Training Without Conflict® Podcast Episode Forty-Six: Dr. Sergio Pellis
Ivan BalabanovIvan Balabanov · 영상 · 1시간 39분
Training Without Conflict® Podcast Episode Forty-Six: Dr. Sergio Pellis
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all right guys welcome to training without conflict podcast number 46 today i have a really really special guest to me um and and you you will find out in a second why that is the case um i want to introduce you to uh dr palace uh professor of behavior neuroscience at university of uh leadbridge in canada and the reason it's so special it's because he shares pretty much the same obsession about play and why play so important in especially in mammals what is it good for where it's coming from what are the benefits and so on he has done an incredible amount of work that it's not even i cannot list all the papers that he's made and the research that he's done because it's just absolutely fascinating but i want to say um if you don't have the book and if you're interested or you become interested in what we're going to talk about definitely uh then we're going to post some links on on some of the material but um dr palace is just a um brief introduction um and basically how how did the obsession we play came about like for me i will tell you in a second my my side of the story as a dog trainer you know like from from early 80s later on later on later on later on later on later on later on later on later on later on later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later later for me and just give us a little bit of a intro and and thank you for for coming to the podcast
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for sure like like i'm so excited you have no idea well thank you very much i really appreciate the invitation so very simply um when i was interested in animal behavior as an undergraduate and i wanted to do graduate work in animal behavior and at the time one of the least studied aspects of animal behavior was development so i was interested in well how does an animal come to organize the way it behaves through infancy to adulthood and so i approached a prospective supervisor and i said well i'm really interested in pursuing a phd looking at development and so on and we explored several projects that that could be useful and all of them turned out to be i didn't have any graduate scholarships on i think so all of them turned out to be too expensive for my budget so i said yeah i'd love to do that but i really can't afford to do it and he said well okay let me show you something so he reached down and showed me and pulled out a 16 millimeter movie film that he shot in his backyard in melbourne australia and showed me the film and what i saw was a pair of australian magpies engaging in rough and tumble play just like two puppies you know i'm using puppies for your benefit so they're rolling around grabbing grabbing one another and and i looked at i said i asked my supervisor why are they doing that this is 1975 i said why are they doing that and he said nobody knows and i thought well this is perfect for four years phd i can solve the problem of why animals are playing so fast forward to 2024 i'm still working on play and as you mentioned i've got a large body of work now and slowly trying to tease out the the big question i started with haven't solved the big question of why do animals play but as the conversation here will progress i think you'll see we've got better and better ideas and snippets of understanding of the phenomenon so that's how it started and that's why it's taken me 50 years to do this this is it just fascinates me um wow where do we start so we we know that all like there is a special thing about mammals in particular like we have this special like we it's baked like it's not uh play like in the last whatever 20 years or so i think it's you know if we didn't think but we finally realized that play is an innate it's just a primary reinforcer it's not something that we have to like it's a fundamental basic need for development as you said that was one of the kind of unexpected even things that came out uh in in i don't know how long ago that was um but we we realized that mammals are just extremely playful and especially like humans we we
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can i mean there is an infinite number of games we can come up with anytime we decide to and i the the uh thing with the dogs it's i think my my speculation of how like people always you know the theory is about how dogs and humans came together and you know the scavenger theory and so on but i think play had something to do with it that's just my gut feeling that there there was somewhere even if it was a a bone but there was some playing ball simply because humans and dogs are we like most mammals as as we know they kind of you know in uh the development in the younger stages they are very playful but that kind of fades off as they grow up to where humans and dogs and and i'm very curious to to hear about uh uh your your your uh take on that but we we play until we die and i mean as soon as all needs are met we want to play right and then it's just some an amazing thing and of course that question why do we play just cannot help it but it comes as a first question which is a um it's a very interesting one and i i'm dying to hear your take on that yeah so if i can break down what what you've just said oh yes into different sub questions right but we'll get a better handle on what the diversity and the range of phenomena that we call play are so the first thing is yes mammals are one of the most playful group of animals on the planet but even amongst mammals not every every species play play so so one of the first questions is why do some animals some species play and others do not right and if you look at how this evolved it seems pretty clear that the ancestral state is for a non-playful ancestor and then from there we spawn lineages that become that have lots of playful species some that do not ever show play in some species so so the first question is how do we go from non-play to play and what is and then the second question is well what are the conditions that make the more playful members of the mammalian family uh playful what what's enabled them to to develop this exaggerated play which as you said in some species is quite remarkable like humans dogs chimpanzees whatever and then the the third question is okay so you do all this play so what in summer in some species so what does it buy you what what are you getting out of it is it just a way to fill up spare time yeah or is there some added value to to the engagement and performance of the behavior so if we sort of break up the big question into these smaller questions we we have better chance of getting some understanding and and as
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we progress through this discussion what i think i'll show you is that some of these questions we we're starting to get some really good insights into what the answers may be some questions they're still a big mystery and it'll probably be in somebody else's lifetime if ever that they're answered which is cool to have that part too right oh yeah well i've had i've had some some pretty pretty good um graduate students that i've trained so for them to know that there's still some really big questions to answer is makes it encouraging them for them to go forward with a career rather than go okay well i know everything so i might as well go do something else so if we start with the first question is where does play come from right what are the origins of play this this is probably still the most vaguely understood question and we're getting some ideas of what some of the components of an answer will be but it's still pretty pretty premature but here's a here's a stab at my best guess as to what constitutes an answer to this if you think of animals doing stuff so let's let's think of i'll give you an example lions in in the wild they they have to hunt other animals in order to eat okay now various studies over the last 60 plus years have shown that in the wild lions are successful in hunting in maybe one out of 26 attempts okay so now let's think about the way we normally think about people and other animals being rewarded for behaving in a certain way so as a dog trainer you know you reward your dogs to do certain things you want them to do but if if you didn't reward your dog for after 26 times it did this right behavior it probably would not make the connection the reinforcements is not there yes so the question is but what makes a lion wake up against the next morning and go hunt again even though it wasn't rewarded by a meal a meal after the last hunt the hunt before the hunt before right so one way to think about how behavior is organized is that one of the things that that needs to happen is that for essential behaviors behaviors you cannot afford not to do they have to be self-rewarding so they're just getting up and the excitement of going out hunting is enough to reward the lion to go out and hunt again right and they're they're very much rewarded by innate they're right they're innate they're just baked into your dna it's not like you yeah yeah so so doing the behavior becomes rewarding in and of itself and i think that's a fundamental feature of what has in some lineages led to the evolution of play so if we now take that seed
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and go into okay now why do some species exaggerate this innate desire to perform behavior to such a degree that we as observers recognize it as well it's it looks playful it's different it's play it's no longer just hunting behavior it's play all right i think the next step is you look at lineages where there is things there are things like spare time so it there's extra resources available the animal has the capacity to become bored so a little bit bigger brain a little bit more cognitive capability so you create conditions oh yeah let's add another one where if you go out and do some random playful activity your chances of being eaten by a predator are low so in in lineages where these conditions conditions are created leads to the opportunity to exaggerate that innate propensity to engage in behavior because the behavior is self-rewarding to transform it into a more playful form of enactment which is why a lot of play in most animals is built on those innate survival-based behaviors like anti-predator behavior predation social aggression sex etc right yes yes yes only a few animals like humans have gone to the point of creating novel types of play that we refer to as games that are really divorced from those survival things so we have a gradation okay then once you fill up your time and using up excess resources to engage in play if that play now has some feedback on how you develop how you organize your behavior in a positive way the natural selection would foster that and so we have in some lineages where the play has not only arisen but now fulfills an essential function and we see that in certainly in humans we see it in many primates and we've demonstrated in even in rats that the plane ends up providing feedback to developing parts of the cognitive architecture of the brain to be able to perform better in a variety of different situations later in life yeah right yeah so so we go through these gradations so so that means when you ask why do animals play and you immediately think of well everybody must benefit well that doesn't explain why it doesn't benefit everybody and why not everybody plays so you have to take this graded step and when we get the dogs to people to monkeys to rats we have the full circle we have the function we have the performance and we have the opportunity there is the standing question or or assumption that okay play one of the benefits is okay they the youngsters they immediately start to practice skills right or the other option and and i've heard you say
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that i'm not going to say this as well that i also feel uh uh more uh inclined to go along with is that uh i mean there's like so so many benefits of play but especially in the the developing the young age it's almost like uh um like making those brain connections and and kind of putting the body and the brain to work together and understanding who you are and what you can do in some way but not necessarily that it's a okay i'm doing this for for that practice i think that comes later on as a skill very useful but the the initial benefits of play is just to really put brain and body together of who you are and what you can do can you really jump this high or can you what do you think yeah so i agree so for about a hundred plus years the predominant uh functional explanation of play is that it affords young animals an opportunity to practice to practice right right right okay and from from when i first started uh studying play in the 70s there were a series of of papers on cats on coyotes on a variety of animals that tried to test that hypothesis and it kept on coming up negative like playing doesn't make you better at predation it doesn't make you better at fighting right and so that hypothesis ended up becoming weaker and weaker but still it was the most useful one to get a a simple explanation so even in documentaries to this day it's still the most commonly reported explanation for why animals play right even though it's just simply the evidence is not there now what has been shown and we've shown it in rats other people have shown it in hamsters um there's some um indirect evidence from humans and from a few primate species showing that well the play is actually changing the ant is doing what you just suggested before what it's doing is allowing the animal to really understand what it's capable of and what it needs to do with that capability to modify it in different situations right and so adapt their behavior to context in a much more effective manner right and so what we found and been corroborated in a couple of other labs now is that playing and it doesn't matter what kind of play it is it can be the aggressive play sexual play predatory play ends up influencing the development of the in mammals the prefrontal cortex which essentially is a place where you gather all the information from all the rest of your brain from the rest of the situation you're in and tries to figure out what should i do and let me just give you a really simple component of that process that i think everybody in the audience will
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understand and that is if if you go to work and your boss says something insulting to you your first inclination is to react but you what you need to do is stop for a few seconds think about how do i really want to react because i can escalate the situation i could de-escalate it uh so impulse control impulse control right is an essential part of of life and certainly for social animals if you have no impulse control there's a real problem and i i don't know um where you where you where are you at new york no we are in florida we are near tampa yeah okay so some of your audience may may remember the the show seinfeld and kramer is a excellent example of someone with no impulse control short he says what he thinks yes right that gets him in trouble all the time and and again that is uh one of the skills we need to be able to organize our behavioral responses in a more effective way and that's going to be true whether you're you're a rat or monkey or dog encountering another dog and you have to make a decision as to whether to escalate this to aggression or not you encounter someone and you're trying to convince them to have sex with you you're encountering prey and deciding whether i should lunge now or swing around and come at a different angle right all the strategies yes all the strategies in life basically exactly and so i think where play has had a feedback effect on skill development that's these higher order skills of piecing together how to adapt your behavioral repertoire to this specific situation most effectively so if nothing else if everybody goes away thinking okay play improves impulse control and that's been demonstrated multiple times in the laboratory in the netherlands then you you got the picture very cool very cool yeah like i think always something like um you know because i'm i'm i mean by my accent you you would guess i'm not born in in the states i'm i'm originally from bulgaria and and we used to play i mean soccer football was like the the game of course in europe and and always a lot of my examples always connect either with martial arts or with soccer and you know like when you give a ball to a kid and they start to kick it of course they learn how to play with the ball but they really what's happening is they learn about what they can do and how to get better doing it right um and there is so many like i i don't know if i mean i'm sure you probably can list all the benefits i i always try to think of how much how deep it goes because like of course we have the the cooperation because we you know to play
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somebody has to want to play with you right so that's like a just as the impulse control cooperation is of extreme value to learn how to cooperate with somebody even if it's stronger or weaker because the game's gonna end if you don't cooperate one way or another right and the other big one to me uh um i mean besides all the social skills but but the fact of you know like like uh kind of finding out who you are who is who in that social group i think through plays a a very healthy safe way to figure things out no yeah so so that takes us to a fourth question which is is which is that so far it looks like from the comparative evidence that about 50 percent of mammalian species that play as juveniles continue to play as adults and so now you have well it can't adults can't be using play to to help foster the development of these prefrontal skills because they're already there so why do so why do half the species that play continue playing as adults and certainly for social play one of the answers are exactly where you were alluding to that the play is used as a way of negotiating relationships right because if i if i engage you in play and you're either you or i become a little bit too rough or too whatever the game is right then you go depending on the reaction of the other person you can say oh sorry i was just playing and you and you've got a way of gracefully backing down however if you encounter one another and you immediately go to okay the choices between fighting or not fighting then it becomes difficult to have a way of backing down so the play has been demonstrated in in humans as well to function as both a graceful way of sampling and identifying where you stand in the social hierarchy in the group which is super critical for social species i mean it's absolutely without knowing where you stand it's a chaos it's it's dangerous for everybody right and and the same applies for sexual encounters identifying mates you can have a little bit of playful banter and then if it doesn't work out well you've got a way of backing away if it works well you can escalate it to more intimate sexual behavior but again it's it's a way of of getting your bearings in a social situation and understanding what the dynamics are with the other individual individuals involved and so you you can um know where what to do next you can see if you're going to be able to do next so in terms of of the comparative literature what's what's known is that there are some species which are super hierarchical i'll just mention a couple of
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primate species there are japanese snow monkeys super hierarchical right they have little to no play in adulthood simply because everybody knows what their status is in the in the group so depending on who does what to whom you know what you're supposed to do right there are other related monkeys particularly ones from the salawesi islands that are also hierarchical but the hierarchy is much more fluid different so even though you're dominant to me and most times you can come to towards me and take whatever i'm eating and you can get away with it okay you're dominant but in some of these salawesi monkeys sometimes the subordinate will go well you've done this once too many times so i'm going to turn around and bite you right so now you as the dominant have to figure out uh you know what's my standing with this particular person before i push my luck further and so what we have is in these salawesi monkeys a lot of adult adult play which seems to be used to navigate and negotiate and reinforce where they are in the hierarchy whereas in the japanese macaques you don't have to worry about that there's no need because once you're in that particular particular position you know exactly what you can and can't do with another animal so again in and in humans obviously particularly more um democratic quasi egalitarian societies like canada and america and so on you know it's not always clear exactly where you stand so some more playful ways of interacting uh are more useful than in other societies where the the hierarchy is very rigidly maintained everybody knows what they're supposed to do with everybody here is a question why why is it that a big big percentage big portion of play has some element it's a some element of aggression it's not aggression but it's aggression in some way it's it's like we're playing but the team is aggression you you know what i'm saying right like in a in a law is it uh is it just a predators or is it like like like like i i from my experience and observations and what i've learned it's it's actually uh it doesn't have to be a predator they they all play in a somewhat play aggression if that's even a a way to explain it yeah absolutely so it's not limited to predators it's as true for at least for all species that engage in rough and tumble play right and it's true for rats which are non-predatory species that's true for macaques monkeys that are non-predatory it's true for dogs which are predatory it's true for cats etc so i think what's what's going on and the evidence is really starting to push in this direction
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that there are two components to this first rough and tumble play to be to be fun to be enjoyable has to be competitive yes right and again everybody can think of themselves back when they were very young and yet you're playing with someone that you you always win that's that's not much fun right there's got to be a challenge similarly the reverse is also true if if the other person that you're playing with is always winning you might find that fun either right so there's got to be a balance and so when you look at rough and tumble play in in a variety of animals which we have what you find is that there's an element of both competition and cooperation and part of the balancing act that you have to decide when you're playing with a particular individual is okay i'm i'm stronger more skilled than the other person i'm i've been winning a lot but i can feel by the tension in the other animals body and so on by their mood that they're losing interest and they're no longer enjoying this so in order to engage them further in play now i have to exaggerate some cooperative element in my behavior to make it easy facilitate them getting at least an occasional win right and it seems that certainly for the development of of um social skills that play can can influence it is that balance and so we've done experiments where we've exaggerated the the the lack of symmetry so it's very asymmetrical in favor of this animal even though this animal is playing a lot it's not getting the benefits from this brain development and it's when the two are more closely matched so that they're both seesawing and winning and losing that you get the maximum brain development benefit and and i think then in adulthood we're talking about negotiating relationships it's that it's that using that relative balance between competition and cooperation that you're using as a judgment to know okay with this person you know i can win 60 percent of the time and that that person is fine only losing uh winning 40 percent this other person i have to alter my behavior because they get really annoyed if i if i win more than 70 percent of the time so again you're using play as a way of adjusting where the correct balance is between cooperation and competition to maintain relationships or in childhood to develop these social skills yeah yeah that's uh like i i i mentioned to you in in our correspondence that i have a school for dog trainers and one of the things when we talk about play which we do extensively uh i always give example uh one of my favorite example is like imagine that you have a
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like some of the the best basketball professional league team and the coach comes and talks to us here and say hey you guys want to play of course we're gonna say yes how can we not even though we know the outcome but i mean this is a one it's in a lifetime opportunity right so of course we don't play but then once it's done and the next sunday the coach says hey you guys want to play we would say no we would rather have a front seat and watch them play and and the same for the top players because why would they want to play with us we know the outcome and they know the outcome and as soon as we know the outcome the game of the competition is not there anymore right and and so that that's kind of ends it in that way um but uh the the interesting thing about play is also you know having that freedom like the best play when you have this uh when when it's uh self-directed like like you have to figure it out as you're doing it the benefit of the play is like you you have to have the the control and the co which goes all into the cooperation right but it's this exploration of how to navigate so it it is competitive but there are some rules we agree on how to stay in the play because the play can become very fragile very quickly and and and having that innate ability and we which it's amazing that desire to okay we're gonna play and we're gonna find out what we're gonna play and there's gonna it's gonna be some rocky ways but even even the rocky moments of the play are of extreme value because those are the moments where you actually learn the impulse control learn the cooperation learn like once we know how to play the game then it's cool to play the game but learning the game itself it's uh the most value of the whole experience no yeah yeah yeah and i think uh to reinforce that point we we see that in non-social play as well where animals are playing with objects or just moving around like you said you know jumping from one branch to another other for monkey where what they do is it seems that they as they're getting better they add some a little bit extra challenge right so it's pushing themselves to the limit and we in in some exaggerated cases you can see this and it's been labeled self-handicapping where you actually make it harder for yourself to succeed and so you have to overcome that challenge and if in in um in social play the other animals providing the challenges for you but in solo play well you have to be the one introducing that challenge so it becomes really start right why why the hell are they doing that yes and it's probably
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because of that very thing that what makes the play fun is to push yourself out of your zone of comfort this is like two two two guys playing tennis and and the one is clearly on a different level and decides to switch hands to make the game balanced right yeah yeah exactly exactly so when you mention so so gosh so many questions we have we have the how you say the rough and tumble we have the games where it's really uh interaction without any objects and then we have the ones with objects uh it's very interesting to me how much any fanny play with mice and rats goes do they do they ever pick an object and chase each other kind of like how dogs would do or or other or or they are strictly interacting in in a physical way directly yeah no i've never seen that object competition in in rats but rats are they tend to i mean they they are pretty they can be quite aggressive for just just in in the colony and everything right with each other um and they resolve that some of that gets resolved through some form of play that right to where like with dogs or humans we can we can resolve it by playing again basketball or or the dog can grab a little branch and the other one can try to steal it and then they can establish that way without the the actual all the dogs also are masters in in playing without any objects and just really go with their necks as you know as we say they're practicing skills right but but it's uh it's a dominance it's a when when the two especially if it's two when it gets three or four the dynamics kind of change and that will be another conversation that i want to have with you with uh do the rats the rats and mice play in groups like that because the dogs do but typically especially when dogs play one-on-one often you will see them in the dog park and people are like oh they are playing they're having fun and clearly the one is having the time of its life and the other one is just kind of trying to dodge and defend because because if he doesn't or she doesn't then he gets to be bullied right and so so with with the mice and the rats are they do they prefer to play one-on-one or do they do some group also like uh play do they team team up or or no yeah no there's no teaming up so in fact the vast majority of of species that engage in rough and tumble play the play is predominantly dyadic right so in in a group if you have a cage with a group of rats and they're playing what you'll have is an individual play with this one then they'll break up and they'll go play with someone else so it's basically serial dyadic
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interactions right and that's true for for most animals it's very rare that a third or fourth animal joins in and they actually create a novel way of interacting in that group structure right that's uncommon they can end up being on on the way yeah so often where you get um a third animal joining in and we've seen this in rats and we've seen it in otters and and and japanese monkeys is the one that joins in will attack the one that's has a disadvantage at the time right so it's taking advantage of one of one of the other one's disadvantage but there are exceptions and and the two most striking ones that i know of one we studied ourselves which was one of these solar waysie monkeys relative to the japanese macaque and bonobos relative to the to the chimpanzee and we get in both bonobos and the solar waysie monkeys is you most most of the play is dyadic but 30 to 40 percent is non-dyadic so you have a third one joining and then the three are competing with one another then a fourth one join then and then the four are competing against one another simultaneously and but it gets to a point where when but okay let me back up so if if you're one of these monkeys what you're trying to do during rough and tumble play is to bite the other person on the shoulder upper arm shoulder here right so you try to grab a bite now two animals doing that you can see how that can work add a third animal becomes chaotic complex yes you get fourth animal becomes even more complex and what happens is as the complexity increases the thing breaks down and what you can end up having is as many animals as many juveniles as there are in the group and one one group of uh tonkin bacac that we studied there were eight juveniles and eventually all like just piled on top of one another and then they stopped bothering by going for the shoulder they just grabbed someone's hand and bite a hand somebody else grab a foot bite a foot so they they broke the theme of the rules based dyadic encounter so instead of trying to maintain the dyadic rules but by with a third or fourth animal it just completely broke down into anarchy right for japanese macaque that would be a terrible thing to happen like that because they wouldn't know how they could get out yes so it would be totally unpleasant for japanese macaque but for bonobos and tonkin macaques this is perfectly acceptable and fun seeking somebody that matches you and typically when we dox and i think with people if we find out we we very quickly find out if it's worth
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to play with somebody or not and and often we may not be able to get out of it it can lead into some some fight or but we very quickly gouge uh what my skill against how they how they how we line up and um what is to me interesting and it's always been in my head and it's a big um i wouldn't say it's a problem but it's there's a a in dog world there is a very much of a controversy as far as like you know there is that notion that all dog training should be done through positive reinforcement and there should be no discomfort no aversive no fear but then when you look at play it's clearly about some discomfort in in fact it's probably the most interesting play he has some elements of aversive and avoiding and and if you cannot avoid it you kind of get punished for it and and those are the the ultimate skills and and there is some something that kind of sucks you that you like that kind of game that you want to explore that discomfort right yeah no i i agree i think that's exactly right and i think that's one of the key features of play is that as we talked about before you're adding some discomfort either psychological or physical to make the situation more challenging more interesting to to work your way through and i think if you try to completely eliminate all discomfort the animals actually will not enjoy doing the behavior anymore right right right so to me that's even more more aversive and more punishing to the animal yeah and that's especially with dogs like like if you if you imagine you know going to the shelter or going to a breeder and getting an eight week old puppy and they don't get that experience of of that type of play simply because it comes from a good place in our heart not to you know not to experience fear not to experience discomfort but there is a a a how do i say like a healthy dose of it that it's really needed and it's in some ways it's all once i i compare it i'm old enough that i i can say i grew up on the street which it kind of sounds crazy but we went to school and then we played on the street all day long or all night long and we learned how to do all these things that we're talking about and there was there was the you know the little conflict the little corporations the little discomfort and at this point this is uh i think it's difficult for kids missing that side of that type of play like parents think okay we're gonna take the kid to do a karate but it's all structured to where they don't they don't get that uh um self-directed and exploration of what they it's all very and and with puppies it's very much
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the same like we we have like you go to the pet stores and you can have the brain toys to where they can use their nose and they can figure things like there is a lot of cool things but missing out on on that type of play where there is that little bit of a question mark well who's gonna win here and and how is it gonna really hurt this time and it's such a important part of development right yep yeah yeah and and also you know think think of if if you're engaging in play most of the time the effective state is positive like you're doing it because you're enjoying it right and particularly rough and tumble play you know and i can see this in my in my rat sometimes they they lunge up at one another high in the air and one gets turned over and bang and you can hear the thud as it lands on the ground right and you go that that's got to hurt but the rat will take that in its stride and bounce back and attack the other one right if that happened in an aggressive encounter the same level of pain would it would uh alert the one that's experienced the pain to either completely submit or to escalate the aggression right and so in play you could experience similar levels of pain but what you're doing is you're weighing that pain relative to what goals you're trying to achieve in that situation and so i think play becomes an important place to learn that hey to get to get what i want sometimes i got to experience some pain but it's not pain that i would i would treat as aversive whereas the same level of pain in another non-playful situation would lead you to a very different end point yeah so so yeah i think some some physical and psychological pain is built in to play and the more we try to sanitize the play experience to avoid any psychological or physical pain we're actually denying we're depriving the kids involved in particular kids the opportunity to gain the most important valuable lessons they can from childhood and so we're not doing them a favor right which you're obligated to learn how to cooperate in these specific situations right yeah yeah and again because we're very social we want to interact we like playing with other people and so you go now if if i'm inflicting too much psychological or physical pain on my partners and they stop playing with me right well that makes me unhappy so it forces me to rethink oh man i want to get back into the game what do i need to do in order to make the other ones accept me again so you're learning valuable lessons about how the world works and the kinds of skills you need in
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order to be able to gain what you wish to gain out of the world i have another interesting one that i i want to ask you about and like what i call it i like this is just something that i i i don't know i'm sure you you will come up you will say the right uh definition of it but i call it a home base as far as like somebody's character somebody's temperament to where like um you know you like let's say let's say you're an a atm machine and somebody taps you on the shoulder and some person will just come and punch the other one somebody will freeze like there will be these responses that they no matter if you are like black belt in some martial arts in that particular situation you totally can respond by freezing and not being able to do anything or do the wrong thing and um um that kind of home base character difference like because that also that match making if i want to say that way can no matter how much you want to cooperate it's just it's not a good match and it either has to we have to split or we end up in a in a much more confrontation right just because of the personalities that the two meet is that something uh um real yeah i i think it is and i'll give you an illustration with with with our rats so what we initially discovered was that engaging in interactions playful interactions as a as a young rat a juvenile rat leads to changes in social skills and a change in a particular area of of the prefrontal cortex called the medial prefrontal cortex so i'll just say mpfc okay and what we also did was say well if that's good what what if we give rats an opportunity to grow up with lots of other play play partners so there's multiple animals right and what we found is well in this case we're changing another part of the prefrontal cortex called the orbital frontal cortex or the ofc so think of orbital frontal as the part that's sitting above your eyes and the medial is right down the middle here okay so these two different things and then we did experiments to show that the two are differentiated one based on play experience the mpfc and one based on how many individuals you had to interact with so diversity of partners then we discovered that that the play induced changes to the mpfc are stable throughout the lifetime of the of the rat so once they change in the juvenile period they remain the same throughout life and you think well what does what does that part of the skill set do for you what what it does is it says if you throw a punch at me i should duck right and that doesn't change throughout my life right it's not that i want to be hit in the face when i'm 10 or when
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i'm 70 right i just don't want to be hit in the face so that's a skill and so timing and and really what it what this area of the brain is important for is time is helping you time this correctly so you don't want to go too soon or too late right you've got to judge it just right so that's one of the things you're learning with the play experience however the changes in the ofc if if if you continue leaving the animals in the same stable group of partners eventually the ofc changes back to the way it was so it's it's re-altered back but then if you expose those animals to new partners the ofc changes again right and so what did we discover the ofc to do it's it does it's not necessary to use the ofc to decide whether to duck or not but who the who the other animal is and one one of the important features in the other animals is whether they're dominant to you or subordinate right so you know well if it's dominant i should do this if it's subordinate i can do that right so i'm adjusting my behavior according to the identity of the other animal and i think in that regard what we can see is that there are some skills that are developed in childhood through the experience of play that uh last for your entire lifetime but there are other skills that need to be updated such as the ofc because over time you end up having to interact with new characters like right you can tell from my accent i come from australia i've spent time in florida i spent time in illinois i spent time in tel aviv i've spent a lot of time in in canada and so i've had to go from different workplaces many times and you have to learn to cope with a new cast of part right and each time you have to adjust your behavior accordingly to the individual personalities within your social group so yes i think there's a role for both right that you have some stable skills that are going to be useful to you forever but there are some skills that need updating all the time which is where we go where we talk about the the the brain making the prediction errors right because yeah the brain has to the the most important thing is to be able to predict but sometimes it's wrong and then yeah it has to adjust and save a different different file in the folder yeah well in my time at lethbridge i've been here for 34 years now so i've seen many many deans come and go and you know you learn okay you know the certain certain rules of etiquette that you have to engage in when you're dealing with your superior but there's different personalities on how they what kinds of ways you can raise issues and challenge that person
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right and so you spend five years with particular dean you you understand his or her personality and and you'll act appropriately and and you've got a way of working out you know where can i get what i want and where do i have to give in etc but then a new dean comes and it takes a couple of years to go oh man i can't use the same strategies i use with the previous thing because this doesn't work it's a different personality very true talk to me a little bit about the deprivation from play like that there is quite a few different like we know it's it it's extremely valuable it's extremely important especially in the like like the the young any any animal or any mammal i've read somewhere that if a rat even doesn't get touched they end up like dying or or something really like if they never get the interaction that is totally isolated um they they just uh don't even make it through life is that a thing or is that something that i um yeah it's that's sort of true but there's some new ones so so what so if you go through life and again we'll deal with rats because they've been the ones most intensively studied on this so your first three weeks of life you're very dependent on your mother so the first week to two weeks you're totally dependent on the mother to to feed you to keep you warm um she needs to link your anogenital area in order for you to be induced to urinate and defecate so just like a cat and early stages in a dog's life right but then in the third week you're starting to explore eating solid foods on your own so you become gradually less dependent on on her for the food you also are growing fur so you're you're starting to be able to thermoregulate by yourself a little bit more effectively but essentially the first three weeks are really critically dependent on your interaction with the mother then after you're weaned so you're less you're no longer using the mother for food you can eat by yourself then then becomes the juvenile period and there where your most frequent interactions are with other juveniles of the same age and a lot of the time when you're interacting with each other you're doing a lot of play together right so the early particularly that first week extending into the second week how much the mother licks you picks you up physically touches you impacts the development of another area of the brain called the hippocampus and and it and also it changes your stress response levels right so that what happens to these rats if they're denied that maternal care and interaction and touch as they get older their stress response always remains at a higher level
1:02:09
and that stress response has a negative effect on hippocampus and hippocampus is very important for memory and learning right so you end up degenerating and very quickly lead to an early death death right so so maternal touch in that early phase is really critical for certain things and then in the juvenile period peer peer contact because most of the rough and tumble play involves actual physical contact with one another right provides an important avenue for further refining your stress response your pain thresholds and all those things that again will later affect how your stress reactivity react is engaged in various situations and so can affect your life so if you now have had poor physical contact with your mum early in life you've had poor physical contact with peers in that early juvenile period you now as an adult have more greater difficulty in regulating your stress response right because you're lacking the skills to interact right you're lacking the skills to interact and then the brain becomes it's very tasking and then it's like this neural it's just a neurotic crisis basically right so you have these negative effects on the brain but also if if your stress response tends to remain high for longer periods one of one of the things that happens when you have a stress response which of course you need to do is one of the things that shut down is your immune system right which is fine in the short term if you're trying to avoid being eaten by a lion you're not going to worry about getting sick yes two years from now you're trying to avoid getting eaten by a lion now so suppressing your immune system is not a problem the problem is if the stress is chronic and so your immune system is lower in a chronic way now you're more susceptible to ulcers to tumors to aterosclerosis and that's been shown in rats so rats that haven't had this physical contact with the mom or the kid or the peers will end up dying have shorter lives because they end up with all kinds of diseases that they can't control can they make up in time for the lack of of that playfulness in the early age yeah it seems that some things are hard to recuperate from so so some some of these negative effects you're not going to be able to compensate for later in life so so it is critical i mean it is yeah it really is what about like when we are talking rice and mats mice um i cannot help but ask about the the spinning wheel why why why is that fascination to where like even i've read a study i think it was in holland i'm sure you you know of it that they they
1:05:31
actually put wheels like in out in the outdoors and eventually they were going and spinning in them right what what is the i mean how much there is playfulness what what is going on so so that goes back to the very first question that i broke down your big question to that animals uh re engaging in behaviors self-reinforcing and what that reflects is that i i just like running or walking and so you provide an opportunity to do that and they will do it now in the wild yeah they'll do some but obviously in captivity where they're not doing anything else except being in a cage and getting fed so they'll do it even more so so that's the problem and and let me give you an example of how this relates to the natural history of the animals concerned one of the most difficult mammals or terrestrial mammals to to keep in captivity are polar bears and one of the reasons for this is they have part of their lifestyle is to walk enormous distances on a daily basis to find seals and other things that they're going to eat so walking is really part of what they need to do and so when you put them in a cage and you can never you can never replicate the wild in in a zoo cage for polar bear they end up very quickly developing those stereotypes where they walk back and forth back and forth right and and that's simply because innately they're built to want to walk and so that means they are positively reinforced by walking and unfortunately that's very interesting because like i i know i i haven't been to a zoo for quite some time but back in the day the zoos weren't even as cool as they are today so you would see mostly what you just described that pacing that and i don't think as you said it's kind of it's a a need and a displacement but they don't necessarily get the benefits of it it's it's a very neurotic thing to where the wheel most likely just like anything that a human would go to the gym and get their body working and then get all the endorphins and all the basically the the brain is like wow i the body feels good therefore we feel good right and and uh probably that would you know that kind of physical activity it's a feel good as it's that that is most likely the self-reinforcing reason yeah yeah if you uh um like like you know i i'm sure this is a little bit of a kind of side stepping question but because i'm sure you you have something to say about it way back in the day like when when we would put the two rats in a small box and we will put the electricity and they will get in a fight we'll stop they do or so on when that kind of induced aggression how how um
1:09:21
is that happens would it happen when they have space and when the electricity is actually contingent when they can make sense because it seems like from those experiments they they had not they were just like okay something really bad is happening and you're right in front of me and i don't know why and we go into a fight like and that's why they call it induced aggression right but i'm very interested in in in this kind of studies like if you can give me any insight it will be very cool so let me break down that experiment a little bit yes please so typically what what um rats will do when when they engage in a an aggressive encounter right what they will do is they will swing around to bite the lower flank or rump area right or if they're hyper aggressive what they'll do is they'll lunge directly at the nose so fight right at the front of the face right so they're the two major targets of attack now if you you can you can set up a situation where you can make one rat the attacker and the other rat the defender by having the animals so you have one rat typically male because they they tend to be the territory holders in its own cage and introduce a stranger okay now the the territory owner he will attack and try to bite the other one on the on the on the rump or on the front of the face the other one it doesn't want to get into a fight it's just trying to defend itself so it now engages strictly in defense and what it will try to do is adopt strategies to block the other rat from getting access to the rump and block it from biting it on the on the front of the face one of the things that the defending rat can do is when the other lunges at the rump is for it to lunge down and bite it on the side of the face so the side of the face is a defensive um target interesting the the nose and the rump are offensive targets right now in that context when you look at what happens in that in so-called induced aggression and you look at well yeah you you hit them with a jolt of electrical current and now they lunge at each other and bite where do they bite the side of the face not the rump not the nose the nose so they're so it's a misnomer to call it aggression it's induced defense the rats are thinking i'm being attacked so i've got to defend myself and so they're so they're counter-attacking in a defensive way targeting the side of the face wow mind-blowing yeah very very interesting and how much contingency makes a difference like like if if they understand why why it's coming or or it just comes out of nowhere is that a a factor for for that aggression yeah because
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it's um because it seems like typically it seems like it's such a setup that they have no really other option to do right yeah yeah yeah and and again this is the problem is that it's an innate response because the animal is experiencing sharp pain there's someone there to blame you're going to defend yourself and it's it's really hard to teach them not to do that right yes so so but where the contingency does come in is and and this has been done with looking at those resident intruder um kind of encounters where you're dealing with a relatively small cage so you know maybe like this where the animals haven't got much room to move or in in an enclosure which is the size of my room here and what the intruder will do as soon as the other one approaches the resident approaches is run away go yes that's your preferred choice and the only reason why you then turn around and try to defend yourself is if the resident corner gets you in a corner where you've got no choice but to physically fight what about any other other things that you're like any interesting studies that you have done any experiments that are worth sharing that people like dog trainers for example wouldn't know but they actually have some some place something for us to consider if something comes to mind that in your all all of the years of that you've done that most people would not really even think of uh or maybe they do as something okay that's an intuitively it's right but but there is actually we've done this we understand that not so much a specific experiment well i'll lead this into an experiment in a minute but um most critically i think um one of the mistakes human observers make is that we tend to interpret what other animals are doing from our own species biases biases that we have right so and you can see this in the way uh rough and tumble play has been suppressed in school yards amongst children because many teachers especially especially not not being sexist here but especially female teachers will view any kind of rough housing as aggressive right whereas it's not and i'll tell you why it's not sexist because experiments have been done where they've compared women teachers who grew up in household with brothers brothers versus households with sisters or no siblings and the ones that grew up with brothers are better at detecting when the rough and tumble play is really playing when it's aggression which means a personal experience really is important right so taking that so there there is a problem and we articulated this in
1:16:51
one study we did with dogs where even even human researchers studying dogs have interpreted rolling over on your back as a submissive gesture right which it can be in some situations but when you look at the details of what's going on in the particular study we did what we found was when the dog rolled over what it did is it used that as a vantage point to lunge up and bite the other one on the throat right so it's a diff it's a way of defending your night by rolling over and so actually we did this by looking at a particular dog who was a particular size and pairing it up with partners that were bigger and so i had an advantage of getting to the nape all partners that were smaller and so i had a disadvantage and what she and this dog as she what she did was she was more likely to use the rolling over onto your back against bigger dogs because they had this comparative advantage relative advantage of gaining access to an eight and then she used that position to counter-attack so whereas with smaller dogs she was more likely to be one biting the nape and she did very little on on the back rollover so again you look at this and you go so she's using this strategically in the context of how best to continue the play fight going on and in one case being on your back is more advantageous in another case it's not it's got nothing to do with dominant subordinates right yeah so so the one advice i would give to to your colleagues who who do dog training and thinking about dogs is try to look at it from the point of view of the dogs don't look at it from the point of view of what you think is happening because if i was if it was me this is how i would interpret it that's one of the probably the hardest lessons for anybody studying the behavior of someone else something different species is to see the problem and what they're doing through the eyes of the participants not through your own view excellent excellent point wow yeah and so now let me go to the experiment side and this has been done both in an experiment i know with dogs and some observational and and physiological work done with horses is that two animals can be interacting and so physically it looks like it's like it's play right but when you measure stress response hormones in the participants what you can discover is well yeah it looks it looks like play but one of the animals had no stress response because they were enjoying this immensely but the other one showed us a spike in the stress response indicating that this was not a pleasant experience with them so again if even just the physical appearance of the
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behavior is not sufficient to really often tell you what the experiences of the participants are so you need you need more subtle cues either more subtle behavioral cues or where you have available physiological responses to the situation brilliant since we are talking we we got into the gender a little bit so if we stay with that for a moment male and versus male or male versus female playing we dogs it's very rarely that if the cooperation starts to break and typically typically the female will kind of get very pissy and the male's gonna back off but if it's two boys or two girls they will escalate very quickly into a fight happens with rats and and other species and how do you why why why do you think if you think that there is that dynamic in the play between the different gender yeah so there's there's two two things that the audience should know we've actually done the experiments now of finding a way of manipulating the play experience of both males and female rats and what we've shown is that the play experience has the same effect on the medial prefrontal cortex in males and females so both males and females benefit from the play experience as juveniles in adulthood and in a lot of the cases of the dogs you're talking about you're dealing with adult dogs all right in adult in adulthood rats continue to use play as a means of social negotiation and navigation in particular for rats the sex that's it's used to assert or test dominance and since the the sex that is most motivated by gaining dominance is males is males you see exactly what you just said under some conditions two males will start playing and this can end up escalating to serious aggression adult females don't use play as a dominance testing behavior so their play when they do play tends to be gentler and so they rarely get into situations where any escalation is possible but again um adult males playing with adult females the females will very quickly show the more submissive pattern of play so it's a little bit not not quite as um it's a little bit different to what you're seeing in dogs yeah yeah yeah but but for example in hamsters where as adults they're solitary as you go towards the end of the adolescent period before they leave the maternal nest or territory the females are about twice as big as males so the reverse is the case it's the case that the males will quickly show a more subordinate behavior during rough and tumble play if it be if it escalates to a more forceful thing so so it depends on the species and the social system as to which sex has the advantage
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how how often like if if they're let alone and they have the choice how often play encounters happen with mice uh not mice with rats rats yeah um well somebody's actually measured that they looked at over a 24-hour cycle so just litters of rats yeah growing up looking at looking at them every hour for 24 hours and what they found is that under captive conditions like this about an hour of the day is spent playing wow wow so it's quite a substantial amount so so yeah i mean totally i can see why work spending time studying them if it's so exuberant yeah and and like if i go back to my phd which involves studying australian magpies this playful bird i was studying them in in in the field so i looked at their activity period from dawn when they woke up to dusk when they went to sleep they're inactive during the night so i just had to deal with the daylight hours and for the peak juvenile period the the average amount of the daytime they spent playing was 20 of their active time wow so it's quite quite substantial i have to google that one because i can i i don't think even maybe i know it but it just doesn't come visually uh uh what that bird is yeah it looks like our north american magpies okay it's just a slightly different bill long longer uh uh beak but it's black and white like our north american magpies or european ones with with the rats or with anybody have you done anything anything as far as how psychotropic medications would affect the brain and especially play uh we haven't done much with that but there's a lot of a lot of uh other laboratories have and yeah i mean it depends what you're given as to whether you play or not so for example things like amphetamine uh will tend to and cocaine will tend to suppress play so the animals don't engage in play but opioids will tend to elevate play so what about the like the typical like the prozoc type like the psychotropic like uh you know that are given for depression ptsds and all that stuff yeah yeah yeah so yeah that tends to increase the playfulness interesting yeah i guess one of the things when we talk about play and we talk about you know the how we how we mentioned the aversiveness the discomfort and and the cooperation and you basically really tap into this fight flight type of responses which now the the the kind of the the typical the not the typical but it used to be that true in brain kind of thing to wear the lizard brain and you know and and it's really like truly just different compartments in the brain and flight and now we understand that you know they they interact and and all those decisions
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are that they have a very different more broader functionality than that um um anything interesting in in terms of that because it's like uh uh quite often we are stuck in especially in dog training it's like well it's fight flight freeze and and they're you know like like looking at them almost as very independent uh actions or reactions and and that seems to be not the case anymore like there is it's kind of outdated right yeah i mean again it's like uh cooperation and competition it's you have to rebalance flight and fight depending on the context depending on who you are what the situation is what the threat is so right because it's mostly it's just that the uncertainty and then you know you you pick up strategies but but it's more complex than just that simplistic uh explanation that used to be before but i think i want to leave you with a a really bad because it's not quite dealing with fight and flight but it's it's it relates to using the animal's brain to try to get insight into what it knows so here's here's this beautiful experiment that's been done by a german team and it's just fantastic so rats will enjoy being tickled by people right and it becomes a form of play so and you get the rat and you pickle it and enjoy it runs away comes back it's tickled some more and so and so what they used was using this tickling as a reward to get them to engage to learn how to play a particular game and the game was hide and seek so you put a rat in a box and then when you release the box it goes into this big room and there are objects like boxes walls some made of plexiglass some made of things that you can't see through etc right and then they had two conditions one condition was the rat had to come out of the box and then go and hide and the the human experimenter would try to find them and when they found them they tickle them right the other condition was the human experimenter was hiding and the rat came out of the box and it to go through the room try to find where the experimenter is and if the rat found them then the experimenter would tickle them okay so there's several really valuable lessons out of this one is they used electrodes in the medial prefrontal cortex to record what's the medial prefrontal cortex what's the activity there during these games the other one was they recorded the vocalizations and then the third is they looked at well what's the behavior they engage in when they're hiding and when they're seeking okay so let's deal with seeking first when no sorry hiding when they're hiding they preferentially hide in locations that you can't see
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through so if it's a choice between a box that's made of plexiglass or a shoe box that's made out of cardboard they preferentially hide in the shoe box so they seem to understand that i can hide where you can't see me also when they're hiding they stop vocalizing so rats have this rich repertoire particularly of 50 kilohertz calls that they emit when they're in a happy state and they stop calling so not only do they hide where they can't be seen but they shut up so they're not giving away their location right good players and and when you look at the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex it shows a particular pattern of activation right when they're seeking they're moving around and they they tend to move and look behind places where they can't have a visual line of sight so they're looking for places where it makes it more likely that somebody's hiding they don't refrain from calling because it doesn't matter whether the the recipient knows whether you're calling or not and when you look at the medial prefrontal cortex it has a different pattern of activity right so the firing pattern is different so that means that if you think of the vocalizations as representing some emotional content right right so they can so you know that emotionally this is probably where they're thinking about strategies how they're thinking about the situation is different and their behavior shows that they can tell the difference that's like to me that is my god that's fantastic for sure that's mind-blowing especially thinking it's still it's it's an insane wow that's insane thank you so so i'd like to leave your audience with the idea that as our neuroscience techniques are becoming more sophisticated we can actually overcome that problem i said of you know just observing and you see behavior looks similar and you give it a particular value you can now get other insights from the brain about what the animal is thinking about what it's doing or feeling about what it's doing and so actually get the the animal's point of view of the behavior insane this is just yeah that's that's that's insane and i wish i was back as a graduate student again so i could start my career again because this is just yes but but but like like to to finish here what what is what is of interest to you right now what are you focusing on any what like anything that you are exploring and like where are you right now because you've done so much that what is the next frontier where are we going yeah so i'm getting at an age where i need to start
1:34:19
looking at wrapping things up because i'm not going to be around for another 50 years so um there are two major questions i'm trying to pursue over the next five years one one is with the rats and the question is okay so experimentally we've shown that if you deny the rats the opportunity to engage in the right kind of play you have this uh reduced capacity social skills and altered brain development right but when you when what made me think about this was a few years ago when you look at the error bars they're very big right both in the control animals and in experimental animals so you go well gee so that means different individuals are responding even though as a group they're showing this difference individuals are showing some market effect and some are showing a minimal effect so now what we're doing is using um rearing groups of animals together and then looking and tracking on a daily basis the amount of play they're doing the type of and we're filming it so we're looking at the experiences gained from the play you're doing and then we're looking at the social skills in adulthood and then the development of the medial prefrontal cortex and early days but what it looks like is not everybody benefits equally from the play so some gain a lot of benefit and some little or nothing so it means that that has implications for promoting play as the the panacea for all your new universal problems it's not it it's good for a majority of people but it doesn't necessarily benefit some minority which then from a a practical point of view then raises the issue of which is one of the things that probably my graduate students will pursue over a career is identifying well what makes the animals that don't benefit from play what identifies them as that kind of animal is that genetics is that the maternal experiences they had with with mothers early development yeah that biases their ability to gain the benefits from the play because if you know that then you can i translate that to humans try to identify okay which kids in this schoolyard are not benefiting from play and so what other strategies could be used to help them build up those skill sets right other than through play so that's oh that will be super valuable and very interesting thing yeah how what is the lifespan of a raft like what what are we talking about about two years okay which is actually good for for experiment uh yeah right yeah yeah so that's why we've got we've gone well into like by 100 days the animals quite quite old and and we've taken rats up to
1:37:37
about 140 days and so we could establish you know what things remain stable over the age post juvenile and what is changed so yeah that's that's it's a manageable age span yes yes very cool dr palace thank you this this was just this amazing conversation and like thank you i mean we went all over the place and it was just really really i cannot wait to myself go back and listen to it like it was just very much so very much appreciate you joining my pleasure thank you thank you so much have this conversation take care thank you you