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that. good for. kids not just cats and. a surprising number of other animals. 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. and animals will play with some unlikely friends. including us there is something in our deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with. us on his part. is deeply embedded in our nature as the most adept in the world we play and we play more than any other species and. it turns out play has huge benefits for our brains. and if it's 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 here. today kids in the u.k. spend as much time outside as their parents did. technology seems to be everyone's new playmate. and it's 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 really. stuart

brown is the grandfather of play research he's 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 and dreams. brown says the instinct to play is an important part of animal evolution so important is the file 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 that's boss lab paws slap which is typical play activity from a dog. part of an animal play and part of the reason it is so compelling is that it's pure and everybody gets a look at that. you know it's instinctive and we're wired the same way you know

same same part of our brain. brown has gathered overwhelming evidence that there's a lot more to play than exercise for the body it's 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 it's infectious here we got 4 of now here we go. we may recognize plenty in our pets but what exactly is. it took gordon burkhardt to figure that out 'd he studies animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective i learned a primarily

a reptile if ologist reptile behavior person and i've always liked snakes and lizards and turtles and years ago articles came out while playing and i thought well i'm the reason so on if you don't consider play interrupt while. scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that move slowly is a lot trickier. it's a dog's waiting its tail or monkeys or ships to respond it's a tickling and so want some we can easily identify hey that's playful pleasurable fun through the animal it's hard to do that with a turtle. so we need more objective criteria. and i came up with 5 different groups i'd say 5 criteria of play. to qualify as play a behavior must be done for no apparent reason. it has to be done over

and over again. sometimes in an exaggerated way. it's spontaneous. and the animal has to be doing it when it's not stressed. burghardt came up with these criteria 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 the deadly komodo dragon. vic bring out a water buffalo. but

sometimes players confuse with exploration. one of the. ways of difference is that an oration just checking out something what you do with it can outplay. me she goes. 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 she'll do this over and over again. its behavior

in an animal that we consider in us relaxed state it's a behavior that is voluntary another conclusion may be bald maybe animals is stupid enough to think it's food and it's acting as if it's prey that is clearly not the case either because they try to eat the. following birds and the scientists never learn the phone collings 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 all too close. it's generally a loner. a year ago seattle became this one's new home. and

the place where you'd 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 make sure their enclosures are clean and we take care. of the day to day feeding. them one day 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 viewing experience for the public and i was up there spraying it off with

a hose. and the animals 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 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 there's 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 spring. the octopus squid scores. so.

what is the power play that it has the power to bridge the divide between a solitary sea creature and human beings. type questions that we really don't have answers to yet 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 this planet. thanks to cell phone cameras and social media we're seeing a lot more evidence of interspecies play. and sometimes it's between the most surprising playmates. the impulse to have fun seems to cross all kinds of foundries in the animal kingdom.

at his new in germany there's a whole community of animals renowned for playing together. but no booze. and it isn't just the young ones who monkey around in. the italian prime attala just 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 lucian of our behavior she's intrigued because these animals are just playful they're peaceful unlike other primates they've never been known to kill each other went to different communities of chimpanzees meet together they normally fight on a bus plane. 2 2 2 2

play is a 3rd they see it in that indefinable society it is a if they call to explore the war. 2 2 2 play create a stronger bond it and if we share strong bonded with your group base you have much more chance to survive and 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 2. if you want to believe in a social group it is important it's crucial that your perceived emotion of the other. our. pledges team is trying to figure out just how. can read one another's 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 sign of empathy humans start doing this at around the age of 4. scientists call it emotional contagion if you are in fact that i mean making another action of group a you can't recreate the same old notion so it is an emotional linkage between subjects. so in that yawning video you can find avatar yawning a lot in different position in front in the latter diagnosed position and animal responds. it can take a while but the but no goes mimic the young many times during the study.

could it be their ability to read faces that enables them to get along so well. it's 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 that this behavior called the reality is. it's 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. it's 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. don't necessarily catch more mice if it

had a. bear cubs romp in the den with their siblings yet generally they live once they mature. clearly there's 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 i'm interested in social spiders because of these tiny little predators that no one knows anything about real at least normal people don't know that they're even a thing. there are spiders that work in concert to make giant webs together capture pray together and vary 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's of immaturity females who aren't mature yet they can't mate and these males will do their part just a little more chip 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 tori 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 it's sort of like we're gaining experience

for later on in life that might be pertinent like motor skills or or our social skills social intelligence and then later on as i conducted morris that is it just became more and more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this thing is kind of behavior we're seeing in a spider might just be play. pruitt's 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 loud some individuals to engage in almost sex in these 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 egg cases not

only do playful females have more young they live longer and they're less aggressive they're much less likely to kill their partners after mating something that's 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 it's an endemic 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 most of us are

sleeping they're chasing off the one on 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 our alternative rearing condition we have a juvenile growing up with an adult and adult raps don't like playing with juveniles so they will hang around together the groom one another sleep next to one another but i wanted gauge in rough and tumble play that the juveniles day i am me 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 try it is play changing the prefrontal cortex and then old these changes we've seen much to play deprived is because of this trying to in the prefrontal cortex. not only was the prefrontal cortex different summer the actual nerd cells they appeared disorganized compared to regular cells this was the biggest discovery that surge palace's 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 looks 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 let's bridge is we sold to the coolest a river valley look fantastic and the thing that shocked us both was where all the kids. my concern is that denying young children the opportunity to 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 and that. there are several studies that track things like how frequent is depression in childhood how frequent is like a pathology and that's 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. they're looking into the connection between play and the ability to deal with life's hard knocks. these are syrian hamsters they're 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 pen each other and rustle. a look at them. and one way to initiate play is when an animal approaches and rolls over on his back and they were rolled into a play fight or the collar there's 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 rolls. millions play fighting.

play it has several functions but one is to allow for development of the prefrontal cortex and so we were interested in it is their ability to cope with stress and a lot of because we know the birth of cortex is important for stress. one normal adult has been placed into the home of another adult don't play at fighting they actually fight these animals usually live alone so the potential can get vicious. the home caged animal will defend its territory against the intruder and attack. so you can see the time from the side just like i'll play fight but in adults it's not playful and they continue to try to a seriously attack each other. the loser suffers what's 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 tends to that loses is less resilient. the next time it's 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 non-threatening 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 that's our index of social anxiety. whether it's the meat 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 didn't 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 and that means for 7 minutes a day of free play outside versus 7 than a half hours in front of a screen. and they're 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 didn't really have to have and slowly the science and the understanding of play behavior itself has burgeoned over the years

we've 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 it's necessary for a sense of optimism fulfillment for a sense of competency for sentiment authentic self these are all components the play produces and many more for the wellbeing of individuals. i'm 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 that. one of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canada's they're not. and they didn't pick that hardly did she started out as an injury prevention researcher focusing on shore with 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 children's 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 it's a lot of mystery if you think about kids taking risks and engaging in risky play they're learning how their body works they're learning what they're comfortable with they're learning how the world works they're 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. playing in the words.

we have smartphones in our hands all the time and we're 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 make little kids in the community make sure that they're comfortable playing outside wherever it is that they want to go and there's very specific things that we can do to design a community to make kids want to play outside and to make parents feel comfortable letting them play outside. cali 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

that's running around is her activity over that time span. so we've got her here she's probably at home and she's just leaving her house and then she's going off to another bit of green space over here where she's hanging out and she sits forward quite a bit of that area she's actually covering a good chunk of her neighborhood and spending time in lots of different types of renesmee i think that i like to play more and if we turn back the centuries like a century years like 1020 years ago i think i could fit in more. but i like like i always like playing outside for the best. it seems the freedom to be active outdoors also frees the imagination. that every really really really careful and so that's 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 for us charles kind of climbing. away it's between a very very very unlikely event versus something that could fundamentally influence your child's health and well. for so these early days of the show children especially girls play outside much more when they're unsupervised 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 generation's 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 started to decline. ellen's and set her plans to change that one playground at a time well. i'm fine how are you man she's collaborating with mariana persone in canada i wanted to tell you about our project and that

we have. all our child care centers. indoor and outdoor environments so no. yeah. wow you know. persone and fans that are a remodelling playground in 8 child care centers with the goal of making them more thrilling playgrounds here. 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 what's 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 care center offer a perspective that's often forgotten usually if you ask people where did you live to play and what did you play when you were young most of the time they mention

being in the outdoors in the chair. so it's kind of interesting that a lot of parents own children do the same thing we've had this kind of preschool 'd for many many years but lost their kids it's been growing in number and i think that's more kind of a reaction to society where a lot of our life is. spending more time indoors. you know all of our digital devices and t.v. and things like that. play is the most important thing for children. playing children important way of being. and also social skills being together with the children

problem solving. 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. it's includes uncertainty maybe something that you are a little bit scared of doing but still it's testing else their environment and themselves. when. you can look at whisky play as a as a way to be to eat your fear so truth play were children naturally engaging climbing and ageing testing their ability to manage hearts they are actually learning how to handle it then it's nothing to fear anymore and then you are not as

afraid. 'd as research suggests the risky play might actually help prevent this we see that it's 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 heights. i don't. 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 it's really something that they are experts in . you and there won't be so. good right. in the striking thing was that all of them talked about bodily feelings. they

usually said it tickles in my tummy my heart goes like boing boing boing 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. there were debates you know which was. there and directed translated to english studies scary funny. is part of a growing network of experts i think eating for every child's right to take part in risky play. i'm very happy for having parents allowed me to explore and to climb. down from high. things and crawl under things and most 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 don't have that frame of reference it's much harder for them to realize what's missing. because this started in the late eighty's 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. entry school age kids whereas now there isn't a sense of that sense of freedom and i think with that there's a huge loss. a return to more outdoor play would reconnect just one of the most

significant aspects of our animal nature. it also promises to restore the emotional benefits that we've only begun to grow. as they're slipping away we have an industrial revolution background where productivity and being honored and loved for your personal productivity is more important than your happiness or your fulfillment. so i think we've got an uphill fight to get play into the consciousness of the culture when i mean gauging a play or watch children engaging in fire i watch our kitten engaging in play i think to myself now this is this is not just fluff this is something that this animal has evolved to do that serves some purpose that is rather significant component of this things life. was new for tech children from every possible danger they're not going to be very

resilient or very able to cope. just like al most hotaru for peer to deal with uncertainties so. people all mammals have basically the same brain structure. we've now made the connection that like all people play translates into a not morally developed prefrontal cortex so now all of a sudden you look at the kid scenario and you got it well for strong 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 whatever kind of play they want with it. the most important thing we can do is just get out of the way and let them play let them play how they choose and provide. an

environment they feel comfortable playing with and then just get out. and figure it out for themselves. because. he has an excellent reputation but so far he's been a bit of a disappointment. really quick you know what was supposed to help byron munich get back on track the season. but as the strike. will take a closer look to see the stellar career. security in. w. see venice

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