That you are just goofy. Its not just cats and dogs that. A surprising number of other animals do to 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 animals playing with someone likely friends. Including us there is something in our deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with a whole range of life from this plot play is deeply embedded in our nature as the most adept use this world with putting and were playing more than any other species is really our it turns out play has huge benefits for our brains. And if its risky play even better. It happened almost without anybody noticing. 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 just specially as evidence from the animal world shows that physical play has the potential to make a smarter braver maybe even kinder. Wrinkle he really. Stuart brown is the grandfather of play 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 tweets and dreams. Brown says the instinct to play is an important part of the animal evolution so important theres a filing language that goes with. 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 toss lab paws flap 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 you know and 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 we got 4 of now here we go. We may recognize slavery in our pets but what exactly is. It took Gordon Burkhardt to figure that out he studies animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective highly primarily a reptile if ologist reptile behavior person and ive always like snakes and lizards and turtles and years ago articles came out about plating and i thought well im a remote sauna if you know and sort of play in a. Scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that moves slowly its a lot trickier. Its a dogs waiting its tail or monkeys or chips responded to tickling and so want some we can easily identify hey thats its playful pleasurable fun for the animal its hard to do that with a turtle. So we need more objective criteria. And i came up with 5 different groups and its a 5 criteria of play. To qualify as playing a behavior must be done for no apparent reason 2. It has to be done over and over again. Sometimes in an exaggerated way. In spontaneous. And the animal has to be doing it when its not stressed. Burghardt came up with his criterion after discovering reptiles are capable of play. Girl. I was going to go back and maybe grab something in my pocket that they like to do. She identified play behavior in the largest lizard in the world the deadly komodo dragon. Vic bring out a water buffalo. But sometimes players are confused of exploration. One of the. The difference is that an oration just checking out something what you do with it and ill play. You should go for 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 stupid enough to think its food and its acting as if its prey that is clearly not the case either because the try to eat the. Following birds or the science is something learned of all kinds of creatures play. Even the fish it seems to enjoy an occasional game of golf but. 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 youd 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. Were here to make sure theyre. Clean we take care of. So its kind of a day to day. One being a bit of housekeeping turned into something. It began with a 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 experience for the public and i was up there spraying it off with a hose. And the animal started to reach out of the water and kind of grab for the fresh water that was down and whats unusual have never seen that before and so actually just went ahead and sprayed the animal with the hose. And the animal completely went up side down and just started to come out of the water and 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 scores. So to speak. What is the power play that it has the power to bridge the divide between a solitary sea creature and a human being. Type of questions that we really dont have answers to and show that there is something in our 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 interest species 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. 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 devolution of our behavior shes intrigued because these animals arent just playful theyre peaceful unlike other primates theyve never been known to kill each other when 2 different communities of chimpanzees meet together they normally fight bonobos plate. 2 2 2 play is a 3rd of a sea of indicting the bonobo 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 the our group they say you have much more chance to survive to get the rest are sunni. It is important for the development of social skills in youngsters because they acquire social competence 2 2 2. If you want to believe in a social group it is important to this crucial that you perceive the emotion of the other. Our. Team is trying to figure out just how well 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 after you see someone else yawn is a telltale find of empathy humans start doing this at around the age of 4. Scientists call it emotional contagion if you are in fact that by mimicking a mother action for fun by group basis you cant recreate the same emotion so it is an emotional linkage between subjects. So in that yawning video you can find avatar joining a lot in different was this something front in the latter bag no position and any more respond. It can take a while but there were no booze mimic the 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 that the basis of play or play is a basis of empathy and the development of empathy back we can say yes we we we have a 1st date on 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 you 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 grownup tools. But a recent study shows kittens who play at home dont necessarily catch more mice as the. 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 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 very to 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 web serve in mature females who arent mature yet they cant mate and these males will do their part just 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 tory 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 i conducted morris that he just became more and more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this is 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 edge 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 its in demick or unique to people or more 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 there chasing off the one and one animal tries to get up to the. Public 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 dont like playing with juveniles. But will hang around together though groom one another sleep next to one another but by whining gauge and rough and tumble play that juveniles day i am going. To 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 try and hes play changing the prefrontal cortex and then old these changes weve seen much to play deprived is because of this trying to and in the prefrontal cortex. Not only was the prefrontal cortex different some of the actual nerd 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 a suitable my wife and i came to lift bridge is we sold to the coolest of the river valley looked fantastic and the thing that shocked us both was were all the kids. My concern is that denying Young Children the opportunity through writing 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 and 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 with 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 life 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 approaches and rolls over on his back and they were all into place but i think now theres a push. You can see that one animal initially and then it ran away and he came back and he attacked the other and they switched roles. Really as play fighting. Play it has several functions but one is to allow for development of the prefrontal cortex so we were interested in it is their ability to cope with stress and a lot of because we know the brain cortex is important for stress. One normal adult has been placed into the home with another adult play and 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 a 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. And the losers suffer is whats called a social defeat. A normal hamster will get over it and go on to fight another day. Ok there you go ok a play deprived hamster 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 his home cage and we put it in a smaller nonthreatening animal and in a cage we allow for a 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 slate 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. A few tweaks. Children in the United States now spend less Time Outdoors than any previous generation that means 4 to 7 minutes a day of free play outside versus 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 has burgeoned over the years weve begun to see play as a whole very differently brown went on to review the play 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 competence for sense of an authentic self these are all components the play produces and many more for the well being 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. If you want to know. Already. One of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canadas very. 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 bad 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 all of us. 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 just covers the thrill of video games. Around the same time adults began to see the outside world as a more honest place. We have smartphones in our hands all the time and were getting bombarded by these cata