Playing Pretend

The ability to have real emotional responses to completely imaginary and fictitious stories is one of the paradoxes of fiction. Similarly there is a paradox of horror, of how we can be scared by this truly fictitious event. Noel Caroll put forth the theory that ‘just the thought’ alone was a significant enough to elicit a physical/emotional response. Caroll builds from a previous work called the Pretend theory, a theory that makes the attempt to say we are playing a game of make believe with ourselves, and have pretend emotions. Caroll’s theory is a reduction of the pretend theory, saying playing pretend is a little too much, but rather our thoughts are sufficient. Caroll doesn’t give enough credit to his predecessor’s work. It is the ability to play pretend that allows for a mind to just use thoughts to such a strong degree that they can bring us to an emotional response.
People are not born with a mind’s eye, or an inner voice, but rather develop these traits through playing pretend. Neural connections and networks in the brain are what allow us to perform all the functions we do in life. With the absence of these networks the human mind doesn’t know how to perform the task. Take walking for instance, the brain is relatively a blank slate, and we developed motor movement skills by repeatedly trying. Humans don’t just get up and walk around, but we learn to balance, try to stand, try to balance while standing, try to stumble, etc. With each attempt and failure the brain innately strengthens certain pathways that lead the desire outcome, and weakens others until an acceptable network is established and we can walk. Similarly with our minds eyes and inner voice we develop these things gradually, we build schemas, learn the difference between me, and other, and then start to develop understanding of the world around us by playing pretend. We willingly put ourselves into a different perspective and let the neural networks strengthen appropriately. By pretending to be the doctor helping fluffy the bear we can then begin to imagine a completely fictitious world (like fiction, or horror) and what it would be like to deal with the problems and events that a real doctor would be going through. Simultaneously this enables the ability for people to be empathic. Empathic people can look through the eyes of another and experience (at least a minor degree of comparability) what the other person experience, like the doctor and fluffy the bear. It is important to realize the development past playing pretend, and as we get older we no longer need to act out the situations but we can conjure up a hypothetical situation with a strong degree of realism and we can begin to entertain ‘what ifs’ these hypothetical situation mature with our library of life experience and final round off into the ability to conjure up a strong realistic world in our thoughts and explore them thoroughly.
The thought of an event or depiction can bring out real responsive emotions, however it is important to understand the development and how the little pieces of a own development connect together to allow us to be able to participate in those feelings. By doing so we can grow in a richer understanding of what the feelings really are, they aren’t pretend, but they are emotions stimulate (and in some sense an extension of) an imaginary event. It is the development of a minds eye and an empathetic capability (from playing pretend) that allows for us to utilize thoughts to make qausi-real fictitious events.