If youre a jew good for. The kids not just cats and dogs thats. A surprising number of other animals too too when you start to consider weird sorts of behavior exhibited by with lots of kinds of animals who suddenly realize that things like play. Occur all over the Animal Kingdom and animals who play with some unlikely friends. Including us there is something in our deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with a whole range of light from this i was part of play is deeply embedded in our nature to have the most to death use this news in the world with flooding and were playing more than any other species if youre longer it turns out play has huge benefits for our brains. And if its risky play even better. It happened almost without any noticeable. 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 their parents did. Technology seems to be everyones new playmate. And its a trend that has many explains where especially as evidence from the animal world shows that physical play has the potential to make us smarter braver maybe even kinder. Really cookie you ready. 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 in animal play you begin to see that it is as present as sleep and dreams brown says the instinct to play is an important part of the animal evolution so important is a file in language that goes with. 12 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 left paws slap which is typical play activity from a dog. Part of an animal played the part of the reason it is so compelling is that its pure and everybody gets a look at that but. You know its instinctive and were wired the same way you know same same part of our body. 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 them down here we go. We may recognize you cannot. But what exactly is. He 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 god always like snakes and lizards and turtles and years ago articles can play and i thought well i never even saw and if you dont consider playing a. Scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that moves slowly is a lot trickier. Its a dogs waking its tail or monkeys or chips responded to tickling him so want some we can easily identify who that is 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 apparent reason 2. 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 his criterion after discovering reptiles are capable of play. I grow. Out is 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 that deadly komodo dragon. Vick bring our water buffalo. Well sometimes play is confusion exploration. One of the. Ways of difference is that admiration 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 elements 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 to think this fool and its acting as if its prey that is clearly not the case either because the try to eat the. Following birds are scientists have learned the only kinds of creatures play. Even 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 youd meet unexpected for. Just watching an octopus movie 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. Enclosure. We take care of. So its kind of a day to day. One day housekeeping turned into something. It began with the simple task of cleaning the windows so we get water from 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 hose. And the animal started to reach out of the water and kind of grab for the fresh water that was. Unusual have never seen that before and so i actually just went ahead and sprayed the animal with. The animal completely with 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 would score. So. What is the power play the difference 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 there are deeply rooted nature. And is able to communicate in some level with a whole range of life on us on his 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. 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 the 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 when 2 different communities of chimpanzees meet together they dont really fight but i know both great. 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 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 of youngsters because they acquire social competence 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. Out. Pledges team is trying to figure out just how well but no bows 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 off 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 of a group base you cant recreate the same an ocean so it is an emotional linkage between subsets. So in that you only video you can find an avatar joining a lot in different was the sunny front in the latter season diagnoses and animal respond. It can take a while but there were 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 empathy and the development of empathy back to we can say yes we we we have a 1st date that suggests that this behavior called a reality. Its a common theory that young animals play to prepare for adult life but a possible connection between play and 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 it. Necessarily. As a. Cubs romp in the den with their siblings yet generally they live once they mature. Clearly. 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 fighter that have been described so far so the sort of 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 observed in mature females who arent mature yet they cant mate and these males will do their part just a little courtship 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 where posture and they could be off spending their time doing other things like getting through or playing down more silk 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 is i just became more more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this is kind of behavior were seeing in a spider might just be play. Pruitt fim 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 i love some individuals to engage in almost sex in his little plastic cups and then others that are 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 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 tracing off the one and one animal tries to get up to the other ones. And they roll over to be offended and you see that they both take turns at doing this behavior. Researchers wanted to see what would happen if the young brats were raised with no one to play with you know alternative rearing condition we have a juvenile growing up with an adult and adult rats dont like playing with juveniles so they will hang around together though groom one another sleep next to one another but i want to gauge in rough and tumble play that the juveniles day i and i know. The play deprived rats fail 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 old these changes weve seen much to play deprived is 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 about 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 coolidge a river valley look fantastic and the thing that shocked us both was where all the kids. My concern is that the gnawing Young Children below can drink 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 what is 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 in 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 roll into a play fight or go 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 adult dont play in 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 the 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. 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 in a smaller nonthreatening animal into the 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 prepared 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 spends less Time Outdoors than any previous generation that means 47 minutes a day a 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. She would brown recognize the fight will roll of play long before it was a respected area of science. 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 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 know. Already. One of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canadas mariana. And they depict that hard world and she started out as an injury prevention researcher focusing on sure what is weighted 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 just covered the thrill of video games. Around the same time adults began to see the outside world as a more honest place. Words. 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