J: Now at age seven to eleven they want to make things. They want to take their actual, living, physical world, take an internal idea, and change the physical world with it. Such simple things as making cookies. Taking a lot of different ingredients, putting them together, doing a certain thing called heat, and they come out radically transformation, this marvelous thing call a cookie. Play of any sort, making things, all art is a form of play in this respect.
MM: What you are describing is imagination and how developing the capacity for imagination literally changes how we relate to the world. What happens if this capacity to imagine isn’t developed?
J: Swedish Pediatric groups are the first ones to come out with the statement that the child with imagination doesn't resort to violence because they have an almost endless alternate number of scenarios within that they can play out which they then know will have some effect on their external world. Whereas the child without imagination is subject to the instant real time of direct sensory input. And so that direct sensory input isn't in any way threatening or demeaning. They have no choice except to try to cut of the source of the input. Whereas, the child with imagination can modulate or moderate these lower immediate defensive mechanisms with the higher imaginative ones that go on in the neocortical structure by which we can moderate the lower. And again it gets back down to the simple thing of representing the spool as the road roller, or the steamroller or the automobile, or something of that nature. The image that the child has in their mind that isn't present to the sensory system, what we call imagination, an image created within, not present in the sensory system, which they then take and project on the direct sensory object of the spool. And through that, they moderate or modulate the sensory object of the spool and see it as standing for the road roller, the automobile, or whatever it might be, and they want to play that for hours and hours. Later on, these very low sensory inputs of the drive for survival, protection, etc., can be moderated or modulated by the same higher cortical structures which create the internal image and project it on the external and change it in nature of the internal. So if we don't put those structures, those abilities or capacities which nature is expecting in at their appropriate stage, then later on there's not only no ability for metaphoric symbolic thinking as found in number systems, physics, mathematical formulas and all the different languages we use, but no way to moderate one's own behavior.
It has been said that play must be learned and that a child not played with can’t play. What do you think this means?
J: So long as we remember when we use the word play, we're talking about nature's means for learning. So when we say the child not played with cannot learn to play in affect, the child's learning is seriously impaired. So later on when they're exhibiting all these extremely violent behaviors and so on, we can say that they did not learn. By learning we mean opening and developing higher cortical structures which can moderate or modulate the lower evolutionary structures of the brain. Just that simple. That just didn't happen with them because they weren't played with. Play didn't take place. Play being the learning and the learning being the opening of those blocks of intelligences which are literally genetically encoded in these particular topographical areas of the brain in their respective order as they appear on the evolutionary scene. This doesn't happen. And then we turn around and condemn these people for moral ethical failure when really we're simply looking at very pragmatic, very common sense kind of biological failure. Just as if you don't water a plant, the thing isn't going to grow. Well we're not watering that intelligence at the appropriate year, and it can't grow.
Making things and imaginationTheme:imagination and play, play, learningSummaryTranscript