Nate Rott (2:27)

But is the ability to imagine as unique to us as we think? Or can our closest living relatives do it too? Today on the show, how scientists used a series of pretend tea parties to help answer that question and what their findings potentially say about the evolutionary roots of imagination. You're listening to Shortwave, the Science podcast from NPR.

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Foreign. This message comes from WBUR Podcasts. No other organ brings together science and spirituality quite like the human brain. Our thinking is very different from what we have imagined. Studies about the brain are at heart studies about ourselves. So why, even after centuries of research, has the brain still remained such a stubborn and elusive mystery? Listen to OnPoint for the special series Brain Waves wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Mint Mobile. This holiday season, stop overpaying for wireless and Switch to Mint Shop. 50% off unlimited plans@mintmobile.com Switch limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 months. Taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only above 35 GB. Network may slow when busy capable dev availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com this message comes from NPR.

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Nate Rott (4:24)

Okay, so we have an ape with a pretty good grasp of English. He can answer questions and ask for objects by pointing much in the way my 14 month old points at the book Goodnight Gorilla every night, even though we've read it a thousand times and I am so over it? I asked Chris Krupena, the cognitive scientist we heard from earlier, how the heck do you turn pointing and language comprehension into an experiment that tests for something as intangible as imagination that allows us.

Chris Krupena (4:50)

To in many ways like ask him what he thinks or knows in more or less the same way that you might ask a human child.

Nate Rott (4:58)

And it turns out, Chris says scientists have been asking human children questions to better understand the imagination for a really long time.

Chris Krupena (5:06)

Kids will have tea parties with their dolls. They might have an imaginary friend. They might play house with their friends. So they're showing these roots of imagination within the first years of life. And the way that we study that capacity in them is to engage them in the kinds of pretend scenarios that are familiar to them.

Nate Rott (5:26)

Chris and his co author Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, found a series of studies from the 1980s that did just that by having a group of kids participate in pretend tea parties.

Chris Krupena (5:40)

Where an experimenter will set up a tea set and then they'll sort of pretend to pour, you know, fake juice into various locations or pour it out and they'll ask the kid, where's the imaginary juice? And kids will often in those tasks point to indicate their comprehension and to indicate where they think this imaginary object remains. And so with Kanzi, we were able to do more or less the exact.

Nate Rott (6:03)

Same thing by setting up a series of very sterile looking tea parties and recording videos of the sessions.

Chris Krupena (6:10)

Let's make it.

Nate Rott (6:10)

Let's find the juice.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (6:11)

Okay.

Nate Rott (6:13)

Now before we start pouring any imaginary juice, let's hold onto our teacups for a second. I think it's worth taking a minute to explain the significance of being able to imagine things that aren't real. In other words, to play pretend. It's a super helpful cognitive ability. Take a kid playing house.

Kristen Andrews (6:30)

We think of play sometimes as, you know, not very functional. Oh, they're just playing like, okay, thank goodness I don't have to take care of my kids because they're just playing over there. But we know from child development that play is really important practice for doing things in the adult world.

Nate Rott (6:45)

Kristen Andrews is a philosophy professor at the City University of New York and at York University in Toronto. She focuses on animal minds too.

Kristen Andrews (6:54)

I actually hold a chair called the Research Chair in Animal Minds.

Nate Rott (6:58)

As a philosopher with a wicked cool title, Kristen spends a lot of time thinking about the abilities of the mind. And she says imagination is something that we grown ups use all the time too.

Kristen Andrews (7:10)

So for example, it is really useful to be able to imagine what would happen next when you make a decision. So, you know, I might say, like, I'm very annoyed at this person over here and maybe I want to go punch them in the face. And instead of just punching them in the face and seeing what happens, I may take a second imagine punching them in the face, imagine what happens next, realize that's not very good and not punch the person, right? So I make my decisions based on rolling out scenarios in my head.

Nate Rott (7:41)

Prudent, right? It's the same thing we do when we plan a summer vacation, when we decide what kind of gift to buy a loved one when we stop and put ourselves in another person's shoes.

Kristen Andrews (7:52)

So it's really important socially, but it's also really important scientifically. When we do science, we form hypotheses about what might happen.

Nate Rott (8:03)

That's like the exact definition of imagination, right? You're imagining what might happen.

Kristen Andrews (8:07)

That's right. What scientists do before they run the experiments is they run them in their imagination. And if they don't work in their imagination, you save all the time of running it in the real world, making them.

Nate Rott (8:18)

And really all of us, because we all do this more efficient with our time. Yeah, that's right. Daydreaming can save you time. But don't zone out yet. Since we're already back on the topic of scientists and experiments, let's rejoin that imaginary tea party. Hey, let's find the juice.

Announcer/Promo Voice (8:35)

Okay.

Nate Rott (8:36)

In the first video of Chris's experiment, Kanzi is sitting in an enclosure. The researcher, or partner, as Chris calls him, sits just on the other side with a wooden table in between.

Chris Krupena (8:46)

And on the table, the partner would put two empty transparent cups.

Nate Rott (8:55)

That they then pretend to fill with juice from an empty transparent pitcher. Kanzi's watching the whole thing. So we have two transparent cups full of imaginary juice, and then the partner.

Chris Krupena (9:08)

Would take one of the cups and, you know, dump it back out into the pitcher. And at that point, there's only one bit of imaginary juice left in the remaining cup. And the partner pushed the table forward and asked Kanzi, where's the juice?

Nate Rott (9:24)

And about 70% of the time, Chris says Kanzi picked the right one.

Chris Krupena (9:29)

Our findings suggest that Kanzi was able to, in his mind, sort of entertain two versions of reality. On the one hand, he sees two empty cups in front of him. He knows that they're empty, but he's.

Nate Rott (9:41)

Also able to imagine, to pretend that one of them is not.

Chris Krupena (9:45)

This ability to sort of go beyond the present, go beyond reality in your mind, is a sort of remarkable cognitive feat. And it tells us, for one, that very likely, that capacity, those roots of our imagination were present millions of years ago in the common ancestors that we shared with bonobos. And I think it also tells us that there's just much more interesting mental life out there in the world than we previously thought.

Nate Rott (10:13)

Can I ask, obviously, this was a study of one animal, right? An individual. And scientists typically want a broader sample size, many examples, to be able to draw kind of a broad conclusion. Does the scale of this study limit its findings in any way, do you think?

Chris Krupena (10:30)

Yeah. So it is true that this study only had one individual. And what we can say from it depends a little bit on what your questions are. One question you might have is, is this form of imagination unique to humans? And I think for that question, all you need is one clear demonstration to say, no, it's not unique to humans.

Nate Rott (10:52)

To Chris, this new study is that one clear demonstration.

Chris Krupena (10:56)

Now, the broader question might be, is it the case that all other apes share this capacity too, or at least all other members of his species, bonobos. And here I think that is an empirical question where we do need more research.

Nate Rott (11:10)

But he notes there's reason to suspect that they can't. For decades, researchers and people have worked with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play.

Chris Krupena (11:21)

Young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying around sticks or logs in ways that look like they're treating them like a doll or a baby.

Nate Rott (11:29)

But he notes, there's reason to suspect that they can't. For decades, researchers and people who work with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play.

Chris Krupena (11:41)

So there's reason to think that this could be abundant. But we needed these kind of experiments to really show for sure that it's within the capacity of these animals, which.

Nate Rott (11:50)

Is why he very much intends to keep studying this with other apes in the future. Well, Chris, thanks so much for doing this research, man. It's super interesting.

Chris Krupena (11:59)

Thanks for having me. It's super fun to talk to you about it.

Nate Rott (12:05)

If you like this episode, follow us on the NPR app or wherever else you may be listening from. It helps us out and means that you won't miss out on any new episode episodes. Also, I did a whole digital story complete with videos of Kanzi. We'll link to it and Chris's study in our show notes. So go check them out. Plus some other interesting episodes on bonobos and the evolution of niceness and what insights Monkees have for the evolution of human speech. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Arun Nair and edited by our showrunner, Republic Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. I'm Nate Rott. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from npr.

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