Transcript Excerpt

Corey: If seems like virtually if not all play is actually an abstracted version of violence and fighting, which is something that continues to blow me away. And it’s not just a human trait; this is actually something we see in the animal kingdom. Right? Lizards, for example, don’t really play. There’s not a lot of playfulness when you know, all you have is a reptilian brain. And then birds evolve. You know, we have two cockatiels…

Keith: They play!

Corey: They do! They play, but it’s a different kind of play. It’s not the same kind of play that you see from cats or dogs. For example, it’s a play that’s more oriented towards social connections, because birds are sort of like when reptiles started forming more social bonds in a certain kind of way. And then you have like a cat, and how a cat trains its young to hunt. And it does so using play — which is a direct analog to like me rough-housing with my daughter, right? Teaching her sort of where boundaries are, that it’s okay to be aggressive as long as you’re sort of staying within these boundaries. And you know, it’s a great way to actually teach someone what a boundary actually looks like!

Keith: It’s necessary. Developmentally, rough and tumble play with kids — if it’s with a strong, dominant adult who doesn’t let it get out of hand — those kids have higher test scores, better social skills, and more affect regulation later on in life. It does something to their nervous system, and they’ve done it with rats where they won’t let them do rough and tumble play with each other when they’re young, and what do they become? They become ADD rats.

Corey: It’s absolutely fascinating. Again, this is all fitting into this frame that you have, which I love, which is “turning these basic drives into art.” And it’s fascinating to me that we don’t only see this within the human species, we actually see this all throughout the spectrum of the animal kingdom itself. And it I think shows how central managing conflict is, and how we’ve created all of these evolutionary strategies to manage conflict. We take a conflict, something that could become violent, and we actually sort of transcend and include it in a new field of playfulness, which is a brilliant evolutionary strategy.