Shownotes Transcript
Major funding for The Pulse is provided by a leadership gift from the Sutherland family. The Sutherlands support WHYY and its commitment to the production of programs that improve our quality of life. This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.
James Kimmel grew up on a small farm in central Pennsylvania in the 80s. But unlike everybody around him, his parents were not farmers. His dad worked in an office, and James didn't fit in with the farm kids at his school. He was an outsider, and the other kids bullied him relentlessly. On the bus, in the locker room, between classes. But it had stayed at school.
Then one night, he and his family were asleep. And we awoke to a gunshot. They jumped up and looked out the window to see what was going on. And I could see there was a pickup truck on the road stopped in front of our house, and it tore off in the dark down the road. James recognized this pickup truck. It belonged to one of the teenage boys who had been bullying him at school.
James and his family looked around the house. They didn't notice anything amiss. No broken windows, no bullet holes. So they went back to sleep. The next morning, one of my jobs as a kid was to go out to the barn and feed and water all of the animals, the cows, the pigs.
and this beautiful hunting dog that we had, a little beagle named Paula. And when I went out to her pen, I found her laying dead in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in her head. At the instant moment that I saw her, it was just like terrible sorrow and grief for why this dog would have worn the brunt of
whatever I was enduring, and then just blind rage in my mind about how I could rectify this and get back at them. His family filed a report with the state police about the dog, but nothing came of it. James was seething, but it seemed like there was nothing he could do.
A few weeks later, he was home alone when he heard a vehicle stop in front of their house again. It was the same pickup truck. He saw a flash and... There's an explosion and they blew up our mailbox and shot it into the neighboring cornfield. And with that, at that moment, that kind of just blew up what self-control left I had in my brain at that time.
I thought this is my chance and my opportunity to balance the scales. James had had enough. His anger boiled over. He grabbed the loaded revolver his father kept in his nightstand. Ran out of my house, jumped in my mother's car, and I tore off after these guys as fast as I could. So, you know, driving down this country road, screaming in a blind rage, trying to catch them as fast as I can.
Eventually, James caught up to them on another farm. He had them cornered against a barn. They got out of their truck, three or four boys squinting into his headlights, trying to figure out who had chased after them. And I grabbed the gun and reach over to open the door, and I open it, and I kind of put my left foot out onto the ground, and then I just kind of paused for just a second. And in that moment, I had this kind of
moment of clarity in which I felt like I could almost see myself in the future and I saw my future self as being either dead or known forever as a murderer. I knew I didn't want that for myself and I didn't want to end my future even though I really wanted to do something very bad to these guys who had been doing this to me. I pulled my leg back in the car, I put the gun back down and I left.
James drove home, trying to calm himself down. He was relieved and grateful that he had left without shooting them. But I also knew that I still very much wanted revenge against them. I mean, this wasn't by any means over for me. It was just, I won't kill them today, is about as far as I could get. ♪
When somebody has harmed you, taking revenge can feel justified and righteous. But the desire to balance the scales can become all-consuming.
James Kimmel spent much of his life seeking revenge, from his teenage days in rural Pennsylvania to a successful law career, until he realized how much this emotion was hurting him and his loved ones. He set out to understand the desire for revenge and to find alternative ways to seek justice.
On this episode, we'll talk to James about his path and his new book, The Science of Revenge, understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it.
After the mailbox incident and subsequent car chase, James still wanted revenge. He felt victimized and powerless. How could he inflict punishment without going to jail for assault or murder? What I came up with was the idea of how could I get legalized punishment? How could I do that and be part of it? And it was around that time that I started to learn about
what lawyers do and I can say because I did go to law school ultimately, that what we do as a profession is we are the profession that's licensed in this country to get legalized revenge. We can go to a court and get a judge to issue an order that will tell a guy who does have a gun named the sheriff to go and potentially use it if necessary to arrest someone or inflict some type of punishment.
And you can get paid a ton of money for it. And I thought this sounds like a career for me. I liked the academic aspect. I liked the revenge aspect. I liked being able to do it. So it was for me the concept of I could kind of get my cake and eat it too, right? I could do this all legally. I can't even believe it. And I can have a good career doing it. So that's what I did. I went and became a lawyer. When you were a lawyer...
Describe what fueled you and how you felt when you were practicing law because you were successful at it. Yeah, I was. I was kind of pretty good at it and I liked that. There are very many types of lawyers, right? There are transactional lawyers that have nothing to do with revenge getting. They're helping deals and people come together. For me, I wanted to become a litigator and
You're highly prized for being somebody who has a streak of vengeance in you, right? I mean that you would just doggedly chase and chase and chase or I would say prosecute, prosecute, prosecute and win the case and get this whoever you're prosecuting put behind bars for the maximum amount of time you could possibly get. It's all about punishing, right? It's all about societal revenge and it's also revenge for the victims.
And in any case that I took, it would always start with interviewing a victim. And they're looking to you for the same thing. They want revenge. They want punishment for the person who wronged them, who assaulted them. His law career took off. It seemed like James had found a perfect and very lucrative outlet for his desire for revenge. And my goal was to maximize the revenge-seeking that I could inflict.
either as a prosecutor or as I went on to become a civil litigator. And to deliver for my clients or gratify their intense need and desire for revenge. Somebody hurt me. Please, I will give you money or I will share a percentage of whatever you win with you if you will go and hurt them for me back, right? That's the transaction. And as I was doing those deals,
This intense feeling, which I began to believe was a high because there's an amazing feeling when you win any part of a piece of litigation because it's just this one-on-one, mano-a-mano conflict. And you're trying to score small victories that will add up ultimately to winning the case either by a settlement or a judgment.
And each one of those victories is intensely satisfying. And each loss along the way is intensely dispiriting and troubling, and it makes you work harder to get the next win. And I began to wonder whether this was some kind of a potentially an addictive process
When I started to see it infecting almost every aspect of my life, I was starting to do that same kind of litigation process with my wife and kids, with my in-laws, with my own family members, with friends, neighbors. Everything became a conflict for me that I could win or lose in an opportunity to kind of punish people and bend them to my will. Give me an example. Like, what did that look like?
It could look like anything from, you know, I can think of one time where I was on a one lane bridge with someone who was coming at me and I was coming at them and we sort of had to meet in the middle. One of us had to give up, right, and back out. And I wasn't going to allow that to be me. And I was going to threaten my way or, you know, kind of bully. I really became the bully.
or the bully style that I had been the victim of in my high school years. I think I had decided I'll stake my entire life on this stupid winning of this silly conflict. I mean, it was a
crazy thing, but it seemed important to me at the time. And the gratification I got from winning, you know, and going first over the bridge was just enormous. It was just this burst of, yes, you know, I got this. I won this today. This is important. And it was to me at the time. It is not important, but it seemed so vastly important and it seemed to feel so good.
And back then, what would people say to you? Like, what would your kids say to you that kind of showed you, oh, man, I'm taking this way over the top? You know, where people like, dad, dad, calm down, calm down. Right. You know, that kind of thing? I do. It was really probably one of the first people and the most persistent is probably my mother-in-law, who would...
And she'll even do it today when I'm not doing it because I think I've created such an impression on her. But she'd be like, why are you asking questions in this way? And the way was I would just cross-examine everyone. It was like they were a witness on the stand and I would kind of bully them down on anything like, did you eat that cookie?
You know, and I don't get the straight response. So I'll start and I'll go back and I'll go, so you ate the cookie here and here and here, didn't you? You know, it's switched from an open-ended question to a directed cross-examining question to my child. But she would witness this or I would maybe even do it with her. And
Then she might talk to my wife and then my wife might go, what are you doing? What is wrong with you? I would explain in a very justified way, I'm just being a lawyer. It was hard for me to understand that maybe I shouldn't be a lawyer with my family members. It's for a different place. But I also saw this same behavior among my clients and I saw it among opposing counsel and I saw it among
their clients many times. And not so much maybe the cross-examining, but the instant attempt to retaliate in the hope of making yourself feel better. Because that's really what I was after all along was, how can I make myself feel better? I feel victimized here, here, and here, right? And we
Our lives are filled with victimization. From the time we wake up, you think about it, you sort of wake up in the before dawn moments and you have your full treasure of happiness for your day. And it's as if, you know, it's in your wallet or your pocketbook, right, or your purse.
And then the day starts and people start coming and trying to take it, take pieces of your happiness. And it makes sense if happiness is a commodity of finite supply for you to chase after the happiness and try and get it. But when you do, you find that the person at the other end doesn't really have your happiness at all. But what you could do is take away theirs. And that's the transaction with revenge. It's like...
But if I take away your happiness, I'll make myself feel better. And I do. And we all do. When you were at the height of your legal career, your well-paid revenge seeking, did you tie it back to your childhood at all? Did you make that connection?
I did start to. So when I say this started to infect my family life and that made me, I was filled with a lot of anxiety as a result of that, rightfully so. And I began to question what I was doing and why. And it also, so it not only interfered with my relationships with family and friends, but it was also inconsistent with my spiritual beliefs that I had.
and that I still have, about the idea of forgiveness being something that's important. James was miserable, and he thought his law career was the cause of his suffering. He went on to a smaller firm, then he started to work part-time, but it wasn't enough. And
This created though ultimately a personal crisis, psychological crisis. I'm sure if I had gone to a psychologist at that point, they would have diagnosed me as having depression because I was very depressed at the time about it. And ultimately, one night thinking about all of this in the room, I really contemplated killing myself kind of in an act of self-loathing. In other words, getting revenge against myself
for all that I had done and all that I had been from the time of this killing of my dog when I was 16 or 17. But I had also kind of the same kind of moment of clarity at that point of I also don't want to be known as a guy who killed himself any more than I wanted to become a murderer, right?
I put that aside, but I started to really delve into the justice teachings, forgiveness and revenge teachings of the world's religions as a way of trying to get myself out of this hole. But I was also very convinced around that point that this – I felt like I was caught up in an addiction. I didn't have personal history with substance addiction, but I knew people who did, and it looked like that.
How did your revenge-seeking behavior look like an addiction? What were some of the similarities that you saw that made you make that connection? Yeah, so there were quite a few. One is just how fantastic I felt every time I was able to get some form of revenge. So it really felt like a high, but it felt short-lived. So it might last minutes, at the most an hour,
Probably less most of the time. But during that time, during the high, I was on top of the world. I really felt like I had superpowers. You know, it was just an incredibly exhilarating and intoxicating kind of feeling. You sort of felt intoxicated.
And then it would go away. Another part of it that felt addictive to me was the habitualness in it, the way it had taken over my life. And I knew I was doing something that was harming myself and other people I cared about. But when I really tried to put myself to stopping it, I couldn't. So I had this inability to really quit. Something that I knew was wrecking my life, kind of methodically destroying everything
who I was and everything that I wanted to become and sort of sticking me in this very dead zone. And so there was that. I couldn't quit.
I felt great. It lasted for a short period of time. It felt habitual. And I knew that it was harmful. And that's really kind of the – those are the ways we think about addiction. Addiction is the inability to resist a desire despite knowing the consequences of that desire, whether it's a desire to ingest a substance or inject one or –
a behavioral addiction like gambling. I didn't really know much more about it than that, but it felt that way. James looked at the DSM-5, the handbook that mental health professionals use to diagnose disorders, and he checked out the criteria for addiction. I was scoring in the severe category if revenge is actually an addiction. And I thought, I mean,
That's lawyer, researcher, and author James Kimmel. His new book is called The Science of Revenge, Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.
When we come back, we'll hear how James changed his life and career when he started to study the feeling that had consumed him. The benefit you do get that motivates you must be satisfaction. It must be a good feeling. It must be a high, in effect. Later on, we'll hear about crows that carry a serious grudge. One by one, these crows started perching on the buildings around us.
and cawing, and then one by one swooping down at me. That's still to come on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about revenge with James Kimmel. His new book is The Science of Revenge, Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.
After being bullied as a teenager and then spending years bullying others as a successful litigator, James started to think that he was addicted to getting revenge and that he needed to stop seeking it. In the early 2000s, he pivoted away from his law career and started to dig into research around revenge addiction. He found some neuroscience studies on the topic.
Then he started to collaborate with researchers to conduct studies on revenge and what fuels it. James is now a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. What happens in the brain when we are outraged, we're feeling all this anger and we want revenge? What is going on there?
There were a few neuroscientists beginning in around 2004, 2005, who started to do brain scans with people to identify what is happening inside the brain when you have a grievance and you're given an opportunity to seek revenge. The question those scientists, they were from the University of Zurich, were looking at, though, was from an evolutionary perspective, why do humans want revenge at all?
And is it an adaptive trait? And their hypothesis was it is adaptive and it's adaptive because maybe around the ice age when humans started to live in social groups, we needed a way to cause people to comply with social norms and to stop taking things including mates or food or other things from other people. And so to live in a society, you needed to have some form of a punitive system to deter, right? That's the theory.
So they put people in a scanner, and this was the first time this has ever been done. It's a fascinating study. And what their hypothesis was is it always comes, though, with a cost. Revenge-seeking always has a cost. And so what they were looking at was...
the idea of altruistic punishment, which is punishing somebody at a cost to you and no material benefit whatsoever. And their theory was the benefit you do get that motivates you must be satisfaction. It must be a good feeling. It must be a high in effect.
So they put people in a scanner and their hypothesis was that this would activate the dorsal striatum, which is part of the brain's reward circuitry for addiction. Researchers tested this out on participants in a brain scanner and asked them to play a game. It was an economic game in which if you were betrayed in the economic game and you wanted to punish the person who betrayed you, you could do that, but you would lose all of your money and you would lose the game.
And they were interested to see whether anybody would go for this. And a whole pile of participants did. They were willing to bankrupt themselves and lose the game just to get revenge. So they were seeking what those scientists refer to as altruistic punishment. And in fact, the dorsal striatum, that area of the brain, which is known in part for craving and in part for habit formation in addiction,
activated very strongly. And so that was the first piece of scientific evidence that I had been quite independently but instinctively thinking that this is an addiction. There's now some evidence that this was an addiction. Other scientists since then over the course of the last 15 years have studied this in greater detail and found that not only is that area of the brain activated, but the nucleus accumbens, which is kind of associated with
true craving, that area of the brain activates and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for self-control, deactivates, which is what happens in addiction. So you're getting this intense pleasure at the same time that you're losing control. And that begins to lead to the conclusion that there is an addictive process, as I instinctively felt there was.
James was also working on an alternative to revenge, something that would foster forgiveness. He developed an experiment where people conduct a trial of somebody who wronged them in their mind. And you play all the roles, though. You play the prosecutor. You play the defendant. You play the judge and jury, deciding guilt and handing down a verdict. You play the warden administering the punishment. But added to that is a final step where you also—
become the judge of yourself and decide whether the revenge you were able to just get and release is Going to bring you happiness or just put you through another grueling revenge seeking experience and didn't free you from the past at all and maybe you want to consider and pretend for a moment to imagine what forgiveness would feel like and would forgiveness
give you something even of greater benefit and much more long-lasting than the little burst of dopamine that you get when you seek revenge. James tested the impact of this courtroom of the mind in a study. First, he had to induce rage in participants, so he gave them a pretty awful scenario, drawing on his own experience with his dog.
And the study participant imagines owning a dog and asking a neighbor to take care of the dog for you because you have to go out of town. And when you come back, the dog is missing and the neighbor that you left it with says that the dog ran away. But you ultimately discover that that wasn't true, that this guy, the neighbor, was involved in a dog fighting ring and used your dog as a bait dog
to train a really vicious dog on how to kill and win in the dog fighting ring. And that's what in fact occurred. Your dog was killed in this process and your neighbor threw it away and lied to you about it. So it's an intensely provoking experience, just really intense rage and pain and revenge seeking. So what did you learn in that study?
Yeah, we had really good results in that study. So when we administered this scenario, so we measured the revenge-seeking using a validated scale or revenge desires, I should say, at the beginning before the scenario and then after. And between those two points, revenge desires exploded and feelings of benevolence plummeted.
Then at that point, the study participants were allowed to go through the courtroom of the mind intervention and we measured again. And we measured at that point, revenge desires plummeted and actually true benevolence increased. It kind of stunned all of the, you know, I'll call the true scientists at Yale because I'm, you know, I'm a half scientist at best because my training is as a lawyer. But it really stunned them the results, that the results would be that powerful and that quick.
And so that was very encouraging. And we've studied it more and more over time. Why is our drive toward revenge so strong if indeed it is not good for us? So there is an evolutionary benefit of seeking revenge, right? It has helped us live in groups. We are obviously hardwired on some level to enjoy it, to want it. So why not? Why should we not do it?
Well, right. So we shouldn't not do it when it doesn't have a negative consequence. That's kind of like the same question for any form of addictions, any substance, alcohol, gambling, gaming, whatever it is, is when does it move from either adaptive or benign to pathological and dangerous?
And that movement happens and it begins to, in other words, be considered an addiction and not just a normal adaptive behavior when you can't stop doing it despite the negative consequences. Revenge – and this is the thing. So as these scientists were doing these studies and showing that there was all this pleasure –
there was a slight debate that would form, well, is this adaptive or not? But independent of those scientists were public health officials and law enforcement agencies over the last 10 years that have now all kind of concluded independently but all at once and quite accurately that revenge is the primary motivation for almost all forms of human violence. So, you know, for all of written history,
Humans have not known why we engage in any act of violence or how to prevent and treat it. We just think the only way to stop it might be through more punishment, right? The criminal justice system. But the insight that revenge is the motivation. So, you know, when you see a mass shooting or any shooting and people go, what was the motive?
I can answer that question almost all the time and it's only one. There's one motive and it's revenge. There was some form of revenge. What people are really interested in is, well, what was the grievance that stimulated this desire for revenge?
And what the neuroscience shows is that grievances, and I want to define that, that is a real or imagined perception of having been mistreated or victimized or treated unjustly or disrespected or insulted or shamed or humiliated, all those things. When you have that grievance, what the neuroscience research is showing is that that activates the brain's pain network, which is the anterior insula. And when that area activates,
for a grievance, it activates that pleasure and reward circuitry for addiction and causes you to crave revenge despite the negative consequences. So why should we not engage in revenge seeking? Well, if you're a mass shooter, you might not want to do it because you'll probably be killed or
jailed for life, and you'll probably kill a bunch of people, right? And if you're in an intimate relationship with someone, maybe you shouldn't retaliate against them because at a minimum, you'll destroy your relationship that you probably treasure because you're in love with them. But even though someone might be so deeply in love with their partner, they can do and inflict incredible psychological and physical harm on that person if they feel comfortable
victimized in any way by that person or their proxy. And that's the other weird thing about revenge is the target of the revenge doesn't have to be the person who hurt you. You may choose a proxy, which is often the case in mass shooters and all sorts of situations where a person that was victimized in your revenge seeking or targeted was not the person who actually harmed you.
James says there is some fascinating neuroscience on forgiveness and how it can help people heal from grievances and trauma. You've been victimized. You feel trauma or pain. And that activates the anterior insula, the pain network. And the brain's reaction to that is to want a dose of dopamine, pleasure, to undo the pain.
With forgiveness, the way it works is this. Forgiveness actually shuts down the anterior insula, it turns out. So if you put somebody in a brain scanner, you know, in an fMRI machine who has a grievance and hasn't forgiven yet, and there's been studies to do this, and you ask them to forgive it, what you see inside their brain is that that anterior insula, the pain network,
stops activating. So it actually is taking away the pain, not giving you a dopamine pleasure hit that just coats the top of the pain and covers it up, but it actually removes that pain.
The second thing it does is it shuts down the neurocircuitry of addiction. So it shuts down the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal stratum, those two areas. So you're no longer plagued by this constant craving for revenge that can take over your life and your thoughts so that you're ruminating about the trauma and how can I get back at the person who wronged me endlessly. And then the last thing that forgiveness does is it reactivates or activates the
the prefrontal cortex in your brain, the decision-making and self-control area to enable you to make good decisions like put that gun down and don't commit an act of retaliation.
So it sounds like when you are forgiving, you're letting go. And when you're seeking revenge or thinking about revenge, you're holding on to what has happened. Yeah, part of that is true. That's a fundamental piece of it. You're also, though, really eliminating the pain of the trauma. It is your decision, and I think you're right to call it a letting go. It is a decision and an acknowledgment that
For wrongs of the past, which is what we've been talking about, these are not self-defense situations. Self-defense is a whole different category of action. But for wrongs of the past, only you as a victim know what the past was in your mind. And only you as a victim have this craving for revenge that you have to manage. So only you as the victim have this pain and it's a remembered pain. And when you
When you see it that way, you realize that only you as the victim can heal yourself. A courtroom or a gun, anything external to you, can't go in inside your head and do what needs to be done, which is turn off the pain, shut down the memories, and turn off this craving for revenge that's driving you into bad decisions and bad places. So
That's why the courtroom of the mind, the non-justice system works is because it actually goes to the place where the pain is and it releases the revenge craving and takes the pain away. How does this model look like in practice when you're trying to reduce, let's say, gun violence or interrupt the cycle of violence? Right.
Yeah, so we've studied that a little bit. There is a group of violence interrupters in New Haven where Yale's located who are, and there's a lot of gun violence there, urban level gun violence. And violence interrupters are well aware now that revenge is the problem and it's the next shooting that comes after the first shooting. And what they want to do is interrupt that shooting. And how can you do that? And the only way to stop the next shooting
shot is you can either use addiction treatment strategies now, right? And because it's an addictive process and we know that. So if you can intervene on that addictive process, you could stop that process there. But forgiveness is unique among the addictions because we have this hardwired process to stop it internally by forgiving that you don't have with a substance addiction.
And so they've adopted the non-justice system and particularly that last step. So out in the community, they often don't have the time to run a whole trial for somebody which takes maybe 45 minutes or an hour, but they will sometimes.
But what they do do is just ask them to imagine forgiving the person who wronged them for a second. And this is something any of your listeners could do right now. If you have an active grievance, and as soon as I say it, you'll know exactly what it is, whoever you are. But when you have that, you can imagine, you don't have to forgive the person. I never tell somebody to forgive somebody. I just say, imagine what it would feel like if you did, which is a less threatening thing. You're not doing anything, you're just pretending.
But if you just pretend to forgive somebody for a moment, what most people immediately say afterward is, oh, I would feel relieved. I would feel unburdened by this need to go and punish the person who wronged me just by imagining it. So then I go, imagine that a second time now and imagine in a third. Just string three imaginations together. You don't have to forgive. Just pretend. And they usually feel better.
And if you continue to do that, you have now suddenly worked toward forgiving this person without really knowing it, without giving up anything other than the pain. And now that the pain is gone and the craving has been reduced and you can start to think more clearly about whether you might really want to forgive them over time. To go back to the bullies that tormented you, how do you think about them now? Have you forgiven them?
I have. And I rapidly forgive now everybody I can as quickly as I can because once you start practicing this forgiveness and thinking of it in this way, you don't want the pain of the grievance longer than you have to, which is only as long as you wait to forgive. So I forgave them. And that wasn't difficult once I understood the benefits of doing it.
And as you pointed out, I'm no longer under threat by them either. And so you might say, well, that's easy because you're no longer under threat. But I would tell you if they came to me and threatened me, I'm going to act in self-defense. I will have to because I want to live, right? So if they're threatening me, I will respond appropriately at that moment. But what I won't do is when it's over, go after them.
James Kimmel is a lawyer and researcher. He's the author of The Science of Revenge, Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.
Coming up, there may be a reason we call it a murder of crows, because it turns out these birds can hold a serious grudge. There was one time I was walking down a street not too far from the lake, and this one crow just followed me. He would go from tree to tree. He would perch, swoop down in my head, kind of wait for me to walk by the next tree, swoop down. That's still to come on The Pulse.
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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about revenge. So far, our conversation has been about humans, but other animals are capable of revenge too. Crows and ravens can hold grudges, and sometimes for years. Alan Yu has more. About 10 years ago, science writer Lynn Peoples went for a run around Green Lake in Seattle, where she lives.
About halfway around the lake, she felt a sharp pain in the back of her head. And a crow flew off. I kept running and yeah, I was definitely a little dazed and confused. She didn't think too much of it. But that night, she sat outside her apartment building with her partner for dinner. One by one, these crows started perching on the buildings around us and cawing.
and then one by one swooping down at me. Lin and her partner took their dinner inside, but the crows did not let up. For years, crows tried to peck her. There was one time I was walking down a street not too far from the lake, and this one crow just followed me. He would go from tree to tree. He would perch, swoop down in my head, kind of wait for me to walk by the next tree, swoop down.
Lynn had no idea what was going on. But strange as all of this may sound, it's not unheard of. I get emails all the time from people that have been attacked by crows. This is ornithologist John Maslow, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington. His research has the answer to why crows seem to hate Lynn.
John's been studying crows and their relatives for years. As part of his work, he has to catch crows and put little bands on their legs so he can identify them afterwards. John and his team would lure the crows in with food. A bit of fried chicken or maybe a bag of Cheetos. They just can't resist some of those things. When the birds were eating, the researchers would cast a net at these crows from 10 to 15 feet away.
After doing this for a while, John and his colleagues started to think the crows were recognizing the people who trapped them. We always thought that when we came around later, they were on to us. The crows would call loudly whenever they saw the researchers. John and his team tested this hypothesis in 2006. To catch the crows, the researchers would put on a caveman Halloween mask.
This mask has orange skin, thick eyebrows and a wide nose. Sure enough, the crows recognized the caveman as the captor. It did not matter who was wearing the mask.
The researchers did experiments with other masks just to make sure the crows were not aggressive towards any kind of mask. So they tried a bunch of different ones, including one of former Vice President Dick Cheney, because it happened to be on sale.
I was hoping this was going to be like a two-month experiment and we would just demonstrate, yes, they respond to us and we're done. But no, the crows around the University of Washington remembered the caveman mask for more than a decade.
This became a series of studies with various masks. John and one of his graduate students, avian ecologist Kaylee Swift, also did experiments with someone wearing a mask while holding a dead crow. Okay, so we have our masked person holding our dead crow. And this, I think there's about 15 birds out here. The crows also learned to recognize someone they had seen carrying a dead crow.
Cayley says crows that live around humans need to tell the good ones from the bad ones. Some are really friendly. They're excited to see you and maybe they carry around some peanuts or some other food in their pocket and they'll give you food. But then some of them don't like you and maybe are really dangerous. Maybe they'll throw things at you. And she found that crows put some thought into who they decide is an enemy. One of the studies she did with John Maslow is a brain imaging study. She
She did brain scans of crows and found that when the crows saw someone holding a dead adult crow, the part of the brain that is active is not the part associated with a fear response. The part that is active is the one responsible for complex decision-making. Cayley was surprised at first, but she says it makes sense in the context of what they know about crows.
Once crows grow to become adults, they are good at surviving. Crows in the wild can live for more than a decade, so it's rare for them to come across a dead adult crow. Seeing one makes them wonder what happened to it and whether there is danger nearby.
They are experiencing a pretty complex sort of decision making of like, I see a crow, but I'm in this cage. I don't know where I am. What am I going to do? This brings us back to science writer Lynn Peoples and why the crows seemed to hate her. At the time she went on that fateful run 10 years ago, she had her blonde hair in a ponytail.
Not far away, she remembers seeing a man with a blonde ponytail yelling and kicking at ducks and geese. Lynn thought maybe the crows around that part of Seattle associated blonde ponytails with dangerous humans. It took years, but the crows eventually stopped attacking Lynn.
you can repair your relationship with a crow that has you marked as the enemy. But it will take some time. Cognitive scientist Christian Blum at the University of Vienna has seen this in action.
He and his colleagues study ravens bred in captivity. These kind of studies always depend on the goodwill of the ravens because their participation is voluntary. So you want them to like you and you want them to be interested in the experimental setup and find it entertaining or rewarding in some way. Christian and his colleagues raise these ravens, take care of them, feed them by hand. They build relationships with the birds.
They did an experiment to test whether a raven can recognize someone who treated them unfairly. One researcher would give a raven a piece of bread. Ravens like bread. It's okay. It's not their favorite food. But directly next to him was a human experimenter that had a piece of cheese in one hand and offered the empty hand to the ravens just in front of the fence. And soon they learned that they can exchange the piece of
bread against a piece of cheese and they absolutely love cheese. They go crazy for it. The researchers did this over and over to train the ravens to do this swap. The ravens could pick up a piece of bread from one end of the room, hold on to it, go all the way to the other end to a second person and swap the bread for a prized piece of cheese.
But then in the second phase, they had a different researcher come in to do the trade. This new person would sometimes make the trade and give the raven cheese in exchange for the bread.
Other times, this person would just take the bread and eat the cheese in front of the ravens. One specific raven, the name of that raven was Rocky. The first time this happened and he saw that the cheese was not exchanged and handed back to him, but eaten by the human, just completely froze, stood still, looked at the human almost as in disbelief.
And then after a few seconds started puffing up the feathers and yelling at the human. Rocky got another piece of bread, went back to the researcher. Once again, this person ate the cheese in front of him. From that moment on, the colleague was basically dead to this raven.
So, even after the study concluded, it took weeks and weeks of effort on the part of my colleague to repair this relationship with the raven and to make the raven come back to her when you call his name, take food out of her hand and participate in her studies, which were just starting at that
point. Avian ecologist Kaylee Swift says you might conclude from this story that crows and ravens are mysterious, scarily intelligent birds that can hold a grudge for years. But she sees them differently. Really what this story is, is an incredible example of how an animal that's on the tree of life very far away from us
has managed to arrive experiencing the world with a lot of similarities to how we do. She says crows and ravens live in a complicated world, and they need to know who their enemies are and who their friends are, just like we humans do. That story was reported by Alan Yu.
That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tan. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.
Behavioral Health Reporting on the Pulse is supported by the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, an organization that is committed to thinking, doing, and supporting innovative approaches in integrated health care. WHYY's health and science reporting is supported by a generous grant from the Public Health Management Corporation's Public Health Fund. PHMC gladly supports WHYY and its commitment to the production of services that improve our quality of life.