That you are just goofing. Its not just cats and dogs that. A surprising number of other animals too to do when you start to consider weird sorts of behavior exhibited by lots of kinds of animals who suddenly realize that things like play. Occur all over the Animal Kingdom and animals playing with someone likely friends. Including us there is something and are deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with a whole range of life of us on this planet play is deeply embedded in our nature and the most adept use in the world we play and were playing more than any other species is your heart it turns out play has huge benefits for our brains. And if its risky play even better. It happened almost without any notice and. Over the past 30 years outdoor play began to disappear from the lives of children in north america and europe. Today kids in the u. K. Spend as much time outside as the parents did. Technology seems to be everyones new playmate. And its a trend that has many experts were especially as evidence from the animal world shows that physical play has the potential to make us smarter braver maybe even kinder. Recopied you ready. Stuart brown is the grandfather of played research hes been promoting its benefits for more than 50 years if you look at the overall place of play in the world of animal play you begin to see that it is as present as sleep in dreams. Brown says the instinct to play is an important part about animal evolution so important is a thigh limp language that goes with. It when 2 dogs want to play what you see is dog dog play language if it was aggressive and they were fighting they have an entirely different body language. And thats boss slap paws lap which is typical play activity from a dog. Part of an animal play and part of the reason it is so compelling is that its pure and everybody gets a look at that. You know its instinctive and were wired the same way in the same same part of our brain. Brown has gathered overwhelming evidence that theres a lot more to play than exercise for the body its also exercise for the mind one of the things that keeps play going that they know how to do instinctively they will keep the play going without one dominating the other and that is one of the essences of play its infectious here were got 4 of now here we go. We may recognize in our pets but what exactly is it. He took Gordon Burkhardt to figure that out he studies animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective highly primarily a reptile ologist reptile behavior person and oddball ways like snakes and lizards and turtles and years ago articles came out about plato and i thought well im a marine song if you know and sort of play and. Scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that moves slowly its a lot trickier. The dogs waking its tail or monkeys or chips responded to tickling him so once thats or some we can easily identify hey thats in playful pleasurable fun so the animal its hard to do that with a turtle. So you need more objective criteria. And i came up with 5 different groups might say 5 criteria of play. To qualify as playing a behavior must be done for no apparent reason. It has to be done over and over again. Sometimes in an exaggerated way. Its spontaneous. And the animal has to be doing it when its not stressed. Burghardt d came up with these criterion after discovering reptiles are capable of play. I grow. I was going to go back and maybe grab something in my pocket that they like to do. He identified play behavior in the largest lizard in the world the deadly komodo dragon. Theyd bring out a water buffalo. But sometimes play is not confuse of exploration. One of the. Probably difference is that an oration he just checking out something what you do with it now play. If you go reptiles operate a little slower pace than we do but she has all the prep work element this is behavior that is part of their normal repertoire shell do this over and over again. Its behavior in an animal that we consider in us relaxed state its a behavior that is voluntary. Another confusion maybe well maybe animals this stupid enough it thinks its food and its acting as if its prey that is clearly not the case either because try to eat the object. Following the birth of the science is something learned of all kinds of creatures play. Even the fish it seems to enjoy an occasional game of golf. Scientists continue to be surprised not just by which animals play but who they play with for instance the giant pacific octopus. Its generally a loner. A year ago seattle became this ones new home. And the place where it would meet unexpected for. Just watching an octopus move is so graceful and so beautiful you can spend so much time just sitting there and watching them and just being mesmerized by the way that they move and they interact with their environment. Or here to make sure theyre enclosure. We take care of. So its kind of a day to day. One day a bit of housekeeping turned into something. It began with the simple task of cleaning the windows so we get water droplets on the top of our there and we have to clean those off so that we can provide a good viewing experience for the public and i was up there spraying it off with a fresh water hose. And the animals started to reach out of the water and kind of grab for the fresh water that was whats unusual have never seen that before and so actually just went ahead and sprayed the animal with the hose. And the animal completely when upside down and just started to come out of the water kind of move around and hung around for a couple minutes. I mean theres a lot of animals that have no interest in humans whatsoever and actively some away from you but these animals come to us. Each time the spray. The octopus squid scored. So. What is the power play that it has the power to bridge the divide between a solitary sea creature and a human being. Type questions that we really dont have answers to and show that there is something and are deeply rooted nature. And is able to communicate in some level with a whole range of life on us on this planet. Thanks to cell phone cameras and social media were seeing a lot more evidence of interspecies play. And sometimes its between the most surprising playmates. The impulse to have fun seems to cross all kinds of boundaries in the Animal Kingdom. At a zoo in germany theres a whole community of animals renowned for playing together. But no bows. And it isnt just the young ones who monkey around in. The italian primatologist elisabet apology has come here to take a close look at this endangered species are our closest living relatives and they can give us a lot of information about evolution of our behavior shes intrigued because these animals arent just playful theyre peaceful unlike other primates theyve never been known to kill each other went to different communities of chimpanzees meet together they normally fight bonobos plate. 2 2 2 play is a 3rd they see it in that indefinable society it is a if they call to explore toward. 2 2 2 play create a stronger bond it and if we share strong bonded with your group they say you have much more chance to survive and to get the rest are sunni. It is important for the development of social skills and youngsters. Just because they acquire social competence 2 2 2. If you want to believe in a social group it is important its crucial that you perceive the emotional the other. Out. Pelagia team is trying to figure out just how. Can read one anothers feelings and whether it could be the secret to how well they play together they use avatars to get the. Yawning up to you see someone else yawn is a telltale sign of empathy humans start doing this at around the age of 4. Scientists call it emotional contagion if you are in fact that by me making another action for fun by bates you cant recreate the same notion so it is in motion a linkage between subjects. d d so in that yawning video you can find avatar yawning a lot in different was the sun in front in the latter. Position and animal responds. Now it can take a while but the but no booze mimic the young many times during the study. Could it be their ability to read faces that enables them to get along so well. Its difficult to understand if empathy is at the basis of play or play is that the basis of them if you are now open about the fact that we can say yes we we we have a 1st date that suggests that this behavior called the reality is. Its a common theory that young animals play to prepare for adult life but a possible connection between play compassion is one of many hidden benefits science has started to uncover. Its no wonder scientists used to think play was nothing more than practice consider how much fun children have playing with grown up tools. But a recent study shows kittens who play it. Dont necessarily catch more mice as a. Bear cubs romp in the den with their siblings yet generally they live once they mature. Clearly theres more going on than meets the eye. Jonathan pruitt has had his eye on a particular kind of spider the social spider since he was a graduate student in tennessee im interested in social spiders because of these tiny little predators that no one knows anything about real at least normal people dont know that theyre even a thing. There are spiders that work in concert to make giant webs together capture pray together and of his offspring and there are only about 20 species of social spider on earth out of the maybe 50000. 00 species of spider that have been described so far so the sort of an evolutionary novelty item. Pruitt and his colleagues were especially interested in the kind of dating game the social spiders play. Mature males recruit to the webs of immaturity females who arent mature yet they cant mate and these males will do their practice a little worship dances for the female. But then the females respond to this courtship dance by approaching the male assuming a posture of receptivity the male just puts his genitals on the outside of the female genitals and then just sits there and over and over there they are just attempting this copula torrie posture and they could be off spending their time doing other things like getting through or playing down more soap to protect to protect them from predators. And so i thought oh its sort of like gaining experience for later on in life that might be pertinent like motor skills or or are social skills social intelligence and then later on as ive conducted morse that is i just became more and more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this thing this kind of behavior were seeing in a spider might just be play. Pruitts team studied hundreds of spiders to find out why they would behave in this particular way so i figure out the consequences of his behavior by manipulating these individuals ability to engage in the behavior allowed some individuals to engage in almost sex in these little plastic cups and then others that were prevented from ever having those experiences. And one of the interesting things that i found is that females that had had experience in gauging in place sex early on in life produced heavier egg cases later on and that that affects scaled to how much experience they had the more experience in play these females had the larger their egg cases not only do playful females have more young they live longer and theyre less aggressive theyre much less likely to kill their partners after mating something thats common in the extraordinary world that spiders. When you start to consider weird sorts of behavior exhibited by lots of kinds of animals you suddenly realize that things like play occur all over the Animal Kingdom and that it might not be such a sophisticated thing thats in demick or unique to people or or mammals that it might be something that has very deep evolutionary roots. It was in western canada where researchers made one of the biggest discoveries about the purpose of play. They took a close look at the behavior of young domesticated rats. Australia neuroscientist serge palace explains what these animals are up to while most of us are sleeping chasing off the one and one animal tries to get up to the. Lake and they roll over to be found themselves and you see that they both take turns at doing this behavior. Researchers wanted to see what would happen if the young rats were raised with no one to play with in alternative rearing condition we have a juvenile growing up with an adult and adult rats start like playing with juveniles so they will hang around together the groom one another sleep next to one another but by whining gauge and rough and tumble play that juveniles day i and i know. The play deprived rats failed to develop social Skills Including the ability to play normally with one another. At the end if the experiment the brains from the play deprived rats were closely examined. The part responsible for Decision Making and impulse control was underdeveloped so he was the set of experiments where we actually shot it is play changing the prefrontal cortex and then hold these changes weve seen much to play deprived if because of this trying to in the prefrontal cortex. Not only was the prefrontal cortex different some of the actual nerve cells they appeared disorganized compared to regular cells this was the biggest discovery that surge palaces career but it left him with a nagging wary i grew up in a suburb in melbourne the strike and the beyond a Mile Straight down from my straight was a river valley lots of greenery lots of slopes to tumble down lots of places to hide create games with your friends it was fantastic and one of the shocking things that i found as suited my wife and i came to lets bridge is we sort of the coolest of the river valley weve looked fantastic and the thing that shocked us both was where all the kids. My concern is that denying Young Children the opportunity through i can play has led to them not dating the cons of experiences that actually prepare them to be able to deal effectively in an unpredictable world that. There are several studies that track things like how frequent is depression in childhood how frequent is like a pathology and thats been going like this so you have the plight coming down of this and all these Mental Health things going up like this at the university of tennessee researchers are taking pelisse is work a step further. Theyre looking into the connection between play and the ability to deal with lifes hard knocks. These are syrian hamsters theyre about a month old and about a month old is their peak time social play and their social play is rough and tumble mock aggression where they will roll around pin each other and rustle. Along at them. And one way to initiate play is when another animal frozen rolls over on his back and their role into a play fight where the fellow there is a push. You can see that one animal initially and then it ran away and he came back and he attacked the other and this was roles. Really as play fighting. Play it has several functions but one is to allow for development of the prefrontal cortex and so we were interested in is their ability to cope with stress and it all have because we know the brain cortex is important for stress. One normal adult has been placed into the home of another adults dont play at fighting they actually fight these animals usually live alone so the battle can get vicious. The own caged animal will defend its territory against the intruder and attack. So you can see they time from the side just like a play fight but in adults its not playful and they continue to try to a seriously attack each other. The loser suffers whats called a social defeat. The normal hamster will get over it and go on to fight another day. Ok there you go ok a play deprived tends to that loses is less resilient. The next time its in a fight it will be submissive. And what we have here is a play deprived animal in this home cage and we put it in a smaller nonthreatening animal and in a cage we allow for social interaction. And a play deprived animals respond with a great deal of anxiety and fear they might go and sniff the other animal and then run away and thats our index of social anxiety. Whether its unique animal world or in the schoolyard play helps us prepare to cope with lights ups and downs but the way Children Play has changed dramatically. A generation ago it didnt take much to have fun a piece of rope. 6 a few tweaks. Children in the United States now spend less Time Outdoors than any previous generation that means for 7 minutes a day of free play outside vs 7 that a half hours in front of a screen. And theyre missing out on a lot more than just fresh air and exercise. Stuart brown recognized the vital role of play long before it was a respected area of science. And back then play was considered trivial an extravagance that kids didnt really have to have and slowly the science and the understanding of play behavior itself as burgeoned over the years weve begun to see play as a whole very differently brown went on to review the played backgrounds of more than 6000 people. They confirmed what he 1st thought that having fun is actually a very serious matter. What you find is that its necessary for a sense of optimism fulfillment for a sense of competency for sense of an authentic self these are all components the play produces and many more for the wellbeing of individuals. Im very concerned. We have a real crisis. While play deprivation may be only one factor the World Health Organization says the Mental Health of young people is declining in europe for example one in 5 kids is dealing with developmental emotional or behavioral problems. One in 8 is mentally ill. You wanna know. Already. One of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canadas very hand up. And they didnt think that hardly then she started out as an injury prevention researcher focusing on sure what is made up again but she came to realize Safety Experts were overlooking something crucial part of it was having my own kids i think that that influences everybody to such a large extent. I actually started to read the literature as a developmental psychologist what is the role of risk in childrens lives and what i read blew my mind you had very different disciplines all coming to the same conclusion that engaging in risk was actually a very important aspect of preventing injuries thanks a lot of history if you think about kids taking risks and engaging in risky play theyre learning how their body works theyre learning what theyre comfortable with theyre learning how the world works theyre learning very fundamental Risk Management skills. It used to be common for children to muck about unsupervised doing things that might make their parents gasp. But in the 1980 s. Children discover thrill of video games. Around the same time adults began to see the outside world as a more honest place. Playing indoors. We have smartphones in our hands all the time and were getting bombarded by these catastrophic and cataclysmic events all the time so you feel like risk is everywhere. 2 years ago persone began a National Study into how different neighborhoods affect how much children go outside. This particular study deals with the built environment right so how can we clear the kids in the community make sure that theyre comfortable playing outside where ever it is that they want to go and theres very specific things that we can do to design a community to to make kids want to play outside and to make parents feel comfortable letting them play outside. Neve kelly an 11 year old participant is fitted with a g. P. S. Watch and then accelerometer. What you see here is the data from news watch from one of the instances where she would have been playing outside in the little point thats running around her activity over that time span so weve got her here shes probably at home and shes just leaving her house and then shes going off to another bit of green space over here where shes hanging out and shes exploring quite a bit of that area shes actually covering a good chunk of her neighborhood and spending time in lots of different types of arenas makes i think that i like to play more and turn back the centuries like a century. 1020 years ago i think id fit in more. But i like like i was like. The best. It seems the freedom to be active outdoors also frees the imagination. That would be really really careful and so thats where it becomes important to point out ok so these are the kinds of limitations that your are putting on your child in order to avoid them you know being out on their own i like playing in bushes forests tree climbing climbing. Away its between a very very very unlikely event versus something that could fundamentally influence your Childs Health and well. For sonys early days of the show children especially girls play outside much more when theyre on supervised the fact that we found an activity where girls are more physically active is an incredibly important finding and so what is it that we can do to promote girls getting outside playing unsupervised rather than seeing that level off once they hit early adolescence and so all of this is suggesting that to be able to be independent and get out there and determine what they want to do is having important influences on this generations feelings of self competence of resilience of anxiety of depression you know all of those really important markers of well being. Norway is a land of dramatic beauty where people have a deep connection from nature. But even here traditional play has started to decline. Ellen sand said her plans to change that one playground at a time well. Im fine how are you my and shes collaborating with mariana persone in canada i wanted to tell you about our projects and thats why we have no. All our Childcare Centers both indoor and outdoor environments so on all 8 yeah. Wow you know. Sony and fans that are are remodelling playgrounds in 8 Child Care Centers with the goal of making them more thrilling playgrounds here started trip changed everything was kind of shrunk in a way because they were supposed to be. More safe the new designs will be based on sand setters Pioneering Research she was the one who pinpointed the features of whats called risky play. Sunset or was one of the 1st researchers to talk to children about their favorite kinds of play. Preschoolers like the ones at this outdoor Childcare Center offer a perspective thats often forgotten usually if you ask where did you live to play and what did you play when you were young most of the time they mentioned being in the outdoors in the chair. So its kind of interesting that a lot of parents own children do the same thing weve had this kind of preschool d for many many years but this last decade its been growing in number and i think thats more kind of a reaction to society where a lot of our life is. I wish that spending more time indoors or. You know all of our digital devices into t. V. And things like that. Play is the most important thing for children. Playing childrens most important way of being creative and also social skills being together with other children problem solving play is where they learn. What makes risky play different from other kinds of play is that it is a chance for getting injured that is probably the thing that we are afraid of. Its includes uncertainty maybe something that you are a little bit scared about doing but still its testing oust their environment and themselves. We were the last. Thing you can look at whiskey play as a as a way to be true 8 your fear so true play were children naturally and gauging climbing in gauging testing their ability to manage hearts they are actually learning how to handle it then its nothing to fear anymore and then you are not afraid. Research suggests that risky play might actually help prevent. We see that its the ones that never got the chance to experience climbing those are the ones that are were presented in the population with a phobia for hearts. We dont. Know when i started doing this research i read a lot about risky play and it was also always from the adults perspective. And i wanted to talk to the children its really something that they are experts in. It when they want. Her. In the striking thing was that all of them talked about bodily feelings and they usually said it tickles in my tummy heart goes like. And all of it was very positive but still they talked about the fear being there are the anxiety of being there because they did something that was scary. Their word of it you know which was. Ok and directly translated to english that is scary for me. Is part of a growing network of experts i think for every right to take part in. Im very happy for having parents that allowed me to explore and to climb trees and to jump down from highlights and to build things and crawl under things and all those things that children want to do. But time may be running out many children are growing up today with parents who have few memories of the pleasures of the outdoors. If they dont have that frame of reference its much harder for them to realize whats missing. Because this started in the late eightys those people are now parents and we could have a collective intergenerational kind of memory fog that white so that idea as kind of a normal part of childhood. Traditionally kids were let free. Real mentors School Age Kids whereas now there isnt a sense of that sense of freedom and i think with that there is a huge loss. A return to more outdoor play would reconnect us to one of the most significant aspects of our animal nature. It also promises to restore the emotional benefits that weve only begun to record. As theyre slipping away we have an Industrial Revolution background where productivity and being honored and love for your personal productivity is more important than your happiness or your fulfillment. So i think weve got an uphill fight to get play into the consciousness of the called what i mean gauging a play or watch trying to engage in a player i watch a kitten engaging in play i think to myself you know this is this is not just fluff this is something that this animal has all to do that serves some purpose that is a rather significant component of this because life. When you for tech children from every possible danger theyre not going to be very resilient or very able to cope just like animals half appeared to deal with uncertainties so do people. All mammals have basically the same brain structure. Weve now made the connection that the lack of peer play translates into a not normally developed prefrontal cortex so now all of sudden you look at the kid scenario and you go well if its true when rats maybe those correlations in children are in fact causal. And my concern has always been is this a good thing to prevent Young Children from freely choosing to engage in what were trying to apply they want with a. P. Its. The most important thing we can do is just get out of the way and let them play let them play how they choose to provide. An environment they feel comfortable playing with and then just get out of. Luck and figure it out for themselves bellamy. Are you ready for this. Ouch. Would you like a piece of shoulder. 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