This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

It is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you.

You know where we're going with this one, because we are, what, halfway through the through the pretend to play series that we're re-airing.

This is going to be part three of five and it originally published 116, 2025.

Let's jump right in.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and my name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the third part in our series on pretend play, the type of play that involves non-literal understanding.

So when a child or an adult, but it's usually a child, when a child runs around the living room saying, vroom, vroom, I am a truck, or when they turn a cardboard box that a package came in into a house and live in the house and

do things in there and talk about the tiny people who live in there with them, when they

pretend to feed and care for a plastic dinosaur as if it were a baby, when they have adventures

with an imaginary friend, all of these are forms of pretend play. It's play that takes anything

in the world, in the situation, in an object, in the self as something other than literally

what it is. Now, in the past two episodes, we got into a number of fascinating ideas and

concepts from the academic study of pretend play. We talked about the standard schedule on which pretend play appears to emerge, usually with the first type of play being object substitution. So, you know, this stick is a sword, this dinosaur toy is a baby, this remote control is a phone. We talked about the evidence for possible

links between pretend play and the development of complex cognitive capacities like symbolic

understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind. And in part two, we talked about

some of the existing research on imaginary friends and imaginary companions, how prevalent they are within and across different cultures, how they work, what different forms they take, and what children believe they know.

And today we're back to talk about more.

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