Com101 – Needs Maslow’s Model Missed

I covered Maslow’s Model in my previous article, Com101 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  One category Maslow seems to have left out that Rosenberg included in the book Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is: play.  (See Com101 – Recommended Resources for details on the book.)  NVC’s category for play includes fun and laughter.  I agree with NVC, play is a basic human need.  However, these needs don’t seem to slip into any of Maslow’s existing categories.   So where do we put them?

The idea of play doesn’t seem to enter our mind until after our needs for safety are met, so playfulness must be somewhere after that.  The belonging & love category focuses on our connection and interactions with others.  Yes, we often play with others, but we can also entertain ourselves.  We dance to music alone when we’re cooking and accidently pretend to be in random scenarios with famous people.  The need for play seems to exist after safety and before belonging & love.  So, when we are safe, we tend to play, then we can elevate that play with all the categories after this new category.

Great, a new category between safety and belonging & love.  Do we call it “play”?  What is “play”?  More importantly, what else is missing from Maslow’s lists?

Focusing on just play for a second, the fun and laughter that come from play often come from engagement with something. This could be an active engagement or a passive engagement.  Active engagement would be things like puzzles, games, and projects, as well as engagement with pure imagination, like daydreaming.  Active engagement can often include a challenge as we test ourselves and our limits.  It can be light challenges in safe scenarios or more extreme challenges in risky scenarios that push passed our limits to create new limits in the process.  Play can be light and easy like a stroll through the park or a crossword puzzle.  Play can also be intense like skydiving out of a plane or a swift ride down a mountain on a snowboard.  Challenging ourselves and testing our limits seems like a major part of play.  Maslow’s list doesn’t talk about discovering and challenging our limits in this fashion. 

How about passive engagement?  TV, theatre, and music might be considered a form of passive play.  “Rest” is a need on Maslow’s list, but what about the opposite; entertainment.  We can definitely find fun and laughter in TV and music, but it doesn’t stop there.  We can find a wide array of emotions in various forms of entertainment.  Sad songs and movies wouldn’t sell if people didn’t crave them. 

Humans seem to seek out passive and active experiences of all types.  Whether we are relaxing with a story or actively being the main character of our own story.  We crave things that spark emotion, thought, and imagination.  We seem to seek out new information, ideas, understanding, lessons, and challenges.  We seek new experiences, and we revisit familiar experiences. 

The same way people talk about developing their palate for the taste of food or wine, we humans seem to crave the development of every aspect of our very being.  We crave the expansion of our palate for music and movies the same way we crave expanding our mind with new ideas and fictional scenarios.  An interesting cycle emerges.  We feel a need to hear and connect with new music, but then the music eventually becomes “played out.”  So, we begin to pursue new music.  Then we will long to hear that old song again.  We do that with ideas, stories, visual art, food, and pretty much everything as we seek out both novelty and the familiar.  We want to experience things for ourselves, and we crave a wide variety of experiences.

If there are no experiences to be had, we invent them.  As kids, we jump over cracks in the sidewalk and make up stories for our favorite toys.  As adults we invent all sorts of challenges and entertainment.  We might decide to “shake things up” at dinner with a new recipe or by inventing our own.  Our need to play and seek entertainment is so strong that we will invent new things to satisfy this need, consequences and all.

Not only is fun missing from Maslow’s model, but there seems to be a whole category of needs that involve experiencing our body, all our senses, and the world around us.  These new experiences turn into cravings to find, challenge, and expand our limits with all our senses and abilities.  We have a need to experience life using every means we have.  Not only through site, sound, touch, smell, and taste, but also our mind, our imagination, our voice, and our emotions.  We naturally crave to find and play with our limits.

The word for experiencing all of our abilities is “cognition”.  Here is how Wikipedia.org summarizes cognition[1].

Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”[2]. It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

We have a cognitive need for experiencing input, and stimulating all our senses and abilities.  We have a need to experience life, find the limits of our abilities, then to experiment and challenge those limits.  We need to find novelty in every dimension of our human experience.  We need to discover and expand our pallet of what it’s like to be a human and an individual.

I call this new category, cognitive needs.  For clarity, please know that I use the word “cognitive” as an adjective relating to the definition of “cognition” that I sighted above.  I make this distinction because the current common use of the word “cognitive” seems to highlight mental abilities and lose a bit of the “through […] experience, and the senses,” part in of cognition’s definition.

Our cognitive needs include:  experiencing for the experience’s sake; to discover, stimulate, and experience everything our body is capable of doing or feeling; to stimulate our mind and senses, to stimulate and feel emotions, to explore; to discover; to experience and expand the limits of ourselves, our situation, our inner world, and the world around us; novelty; spontaneity; experimentation; to fail; to learn; to invent; to fantasize; to realize fantasies; to grow; to understand; progress; to move; to dance; to sing; and to play.

In the next article, we will combine all these finding with Maslow’s model and NVC’s lists of needs as well as adding in a few items that are needed for healthy communication. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition – retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

[2] “Cognition”. Lexico. Oxford University Press and Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2020.