The few legit goofy. Its not just cats and dogs that suffered. A surprising number of other animals too too 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 Kingdom and animals will play with someone likely friends. Including us there is something and i are deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with a whole range of life on this i was part of the play is deeply embedded in our nature and the most a definite species in the world we play and we play more than any other spaces. If your lawyers 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 the parents did. Technology seems to be everyones new playmate. And its a trend that has many experts were especially as evidence from the animal world shows that physical play has the potential to make us smarter braver maybe even kinder. Recopied 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 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 animal evolution so important is a file and language that goes with that. 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 boss laugh last lap which is typical play activity from a dog. Part of an animal playing the 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 in the 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 were got 4 of now here we go. We may recognize cannot 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 god always like snakes and lizards and turtles and years ago articles came out about play and i thought well i never even saw an if you dont consider play in a while scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that moves slowly its a lot trickier. The dogs waking 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 i need more objective criteria. And i came up with 5 different groups and i said 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. Its spontaneous. And the animal has to be doing it when its not stressed. Burghardt came up with these criteria after discovering reptiles are capable of play. Girl. I was going to go back and maybe grab something in my pocket that theyd like to do. She identified play behavior in the largest lizard in the world the deadly komodo dragon. Theyd 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 now play. If you go reptiles operate a little slower pace than we do but she has all the breath 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 the 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 are sciences have learned of all kinds 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 to posts. Its generally a loner. A year ago seattle became this one. 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 clean the take care of. Its kind of a day to day feeding. Them a bit of housekeeping turned into something. It began with the 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 both 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 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 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 spring. The squid scores. So. What is the power play that it has the power to bridge the divide between a solitary sea creature and human being. Type of questions that we really dont have answers to and show that there is something and i are deeply rooted nature. And is able to communicate in some level with a whole range of life on this on this planet. Thanks to cell phone cameras and social media were seeing a lot more evidence of interspecies 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 in. The italian prime atoll edges 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 went to different communities of chimpanzees meet together they normally fight on a bus they. 2 2 2 play is a 3rd they see it in that indefinable society it is a very call to explore toward. 2 2 2 play create stronger bond it and if we share strong bonded with your 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 of youngsters because they acquire social competence 2 2 2. If you want to believe in a social group which is important is crucial that your perceived emotion on the other. One hour 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 played together. They use avatars to get the home. Your ming off to you see someone else yawn is the telltale fine 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 performed by bates you cant recreate the same that notion so it is an emotional linkage between subjects. So in that yawning video you can find avatar a lot in different sunny front in the latter. Position and at any moment respond. It can take a while but the but no both 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 the basis of play or play is of 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 variates. 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 grown up schools. But a recent study shows kittens who play at hunting dont necessarily catch more mice if a. 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 of these 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 have 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 theyre sort of an evolutionary novelty item. Pruitt and his colleagues were especially interested in a kind of dating game the social spiders play. Mature males recruit to the labs 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 3 posture and they could be off spending their time doing other things like getting through or pulling 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 ive conducted morse that is i just became more and more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this thing 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 their egg 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 there tracing off the one on one animal tries to get up to the other ones. 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 so i will hang around together the groom when i 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 shot it is play changing the prefrontal cortex and then old these changes weve seen much to play deprived if 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 palaces career but it left them with a nagging worry i grew up in a suburb in melbourne a strike and about a mile sprite 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 lets 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 the gnawing Young Children the opportunity through 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 be pressured in childhood african hes 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 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 pen each other and rustle. Oh look at them. And one way to initiate play is when another animal approaches and rolls over on his back and their role into a place like everything 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 this was rolls. Royces play fighting. Play it has several functions but one is to allow for development of the prefrontal cortex 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 at fighting they actually fight these animals usually live alone so the battle 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 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. The 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 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 and occasionally 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 play helps us prepare to cope with lights ups and downs but the way Children Play is 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 for just 7 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. Stuart brown recognized the fight old 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 competency for a 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. You want to know. All right. One of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canadas very. Honored that you picked 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 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 discovered 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 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 clear kids in the community make sure that theyre comfortable playing outside where ever it is that they want to go and theres 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. Of kelly and the 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 and the little point thats running around is her activity over that time span so weve got her here shes probably at home and shes just leaving her house and then shes going off to another bit of green space over here or shes hanging out and shes its already quite a bit of that area shes 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 turn back the centuries like a century or years later 1020 years ago i think id fit in more. But i like like ive always like. The past. It seems the freedom to be active outdoors also frees the imagination. Youve got to be really really really careful and so thats 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 and bush is for us trees kind of climbing. Way its between a very very very unlikely event versus something that could fundamentally influence your Childs Health and well. For sonys early days of the show children especially girls playing outside much more when theyre 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 generations 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. Ellens and set her plans to change that one playground at a time well. Im fine how are you man shes collaborating with mariana persone in canada i wanted to tell you about our projects and that we cant we have no. All our Childcare Centers both indoor and outdoor environments so not only yeah. Wow. Persone and fans that are are remodelling playgrounds 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 whats 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 Childcare Center offer a perspective thats often forgotten usually if you ask people where did you like to play and what did you play when you were young most of the time they mentioned being in the outdoors in the chair. So its kind of interesting that a lot of parents dont let own children do the same thing weve had this kind of preschool for many many years but in the last decade its been growing in number and i think thats more or kind of a reaction to society where a lot of our life is. I wish that spending more time indoors or. You know all on a lie or digital devices and t. V. And things like that. Plane is the most important thing for children. Playing childrens most important way of being of age and also social skills being together with other 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 truth. Its includes uncertainty maybe something that you are a little bit scared about doing but still its testing out their environment and themselves. Hey we were the last. Thing you can look at whiskey play as a as a way to have be true 8 your fear so true play were children naturally engaging climbing in gauging testing their ability to manage heights they are actually learning how to handle it that its nothing to fear and more and then you are not afraid. Research suggests that risky play might actually help prevent this we see that its 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 hearts. We dont know when i started doing this research i read a lot about risky play and it was also always from the adult perspective. And i wanted to talk to the children its really something that they are experts in. And when they. Were right. Those striking thing was that. All of them talked about bodily feelings they usually said tickles in my tummy heart goes like. And all of it was very positive but still they talked about the fear being there are the anxiety being there because they did something that was scary. Their word of it you know which was. Ok and directly translated to english studies scary for me. Is part of a growing network of experts i think teaching for every right to take part in risky play. Im very happy for having parents that allowed me to explore and to climb trees and to jump down from heights and to build things and crawl under things and almost 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 dont have that frame of reference its much harder for them to realize whats missing. Because this started in the late eightys those people are now parents and we could have a collective intergenerational kind of memory fog that white so that idea was kind of a normal part of childhood. Traditionally kids were let free. Strictly Elementary School age kids whereas now there isnt the sense of that sense of freedom and i think with that theres a huge loss. A return to more outdoor play would reconnect just one of the most significant aspects of our and the nature. It also promises to restore the emotional benefits that weve only begun to record. As theyre slipping away we have an Industrial Revolution back around where productivity and im being honored and loved for your personal productivity is more important than your happiness or your fulfilment. So i think weve got an uphill fight to get plenty into the consciousness of the called what i mean gauging a play or watch children engaging in fire i watch our kitten engaging in play i think to myself you know 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 have hunted up this thing as life. When new for tech children from every possible danger theyre not going to be very resilient or very able to cope. Just like animals have to for peer to deal with uncertainties so to people. All mammals have basically the same brain structure. Weve now made the connection that the lack of peer play translates into im not normally develop the prefrontal cortex. So i may all of a sudden you look at the kid scenario and you go well for strong rights maybe those correlations and 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 what they were trying to play they want with a. P. Its. The most important thing we can do is just get out of the way and let them play let them play how they choose to provide. An environment they feel comfortable playing with and then just get out of the. Muck and figure it out for themselves bellamy. Entered the conflict zone youre asked to hear the royal family goes on with no end in sight but whos really trying to stop it my guest this week here in munich is the countrys foreign minister Mohammad Abdullah and a german thousands of civilian casualties to be enormous human suffering. For nothing. Conflicts. In 30 minutes d. W. Right through the dixie cup for a lot of the gold old fought over the nets and home the force i think youve also seen that we can look at least about on the valleys at the last dragon thats one of those as you called the heart of the 2. On. They were abducted by the nazis and taken to germany to be raised as citizens of the. During world war 2 thousands of polish children suffered this fate. Even today many of them dont know who their real parents were. Telling children the kidnapping of nazi germany. April 28th. This is g w news live from berlin tonight germany announcing the 1st steps to reopening its economy and lifting the walk down the no rushing forward even if its with the best intentions we have to understand that as long as theres no facts we have to live with the virus germany has on the america also has a beginning next monday shops and stores will start business again social distancing however will remain also coming up tonight International Condemnation of you was president Donald Trumps decision