just sort of skin it over with we are these characters chasing each other, you know, we're from this movie or and and it would change. Yeah, you're still going chase, but it takes on this different imaginative dimension. I wonder, I wonder if anybody's ever experimented with this, you know, kids playing a common game like Tag or something and trying out. Okay, now if you imagine yourself as these characters while playing, does it change the way they play the game? Do they do anything physically different? Oh? I bet I I'm almost certain they do especially if if it involves really embodying certain characters or animals. I've certainly observed kids playing tag where they'll yeah, they're all going to be cats and dogs, and it does seem to change the way that they play. Sometimes it's a little frightening because they're like, oh man, they're really really acting like animals out there. Anyway, I think I think it's all interesting to think about. But again I want to drive home that that obviously early childhood development and childhood learning again huge field, lots of work within those fields. We're only looking at a few examples here, so please don't take anything we're saying here. It's like this is this is the golden and uh and only truth concerning childhood play and imagination, et cetera. All right, well, I think maybe we're gonna need to call part two of our series on fun there. We may in fact be back with the part three. Well, we'll leave that as a surprise for you. You've got to figure out how our how our podcast feed works, and you know we're not going to give you all the clues ahead of time, right That podcast feed, by the way, is of course the stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed where you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a fun and weird film. Huch. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. 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 stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Staff To All Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on fun. Of course, we all roughly know what fun is. You know fun when you see it, you know fun when you're having it, so you got a gut level understanding. But fun is actually rather difficult to define and to differentiate from other related concepts like pleasure, happiness, and entertainment. So we've been trying to to tease out some of the studies about fun and some observations people can make about fun and what its unique characteristics are. Now, in the last episode we talked a bit uh Rob. You had a section about what particular features make a game fun, and I thought one of the most interesting things you brought up there was the suggestion of a natural association between learning and fun, which is in a way kind of funny because you can think about very painful attempts to to make wrote learning quote fun in some way, you know, adding games in school that are of questionable fund value sometimes but that could in a way still be onto something because there may, in fact be um a major role for fun in the kind of learning that we do in a non structured way, in a non school environment, when we're just learning through free exploratory behavior. Yeah. Yeah, it is fascinating to think about because it made me think back, certainly on school days and at various age points and thinking like, well, when did this? When did it become fun to engage in this quest for learning? And you know, those are the learning experiences that that do tend to stand out the most. Yeah, I have similar experiences. A lot of what I remember most from school are the things that were the most fun in school. Uh. And So I wanted to talk about a paper that I came across that I found pretty interesting. I think, again, this only addresses one facet of the issue of funds is it's not going to give you a total view. But it was a really interesting child psychology paper from two thousand seven addressing the relationship between toys, fun, and a child's ability to control natural experiments. So this paper was by a couple of authors named Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonna Wits. Now for some context, I was checking out, particularly some of the other research by Laura Schultz. She actually has a a pretty good TED talk where she explains sort of the arc of her career. It's from a few years back, but Schultz is a professor of cognitive sciences at m I T and a lot of her research is focused on the question how do children learn so well? Because children are able to learn how the world works in a relatively short time, with relatively limited experiences. I mean, people often phrase this question about language in particular, I think because language acquisition is just one of the most amazing things. Yeah, it's it's astounding, Like the way children acquire language, Like how do you learn to put together infinitely variable, grammatically functional sentences just by listening to adults talk for a few years, Like you don't even have to be taught the rules of grammar, you know, when you learn grammar in school. The grammar you're learning there is basically just an analytical tool or maybe an attempt to kind of regularize or normalize exactly the way you construct sentences. But you're you're already able to do so in a functional way, I mean, where people can understand you. Yeah, the neural plasticity of children is just absolutely amazing. I know we've we've touched on it a few times over the over the years, and yeah, it's it's fascinating to learn about. It's it's mind blowing to experience in real life and real time that you sort of lose some of the mystery at times by being so close to it. But but yeah, like that they have to acquire so much data in such a short period of time. And I think another weird thing thinking about this and thinking about it too for this episode in terms of fun and also you know, talking about games and toys and the imagination, as we'll get into, is that we we live in a time now where I feel like we we definitely have more understanding of what children are and when, what they're not, and what they're doing, and that all these things have a purpose. But it's so easy to sort of fall back in this older way of thinking and look at a child playing, a child having fun, and then well, of course they having fun. They don't have anything else to do, they don't have a job. Uh, look at these look at these bumps. But this is frivolous activity, right, It's it's for some reason, it's still easy to think think that way, But of course we know better now, we know that the reality of it is that part of what makes ldren children is that they are these sponges. They are absorbing all of this information and then processing it, uh, coming to terms with it. And so a lot of the the ideas that they were discussing in this episode, uh, you know, some of the ones that I'm going to get into are certainly not the only theories out there, but a lot of them do involve this this more nuanced vision of the child and what the child is doing in the world. Yeah, play is a child's job. It is them that they're going to school, but in an unstructured way. Play is how they not just you know. Uh. You mentioned it's important for them to gather a lot of data, and that is true. But another way of thinking about it, children are able to generalize inferences about how things work, uh, with way less data than you would expect to say, a computer to need a certain kind of program to need in order to learn how something works. So how do children make such powerful general inferences? How do they figure out rules about how the world works on the basis of so little experience? I think play is a big part of this um and so the paper I wanted to look at again. This is by Laura E. Schultz and Elizabeth Barreff Bonowitz. It's called serious fun. Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded. This was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in the year two thousand seven. And this study looks at a concept that it calls causal knowledge, meaning an understanding of cause and effect relationships in the environment. Another way of thinking about it is just understanding how things work. Now, obviously a major part of child development is this formation of general causal knowledge. Learning that if you set a spherical object down on a table and you let go of it, it can roll off the edge, or learning that if you turn a door knob it will open a door, or learning that if you pet the cat too roughly, the cat might hiss and scratch you. The world is full of these cause and effect relationships, and to learn how the world works, you have to not only learn, but you have to learn how to learn. You have to, to some extent, understand when a relationship between two events that you observe is causal and when that relationship is just random or safe to ignore. So you have to learn how to tell the difference between Okay, I pet the cat too rough and it gets angry. That's clearly causal, Like that not being gentle with the cat is what made it angry versus, oh, I'm plucking at the carpet and then a bird lands on the window sill. Somehow a child usually figures out that that is not actually causal, that's just random. So how does a young child master all of this complex inference? Uh? I think I was just thinking about this, and I think some inference might be helped along by maybe instinctive heuristics like physical proximity, like how close is what I did to the effect that it might have produce boost? Are they physically connected in some way that I can see? Obviously, this wouldn't always be the case, especially in a world full of you know, remote electronics and stuff like that, but that would help a little bit. Another way of sifting through inferences to separate the good from the bad is just by repeating experiments. Whatever you just did, do it again and see if the same result happens. Of course, this is useful in in actual scientific experiments. You know, you want to repeat experiments to see if you get the same result. But you can observe children naturally doing this all the time. They'll do something and look for a result, and then they'll do it again, and they'll do it again. Of course, in general, children just love repetition. Yeah. Well, and you might you might plausibly argue that there's a kind of built in science module in in the child's brain. I mean, it's not going to be as refined as a as a carefully scrutinized scientific method planned by adults, But you could say that there's some kind of instinct for repetition that might be based on the fact that repeating experiments gets you better data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe that's what's going on when when generally, if there's something funny, I've noticed that with with kids, like they figured out a joke that works, whether they're going to keep telling that joke, keep telling that joke, and then I guess part of the learning experiment is realizing like how far how many times can you tell about joke and it's still elicits a response, Uh, what are the hard limits to it? So the authors of this developmental psychology paper are talking about children's acquisition of causal knowledge, and they write that since basically since Jean Pig, psychologists have mostly accepted that children construct their causal model of the world through exploratory play, like this is not something having. Having causal knowledge is not usually something that has to be explicitly taught by adults, though and of course in some limited cases it can be. And it's not something that just comes was fully built in hardwired instinct. It's something that children learn through experimenting with the world on their own. So under this model, a major function of play is learning, specifically learning to predict cause and effect relationships in the world. Now, if this model is true, you would expect to see evidence of that if you just observe the natural patterns of exploratory play behavior in children. And the authors isolate one major finding which does seem to back up this model of the acquisition of causal knowledge, and that is children's preference for novel stimuli. So the authors don't phrase it this way, but just my interpretation, I think it would connect to the idea of like, why do children want a new toy when they already have toys at home? I think you could argue that, at least in part This could be because they already know how the old toy works. They've used it in a hundred different ways. They've figured out all the different things that it can do and what it does when you do different things to it, And a new toy provides opportunities to learn new things about something else, something different. Yeah, this of course is frequently a parental comment about the ephemeral interest in toys. Right, you get the fancy new toy, it's played with for a day and then it's on the floor, and then we quite hypocritically, will say well, why aren't you still playing with that toy? And if if the child was savvy, they might say, well, you have top Gun on VHS. Why aren't you still watching that? Why did you stop watching that movie? Why isn't that you just go to movie? You like to watch movies, you own one, watch it? Um, you know, we're we're not that that different in that regard. Another big one, of course, is there's the there's the old toy versus new toy. But it's something that's always more interesting other kids toys. Whenever you take the child out, then you're you're I don't know, you're a friend's house. Or or at a park and somebody's brought a toy like the toy of the other child is instantly interesting for this very reason because it is the new toy. It is the novel toy. Well, that seems like it might have a double appeal because not only is it novel, so it has the appeal that all new things do, but it also has been sort of pre vetted, like if some other kid is playing with it, that shows like, okay, there probably is something good about this toy and it would be worth my time, right and yeah, and then also there's the social dynamics of this thing is also desired, and ownership maybe up in the air on it. But this is all fascinating thinking about about something about the novel factor here, because once again makes us think of fun and uh and the idea of learning from the last episode. So even if you're just thinking about an object right like it's there's something even if it's just a tactile experience, you're interested in in what does it feel like, what happens when I throw it against a wall, etcetera. And of course all of this reminds me once more about the connection that we're looking at between fun and learning, right, because this paper is looking at a connection between learning and exploratory play behavior. This is beyond the scope of the paper itself, but I think it is a totally reasonable inference to believe that the primary intrinsic motivating factor driving exploratory play is fun. So like fun is the is the wages that are paid for the work of play? Yeah, I thinking of a biblical parallelism, is the wages the wages of play is fun. It's gonna be the singular, is right. Yeah. But anyway, so coming back to the author's introduction on this paper, they say, you know, at the time this paper was written, there was actually not a whole lot of evidence for consistent patterns that have been observed in the exploratory behavior of children. Uh, And so they're they're going to uh study one pattern in this experiment they're setting up. But as as preface to that, they write, quote moreover, considerable research suggests that even older children and naive adults are poor designing causally informative experiments and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would support or undermine causal hypotheses. And then they cite a whole bunch of studies to back up this assertion. Um. They write, quote, such findings pose a challenge for the constructivist account. The number of events children might explore in principle is vastly greater than the number of events they can explore in practice. If children's exploratory play is largely unsystematic, how might they generate the type of evidence that could support efficient causal learning. So this is a really interesting paradox. It seems very likely that children learn causal knowledge by exploratory play, and yet children don't seem by and large to be very good at designing causally informative experiments like that they they have double separating out variables and stuff like that. Nevertheless, children might have some instincts about how to sift some different types of evidence. Uh and the authors hypothesized that exploratory playing children might not only be drawn toward novelty such as here's a new toy or two perceptual complexity, but also to what they call the quality of evidence. They observe that there might be a relationship between a child's desire to play with something and what type of evidence they are getting from it or have already gotten from it. Maybe even young children who are not so great at designing experiments can in in some senses, tell the difference between informative evidence and uninformative evidence. They can make predictions based on those differences, and they're driven to continue playing based on those differences. So what would be the experiment to test this? Well, they tried this out on a group of sixty four preschoolers between forty eight and seventy months of age. This was an experiment staged at a at a children's museum, and the experiment goes like this. You've got a special toy built for the experiment, and the toy takes the form of a box with a slot at the top and two levers on the sides. In reality, each lever when you press it causes one of two different figures to pop up out of the slot at the top of the box. There's a puppet figure operated by one lever and a little duck operated by a different lever. Now, there were several experimental conditions. One was what they called the confounded evidence condition UH, and the others were all three different types of unconfounded evidence conditions. The difference being that in the unconfounded conditions, the child would one way or another get to witness or experience unambiguous evidence of how the box worked, so they would see the levers being operated separately and they would figure out which lever may which little figure pop up. But in the confounded condition there would be unresolved ambiguity after their initial experience with the box, so the difference was that like in the unconfounded conditions, UH, there would be a procedure where the child and an adult experiment or would count to three and then each press a lever at the same time, and then after that they would take turns counting to three and pressing or operating one or the other lever independently for a total of three presses, but in the end the child would get to see how what each one did. In the confounded condition, the child and the experiment or would always each press their lever at the same time on the count of three, so it would never be clear to the child which lever did what. Either lever could operate each of the figures, or one lever could operate both of them, or maybe both levers had to be pressed at the same time to make them pop up. There would be no way to know bay st on pressing them at the same time as the experiment er anyway, So you have these different conditions, and then at the end of each one, the experimenter would walk away and tell the child it was okay for them to play with whatever they wanted. And so then they had the option to keep playing with the box from the procedure or reach for a novel box that was also within arms reach that hadn't been part of the experiment yet. So what did they find. Well, the previous findings from other studies about children's preferences for novelty came through. The kids very often reached for and spent more time playing with the new toy instead of the toy they had already played with. But whether or not there was lingering causal ambiguity about the original box made a big difference. In the unconfounded conditions, where it was clear how the box worked, they spent more time playing with the novel toy, but in the confounded condition, where the original toy remained a mystery, they spent more time playing with the original box that they had already played with, And this suggests that a lack of good evidence about how an object works is a strong motivating factor driving children towards spending time in exploratory play with that object, and in some way, most children can tell when the evidence that they're aware of is sufficient to understand the workings of the box or not. Now, there was one funny little note in their results section where they write that in the confounded condition where the child hadn't been able to see the levers operated independently, so didn't know how it worked. Um, they write quote, in the course of their free play with the familiar box, children often manipulated the levers simultaneously critically. However, twelve of the sixteen children or seven also manipulated each lever separately, fully disambiguating the evidence. So I thought that was funny that they would they would be curious about Okay, there would I'm part of them would know I haven't yet figured out how this box works. And yet what they would do when they got hold of it often was initially repeat the same thing that they had already seen happen, which is pressing both lovers at the same time, which doesn't tell you anything more than they already learned. So like like they know that something's wrong, but they don't always immediately figure out how to disambiguate the confounded evidence. Yeah, this is fascinating and made me made me think of like just of course, just sort of basic toy interactions like it made me think for some reason of the panic, Pete. Did you do you remember the panic Pete? I'm not sure, not yet. Describe it to me. A little pink, sort of limbless clown from outer space, and if you squeeze him, then the red balls that are in his nose and at your holes pop out, and also the blue eyes of his the blue balls of his eye sockets. Yes, I understand, Panic Pete. Now I seem to recall a scene in Jurassic Park where Wayne Knight squeezing one of these, chatting with Mr Hammond. Right, Oh, you may be right. I forgot about that, but yeah, but you know, it's one of these things where if you if you bust out this toy in front of a child and you squeeze it, you know what the child is going to want to do. The child needs to squeeze that toy as well to witness this, to to to to to have the feeling of of being the the individual in power over the pete doll uh and then it's and then of course this would not be a treasured toy for all eternity. They would squeeze it, however, many many times, and then you abandon it because it's it's been used. Panic pete has fulfilled all your curiosity. And even as a an adult, like that would basically be your experience with a panic pete. Um someone gave you one, you would be like, Okay, I'll squeeze this a few times. Interesting, I have now consumed all of the necessary data, and I may set the panic pete aside, well, even thinking about like seeing somebody else squeeze the panic pete and then um, wanting to squeeze it yourself. I mean, I do think there is there are some interesting mysteries that like could fill the child's mind before they get a chance to try it out, which is like, Okay, would just squeezing it normally make it make the eyes pop out and the ears pop out and everything? Or do I need to squeeze it a special way? Is it possible I could squeeze it and it wouldn't work? And then what would I need to figure out how to do? Yeah? Could I what if I have pushed the eyeballs in while squeezing the body, what would that do? You know? They're all these these sort of different ways. It's almost like a you know, sort of a play testing on it, you know, like like what what are the what are the limits of the design? How can I sort of break the design? Like children want to do that naturally? And I mean that's one of the ways that toys get broken because the child doesn't doesn't know the limits of the design. Yet that's a great point. Yeah, the play the toy is often played to extinction. Uh, and the you know, they like the bounds of science go too far out, like only an adult would say, well, don't squeeze panic pe too much. Um, if we wanted to look good on the shelf. No, no, it's not the child play. But so anyway, to come back to the study, it's I think this result is really interesting that children seem to be more motivated to play with a familiar object if they haven't yet been given evidence of how all the different parts of that object work. And this appears true, so they can figure out some things about what the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence is. At the same time, there are all these findings that suggest that children have at least poor metacognitive ability to design experiments and explain concepts like confounded evidence, and yet at some gut level they do they are able to make stuff like that work in practice. Uh. And the author's right quote, the exploratory play of even very young children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry. And so, of course, coming back to the idea of what is the intrinsic motivation driving most exploratory play, I would say overwhelmingly it is fun. So I think this is a really interesting piece of evidence that not only is fun in young children, probably related to learning how things work. A sense of fun can be generated to some extent by making the evidence of how something works remain obscure or ambiguous. And this reminds me of play patterns I remember from my own childhood, when, like, especially with certain kinds of electronic toys. You know, like a toy that would play one of a number of horribly annoying prerecorded sounds or sayings, um, if it would just play them in the same orders, like you could cycle through them and they'd always be in the same order. Instead of randomized. I remember being kind of disappointed once I realized that I knew the whole cycle of sounds by heart, and this kind of meant the fun was over. Like I'd figure it out and they'd be like, oh, kind of satisfying feeling, and then it's like, well, this toy is dead now. Uh, you know it's all It's like the feeling of fun I got from pressing the button and making the noise was part of a drive for discovery of causal knowledge, and once I had the knowledge firmly in hand, there was not much more fun to be had with that thing, except maybe by making other people react to it. M interesting. Yeah, yeah, Like I think back on on my own play patterns. I remember like G I Joe figures, the old G I Joe figures, and I remember reaching a point where it was, you know, I did a lot of imagination play with them, but also got to the point where, oh, I have this tiny screwdriver, and so now I can take them all apart, and I can put them together in different ways, and of course you end up with just a tub of parts and a few assembled uh the soldiers, and I see pretty much it's a very similar thing with with my son's a lego obsession is you know, he'll he'll build the thing. Uh, he'll make his own changes to it. If it's particularly special, it may live on a shelf and and sort of have its shelf life as being a decoration. But generally, even if it's on the shelf, it may be stripped for parts to create some new thing. And so you know, it's it's it's easy for me to come in and be like, well, what happened to this thing about now it's pieces um, but like that's part of the process, that's part of playing with it. It's the one once you've built it and played with a little bit, it's no longer novel. It's let's move on to the creation of the next thing. So anyway, I thought that study was very interesting and though this is beyond the scope of it, it also makes me think about the link, even in adults, between fun and concepts like surprise and mystery. I think there's often a strong connection there. Yeah, yeah, that like anything you would you know, any kind of you know, movie, you're watching, book, you're reading, whatever that has like a sense of surprise or mystery in it. In a way, that's sort of keeping you in the fun spirit, even like a childhood with a novel toy, because you haven't yet figured out all the mechanics, like it's not clear how it works. Yeah, I mean, dude, to come back to video games, for example, I mean, there's there's completing the game, right, there's completing the story. There's there's also finding the easter eggs, finding the hidden things in it um and then perhaps getting into the glitches, finding ways, figuring out where the seams are, where the imperfections are, and whatever your level. Like, it's it's ultimately all about figuring out the thing, understanding the thing, learning the thing. Now on the subject of fun and toys there you know, there's of course that additional layer of the imagination we've alluded to already. You know, it's one thing to figure out the physical properties of say a stuffed teddy bear and how it interacts with the world. Very young children often seem kind of limb into this. You know, you hand them the stuff bear and what do they do. Well, they throw the bear against the wall, where they throw the bear across the car, and then you hand it back to them and they do it again. It's just endless fun. Um. And if you were I and if you're expecting a child like that to spend more time snuggling the bear or or or giving the bear a little picnic, you might be disappointed because nothing is as fun as throwing the bear against the wall. But I mean, let's you know, let's not under I mean, throwing is fun. I like throwing too, Yeah, yeah, And of course it's in a social engagement like this too. You're also you're not just playing with the bear, You're also playing with the adult. You're getting a rise out of the adult, like they're running to get it. It's a big fun right in a way the other person there is also the toy, right. But but then there is the level of the teddy bears picnic. There's the level of of teddy bears battling each other, battling of their stuffed animals. Um, the various battles, discoveries, adventures that toys may go on. And so there's a whole domain fun and with toys, and certainly even fun without physical totems as well, that I think we might well consider fun. I mean, it's just it's fun to engage your imagination in these scenarios and um, and these aren't really games per se. Like if teddy bears are having a picnic, unless the child I don't know has a has just a very gifted mind for game design, there's probably not a game mechanic to what's going on. Likewise, if teddy bears are battling each other or action figures are exploding all over the living room, right. And in fact, I would say children often have very poor instincts about how to design a fun game. Oh good god, yes, I've occasionally there will be a game that has been designed and I'll be asked to play it, and um, I mean it's great, it's great that the mind is already going there. But you know, early game design is often a bit clunky, So they have better examples than than than I feel like I did as a kid. Like I remember designing horrible games as a as a child out but I had horrible examples to go off off for the most part. Yeah, So these activities, you know, they're not really games again, they lack any uh, you know, rule structure. Instead, they seem to be orchestrated dramas of the mind that use physical totems and idols. And this is interesting because, unlike some of the previous examples, it seems at least like there's less of a firm connection to learning, right, at least at first it may seem that way because what is being learned at the Teddy Bears picnic? You already know what the bear is. You're not unlocking some mystery of the object, right. Uh, it's But on the other hand, if it's not learning as fun than what's going on here, why is the child doing it? This child who again is this sponge that has to take in all of this data about the world and and and essentially a form an adult mind out of it all. Well, yeah, but I see what you're saying about that. Even though it's harder to see exactly how imagination plays about learning, I would probably liken it too. You know, the difference between imagination play and playing with the physical object like a toy that has mechanics is kind of the difference between a thought experiment and a physical experiment. A thought experiment can still be informative, it's just it's just an informative in a looser way, like it relies on you having good intuitions about what's plausible and what would happen without checking against the laws of physics. Yeah, yeah, that I think that does get to some of what seems to be going on here. And now I want to drive home that we're not doing an exhaustive look at imagination play here. There's a lot of scholarship out there about imagination play and early childhood learning. But so I'm just essentially carving out like a few thoughts on this here that I think play well with what we've been discussing in these these fun episodes. But in the context of humor on the past episod oades of stuff to bow your mind, we've discussed incongruity theory before, or more formally and clearly, incongruity resolution theory. Some incongruity in the world is observed, and by resolving it, and if we're talking about humor, we're talking about cracking a joke or you know, or or engaging with humor of some kind, we reduce the tension that that incongruity created, and in doing so we release a feeling of joy. Just a quick reminder that in that uh, fun, fun, fun study that we talked about in the previous episode where people were asked to remember a fun situation and then later circle all of the words that described it accurately. The number one word circled was happiness or happy, but the number two was laughing. So there's clearly a strong natural association people have between the idea of fun and between and humor. Yeah. Yeah, So it would be natural that there would be some overlap between these these areas of study. So in particular this time around that I was looking at a book by by Dorothy G. And Jerome L. Singer from two thousand nine titled The House of Make Believe that I thought, that's some insightful content in it. One quote from the book here quote playful interactions between self and others, or in the case of pure fantasy, play self and symbolic others, or between self and objects usually results in a somewhat reduced level of novelty or incongruity that evokes joy. So the idea of tackling novelty here this is This is interesting because it does seem like more we focus on in these episodes, seems like we're driven to understand something to the point of making it mundane, where like, give me that novelty. So I can destroy all of its allure, and once the allure has been drained from it, then I will discard it, or I'll put it on the shelf, etcetera. Yeah, it's like I want to suck all of the fun out of this thing and make it not fun anymore in the process, Like the fund is almost a you know, it's it's not actually a physical abstance in the object, but it might as well be. And once you have drained it by extracting all of the novel information that you can get from it, you've done all the experiments you can. Now you've taken the fun and it's gone right. So it's easy to understand that with the object like the panic pete. You know, you squeeze it, squeeze it until it's not no longer fun anymore than you get rid of it. But the world is full of novel and incongruous things, situations, feelings and more. Um So these are all things that the child has to has to has to make sense of and to process. There's a lot of data coming in and they get has to deal with it. Uh So this is just one theory, naturally, but the idea here is that examples of imagination play dip into the world of simulation and control of incongruous realities that help us help better prepare us for those realities. And the control factor is key here as well, because we're generally considering incong reality in the adult world that children certainly have no control over. Like there's something there's something strange in the adult world that you don't fully understand, um, and you certainly don't have control over it. But then by engaging in imaginative play, you sort of create a model of it, a model of what might be going on or what you've come to understand is going on, and and it's one that you can control and manipulate. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the imaginative play behaviors of children are uh, creating and trying to mimic scenarios that they would have observed in the adult world, either you know, in person or in media some way that they don't fully understand that they partially but don't fully understand, and trying to act it out or imagine it out maybe too somehow better grasp how it works. Yeah. Yeah, they The authors here also point out citing Diana Schmuckler's work. They point out that brief story, be they real stories or fictions or myths, etcetera. They assist children in the creation of schemas or scripts, which, when matched with previously formed schemes or scripts, can help to reduce fear or confusion brought on by novelty and incongruity in the world. And I found that really interesting because it reminds me of a lot a lot of what what I would hear as a parent, especially early on with our son hearing uh, like the doctor asked about imagination play, and like, well, what is the imagination play consists of? And so forth and and and certainly parents can think of all sorts of strange or in hilarious examples of this too. It's not just a situation where the children are going to just carry out the same story over and over again that they've heard. No, there will be tweaks, there will be changes, and and in to to the parents mind, it might be strange like, okay, you're doing you're reenacting this battle from our wars, but the Pokemon are here as well, and of course they're just you know, or they're probably better examples of that, and probably more like sort of personally poignant examples of that. But it's the taking of these scripts, these schemes, and combining them with other schemas, putting twists on them, and and and then control. It's like little thought experiments carried out over and over again. And I think sometimes it's observed where like there'll be something like a death, and a child will take death and introduce death into the imagination play of a given scenario, and like that's clearly a part of processing what this means. Like, here's this this huge, um alarming, potentially traumatizing thing that happens, and and you know, perhaps you haven't been been that well prepared for it. Where can you test that out? Where can you process that? Where can you take some of the edge off of that? But in play, introducing the unfamiliar into the play makes it fun, It keeps it fun. Yeah, Yeah, that's another That's that's another important thing to think about. Like there's this we're drawn to novelty. Well, if you begin to employ your imagination, you can keep making something novel. You can keep interjecting the injecting the novel into the scenario, into the into the toy itself, even and the game that reminds me to coming back to games. Uh, like, what is what? What do you do when you have a successful game that resonates with people? Well, it's you gotta bust out some some DLC, right, You gotta bust out some expansions for your board game. You gotta bust out eventually a sequel, and you you you stay true to some extent, but you add new features, You add new you make the familiar novel again, and that's the key to success. Well, I mean, I think about the ways that when I was a kid, we would take a familiar game with physically familiar mechanics such as Tag and just sort of skin it over with we are these characters chasing each other, you know, we're from this movie or and and it would change. Yeah, you're still going chase, but it takes on this different imaginative dimension. I wonder, I wonder if anybody's ever experimented with this, you know, kids playing a common game like Tag or something and trying out. Okay, now if you imagine yourself as these characters while playing, does it change the way they play the game? Do they do anything physically different? Oh? I bet I I'm almost certain they do especially if if it involves really embodying certain characters or animals. I've certainly observed kids playing tag where they'll yeah, they're all going to be cats and dogs, and it does seem to change the way that they play. Sometimes it's a little frightening because they're like, oh man, they're really really acting like animals out there. Anyway, I think I think it's all interesting to think about. But again I want to drive home that that obviously early childhood development and childhood learning again huge field, lots of work within those fields. We're only looking at a few examples here, so please don't take anything we're saying here. It's like this is this is the golden and uh and only truth concerning childhood play and imagination, et cetera. All right, well, I think maybe we're gonna need to call part two of our series on fun there. We may in fact be back with the part three. Well, we'll leave that as a surprise for you. You've got to figure out how our how our podcast feed works, and you know we're not going to give you all the clues ahead of time, right That podcast feed, by the way, is of course the stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed where you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a fun and weird film. Huch. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. 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 stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Staff To All Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.