Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes

Summary

Episode Summary: "Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes"

Something You Should Know
Host: Mike Carruthers
Guest Experts:

• James Kimmel: Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, Founder and Co-Director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, Author of The Science of Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.
• Stephen S. Hall: Renowned writer with contributions to The New Yorker, National Geographic, Scientific American, and author of How Nature's Most Malign Creatures Illuminate Our World.

Release Date: May 26, 2025

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into two seemingly disparate yet profoundly impactful topics: the psychology behind revenge and the intriguing world of snakes. By interviewing experts James Kimmel and Stephen S. Hall, Mike uncovers the hidden mechanisms that drive human behavior and demystifies the often-misunderstood lives of snakes.

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The Neuroscience of Revenge

Timestamp: [02:13] – [28:44]

Revenge is a universal human emotion, often perceived as a natural response to wrongdoing. However, James Kimmel offers a groundbreaking perspective by likening the desire for revenge to an addiction. According to Kimmel, when individuals perceive an affront—be it physical or psychological—their brain activates the anterior insula, a region associated with pain. To mitigate this discomfort, the brain seeks to balance itself by triggering the pleasure and reward circuits, much like those involved in substance addiction.

Key Insights:

• Biological Basis: "Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs," Kimmel explains, emphasizing that the neural pathways activated during revenge-seeking are similar to those in addictive behaviors ([04:54]).

• Behavioral Implications: Using the example of road rage, Kimmel illustrates how minor provocations can escalate into dangerous actions. Approximately 20% of people are predisposed to taking aggressive actions, driven by this "revenge addiction" ([09:26]).

• Short-lived Pleasure: While the immediate gratification from revenge is intense, it is fleeting and often followed by negative psychological consequences. Kimmel remarks, "The pleasure that you get is very short-lived... there are negative psychological consequences for avengers" ([12:01]).

• Forgiveness as a Remedy: Forgiveness, according to Kimmel, acts as a "wonder drug." By imagining forgiveness, individuals can deactivate the reward circuitry associated with revenge and re-engage their prefrontal cortex, enhancing self-control and decision-making capabilities ([22:24]).

• Personal Connection: Kimmel shares his personal struggle with revenge addiction stemming from teenage bullying, which led him to pursue a career focused on understanding and overcoming this destructive behavior ([19:28]).

Notable Quotes:

• James Kimmel: "Almost all forms of violence are the result of revenge seeking." ([10:13])

• James Kimmel: "Forgiveness just imagining what happens when you forget... It actually takes away the pain instead of covering it up." ([22:24])

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Understanding Snakes: Nature's Most Misunderstood Creatures

Timestamp: [29:51] – [52:19]

Shifting from the complexities of human emotions to the enigmatic world of snakes, Mike Carruthers welcomes Stephen S. Hall to shed light on these often-misunderstood reptiles. Hall demystifies snakes by exploring their biology, behaviors, and the misconceptions that surround them.

Key Insights:

• Biological Diversity: Snakes are vertebrates with a backbone but lack limbs, an adaptation that allows them to navigate diverse habitats effortlessly. They exhibit remarkable variations in size, lifespan, and reproductive methods, including oviparity and viviparity ([30:54]).

• Global Distribution: Adapted to virtually every environment except Antarctica, snakes thrive in deserts, jungles, rainforests, and even marine ecosystems. Their ectothermic physiology enables them to regulate their metabolism based on external temperatures ([31:27]).

• Behavior and Perception: Contrary to popular belief, most snakes are non-aggressive and prefer to avoid human interaction. Fear and loathing towards snakes are often exaggerated, especially in developed countries where snakebite fatalities are minimal ([32:37]).

• Rattlesnake Rattles: The rattle serves as a warning mechanism rather than an offensive weapon. Invented by the addition of segments with each shedding cycle, it alerts potential threats without compromising the snake's safety ([37:45]).

• Intelligence and Sensory Perception: Snakes exhibit forms of learning and possess a unique sensory integration system where all sensory inputs converge in the optic tectum, suggesting a form of synesthesia. This allows them to seamlessly interpret multiple sensory modalities ([42:12]).

• Shedding Skin: Snakes periodically shed their skin to accommodate growth and remove parasites. This process, known as ecdysis, results in the often-strikingly beautiful patterns observed in shed skins ([44:42]).

Notable Quotes:

• Stephen S. Hall: "Snakes range in size from 3 inches to 30 feet and can live up to three decades." ([31:08])

• Stephen S. Hall: "Most snakes prefer to have nothing to do with humans or other animals. Given a choice, they would just disappear into the brush." ([35:48])

• Stephen S. Hall: "Snakes are examples of synesthesia... they conflate senses because they all come to the same place." ([42:12])

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Conclusion

This episode of Something You Should Know masterfully intertwines the intricate workings of the human brain with the fascinating lives of snakes. James Kimmel's insights reveal the deep-seated neural mechanisms that make revenge an addictive and often destructive force in human behavior. On the other hand, Stephen S. Hall's exploration of snakes challenges common misconceptions, highlighting their biological marvels and misunderstood nature. Together, these discussions provide listeners with valuable knowledge that not only broadens their understanding of human psychology and animal biology but also encourages a more empathetic and informed perspective towards both personal emotions and the natural world.

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Further Resources:

• James Kimmel's Book: The Science of Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It – Amazon Link

• Stephen S. Hall's Book: How Nature's Most Malign Creatures Illuminate Our World – Amazon Link

Transcript

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[Mike Carruthers]

Today. On something you should know who's more likely to be healthier, a tall person or a short person? Then revenge. What happens in your brain when someone wrongs you and you want revenge? Like when someone cuts you off on the road?

[James Kimmel]

We're perceiving an attack, potentially on our bodies, but we're also perceiving an attack on our ego. We see it as a sign of disrespect. That is searing pain right in your head. That's real pain. We can see that on brain imaging.

[Mike Carruthers]

Also, we'll take a look into the fascinating world of snakes. What are they exactly? What do they do and should you be afraid of them?

[Stephen S. Hall]

It depends on where you live. In the United states, it's roughly five people a year die from snakebite. In India, nearly 60,000 people die from snakebite. So it's a very dire public health issue there.

[Mike Carruthers]

All this today on something you should know.

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[Mike Carruthers]

Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life.

[Podcast Host]

Today.

[Mike Carruthers]

Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. So who is more likely to be healthier, a tall person or a short person? It's an interesting question with an interesting answer. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something youg Should Know. Being short and being tall both have health risks. Very different health risks. Short men may have a greater risk of developing coronary artery disease than taller men. According to a study, the average American male is five foot nine and a half. And for every two and a half inches shorter you are, your risk of heart disease goes up by about 14%. Of course, diet and exercise and not smoking are ways to fight against those odds, as is having your blood pressure checked regularly. But the news is not all doom and gloom for short people. The research points out that shorter people actually have a lower risk of getting cancer, possibly because taller people simply have more cells. The more cells you have, the higher the chance for cancer causing mutations. And that is something you should know. I can't imagine there is a soul on earth who hasn't felt the urge for revenge to get back at someone who did you wrong. Very often the consequences of getting revenge on someone turn out to be not worth it. It isn't as satisfying as you'd hoped it would be. Still, I know people who ponder getting revenge for a long time. They think about what they would do to get back at it. Seems like a fairly unproductive emotion. In fact, some people might argue that it is a very destructive emotion. You're about to hear a conversation about revenge that will make you think about it very differently. And here to have that discussion with me is James Kimmel. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He's a lawyer, and he is the founder and co director of of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He also has a personal interest in the topic of revenge that he will reveal to you shortly. James is author of a book called the Science of Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to overcome It. Hi, James. Welcome to something you should know.

[James Kimmel]

Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what is that feeling? What is that desire for revenge? Where does it come from? Can you explain that?

[James Kimmel]

Sure. So the recent neuroscience on revenge, which is very fresh and really it hasn't been explored at all by scientists until the last about 20 years. But what we know now is that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs, meaning when you experience a grievance, and a grievance we can think about as a real or imagined perception of having been wronged, mistreated, shamed, humiliated, insulted. Any of those experiences of victimization, they all register inside the brain in the pain network, which is known as the anterior insula. And when that area of the brain, which is your brain registering significant psychological or physical pain, your brain doesn't like pain and it wants to rebalance itself. So it's got too much pain and it wants to reverse that or balance that. And the way it does it, it turns out, for revenge seeking is it activates the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. And in that area of the brain, it registers revenge, which is to say inflicting pain upon another person to make yourself feel better, that registers in your brain in that circuitry, and it feels extremely pleasurable for you.

[Mike Carruthers]

So take me through an example, the anatomy of revenge by example, and explain what's going on in the brain. And I know you say that revenge is an addiction, which I don't really understand. So maybe with an example, you can explain that.

[James Kimmel]

Let's take an example. If you're driving your car right now, or at some other time, and somebody cuts you off in traffic, right? So they've disrespected you, and your perception is that was wrong, that was a violation of some social norm. And if you're like a lot of people, you're pretty upset by it. And you're going to maybe potentially honk your horn, you're going to potentially shout. If you're a little more aggressive, you might flip the finger at that person. If you're a little more aggressive, you might start tailgating them. If you're a little more aggressive than that, you might try and cut them off. And if you're a lot more aggressive, you might pull a gun on that person. So there are these different stages of seeking revenge. So why do people do this? Why do we have road rage killings, and why do we have road rage accidents? And why don't we just have a lot of anger on the road from something as simple as being cut off in traffic? And what we know now is that that is your way, you being the victimized driver of this guy that cut you off, that is your way of trying to make yourself feel better after the pain of being cut off. And that's an important insight for humanity, because we've never understood until now what the biological cause of any form of violence is. And now we know the biological cause is almost all forms of violence are the result of revenge seeking. So we know that from vast public databases and law enforcement agencies now all generally agree, and behavioral studies, that almost every, every form of violence is the result of the perpetrator having felt victimized and now trying to make themselves feel better, acting out this neural circuitry of pleasure and reward seeking to make themselves feel better. And the last component is you have a prefrontal cortex in your brain, which is your executive function and control circuitry, and. And that's there to stop you from doing things that hurt yourself or other people. In addiction, that circuitry is generally seen and believed to have been inhibited or hijacked so that you no longer have the clarity of decision making that you might have in A more calmer state.

[Mike Carruthers]

Okay, so a couple of questions. In your example of the road rage and the escalating response to being cut off, is that the addiction? What's the addiction?

[James Kimmel]

So the addiction is if you go after that driver, you swerve in front of them, you put yourself in harm's way, that driver in harm's way, and the other drivers around you in harm's way, and you couldn't. Control wasn't a rational thought. It was compulsive. Compulsive. Revenge seeking is the addiction. And we see that throughout society. We see it in intimate partner relationships, husband, wife or otherwise spouses, in which there's a continuation of seeking to retaliate over and over again, despite the serious damage it's doing to their relationship, to their family, to their kids.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what's the difference between somebody who can get cut off and go, God, that jerk and forget about it, versus the guy who hits the accelerator and goes after the guy and does what you described? What's the difference between those two people?

[James Kimmel]

Well, the first person who said, wow, that guy was a jerk, and then goes back to listening to their radio and driving normally, that person's in full control. He may or she may have fantasized a little bit for a while about all the deliciously cool things they'd like to do to that jerk, but they don't act on it. And they're safe and acting in the normally adaptive way. But for many other people, maybe 20% of the population, they're going to escalate that, put themselves in harm's way, put other people in harm's way. And those people are struggling with a revenge addiction, which is it feels good to retaliate. And just like any other addict who's an addict, you know, of alcohol, other narcotics, they're seeking that pleasure.

[Mike Carruthers]

When you say pleasure, though, I mean, I get that maybe there's some brief moment of satisfaction when you get your revenge, but I bet you in the history of revenge that very few people have ever, the next day, looked back and thought, wow, I'm so glad that happened. I'm so glad I did what I did. That felt fabulous. I mean, maybe sometime, but for the most part, the pleasure is pretty empty and can have serious consequences.

[James Kimmel]

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. So the pleasure that you get is very short lived, just the way it is for drugs and alcohol. It might be minutes to an hour, but as you say, and studies have shown, and backed up exactly what you just said, there are negative psychological consequences for avengers. And they're always there. We always experience them. And I try to explain that by imagining a hammer striking a nail. And we often think about, in that case, oh, poor nail, it's just been slugged by this hammer and driven into this board. But we don't think about the hammer. The hammer, by physical law, had to experience the impact of that blow at just the same intensity as the nail. And that happens for us as human beings. We cannot become the instrument of another person's pain, even a person who we think started it and started the pain cycle first. We can't become the instrument of their pain without experiencing the pain that we're trying to inflict. We always will experience that. But we are willing to set it aside for that brief dopamine high that we get by retaliating against someone who we believe has wronged us.

[Mike Carruthers]

I also want to ask, I want to go back to something you said, if I heard you correctly, that all violence is revenge.

[James Kimmel]

Yes, almost all forms of violence are revenge, intimate partner violence, bullying and youth violence, gang violence, street violence, extremism, violence, terrorism, genocide, war, all the way from bottom to top.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I want to dig into that a little more. We're talking about revenge, what it is, what it does. And my guest is James Kimmel, author of the book the Science of Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. I am a big fan of Shopify. They have been a longtime sponsor here and Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and they should be behind yours too because they get it right. If you run a business, you know, as I do, that there are so many details that need your attention, it can be overwhelming. Finding the right tool that can handle a lot of those details and simplify the selling process, well, that's a game changer and it makes your life easy and helps you sell more, which is what Shopify does. Shopify handles 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark. If Mattel and Gymshark are using Shopify as their commerce platform along with millions of other businesses, shouldn't you be too? Shopify gets you up and running with your own design studio. They've got hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful online store and AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. If you've ever tried to build an online store, this has got to sound pretty tempting. Turn your big business ideas into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com sysk go to shopify.com sysk shopify.com sysk.

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[Mike Carruthers]

So James, when you say all violence is revenge. If I'm sitting in my living room and some crazed stranger just bursts open the door and shoots me, how is that revenge? He doesn't even know me.

[James Kimmel]

Actually, the person who broke into your house is almost guaranteed to have been acting out of some form of perceived victimization. And the perceived victimizations that we imagine or experience in our minds, like I said, sometimes they're real, sometimes they're imagined. Also, they may be deeper in time and relate to other experiences in their life. And they're seeking what we call revenge by proxy, which is to say you can get revenge against someone even if they aren't the person who actually wronged you. And there are multitudes of examples of this in human life. And throughout human history in which we will retaliate against someone who's an easier target. So, for example, let me give you an instance of a child who is being abused by a parent or some other adult. The child is essentially powerless against that parent or adult and is unable to retaliate. So what do they do? We see that playing out in bullying in school, in which they will, in order to get revenge or the gratification of revenge, will pick a weaker child out and be able to start bullying that child, acting out their desire to retaliate and make themselves feel better for what the parent did to them, maybe that morning or maybe a week ago.

[Mike Carruthers]

You have a very personal relationship to this topic that I'd like you to explain.

[James Kimmel]

I had a serious victimization experience as a teenager, bullying experience. And that kind of put me on a trail to becoming ultimately, a lawyer in the professional revenge business, as I call it, because we're paid to help our clients get revenge for the grievances and perceived victimizations that they experience in their lives. And we're licensed to do that legally, and, you know, we're licensed to prescribe and manufacture and distribute legalized revenge for people. So I went into that business in part to continue this gratification experience, but it bled over into my personal life and to my family life, where I was just becoming sort of a continual avenger in a very habitual way. And I started to realize when I wanted to cut down, because it was making me a pretty awful person and an unhappy person, that I wasn't able to, or I was only able to for short periods of time. And eventually it pushed me away from the law to sort of save myself and begin to study over the last 20 years, the idea of revenge as an addiction. And just about the time that I started to do that at the Yale School of Medicine, other researchers around the world began to put people in brain scanners and try and figure out what happens inside your brain when you have a grievance or a sense of victimization. And then this desire for retaliation emerges in your mind and what's going on there. And that's what we've learned so far. But the good news is running on a separate track to try and understand what revenge is all about and violence. A separate group of researchers were trying to understand what forgiveness is all about and found out some fascinating information, which is that forgiveness just imagining what happens when you forget. So let me put it this way. If you have a grievance and you imagine forgiving it, just imagine it you don't tell the other person that you're forgiving it inside your brain. That shuts down that pain network that I talked about. So it actually takes away the pain instead of covering it up the way revenge does with a little short acting hit of dopamine. It then takes away the revenge cravings by deactivating the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. And then finally it reactivates your prefrontal cortex so that you're able to exert self control, weigh costs and benefits, and make good decisions. Forgiveness is actually a wonder drug that we didn't even know had all of these powers. And this neuroscience really supports the ancient forgiveness teachings of luminaries like Jesus and the Buddha.

[Mike Carruthers]

And you can do that in your road rage example. You can do that in the moment when some guy cuts you off. You can forgive that guy right away and that stuff kicks in.

[James Kimmel]

Yeah. And you only have to imagine forgiving so you can go, I don't want to forgive anybody. I can't believe this guy just did that. Maybe flipped a finger, almost killed you, almost knocked your car off the road. And you might go, I don't want to forgive. I don't. And I get that, and I really do. But if you choose to imagine, just imagine for a few seconds, how would you feel if you forgave it? I haven't met a person yet who just imagined what it would feel like to forgive, who didn't say back to me, oh, how would I feel if I forgave? I'd feel relieved. I would feel like this weight is suddenly off my shoulders. I no longer have to go out, put myself in harm's way and try and harm them back because of what they did to me. I can just, in other words, leave the pain of the past where it belongs in the past.

[Mike Carruthers]

You know what's interesting about the road rage example is typically we don't know the person that cut us off. It probably, or many times it may have just been a mistake. The person wasn't paying attention. Something. It wasn't something they were doing deliberately. We've probably made mistakes in the car driving ourselves, and we hope for forgiveness, but boy, there's something about that moment that when that guy cuts you off that just all bets are off.

[James Kimmel]

And I'm one of those people. I mean, I'm really angry when I get cut off. You know, I'm shouting jerk and maybe some other words that I want to say right now. And that's not the part that, that reaction of pain. Right. Cause what we're perceiving at that moment is we're perceiving an attack on our, potentially on our bodies because they might have put us in harm's way. But we're also perceiving an attack on our ego, our individuality. We see it as a sign of disrespect. And that is searing pain. I mean, right in your head. It's real pain. You can see that on brain imaging. You can see that area of the brain activating and your brain needs to do something with that. One possibility is revenge. But we're now learning that another possibility that is much more enduring doesn't come with all of the risks. You can do it as often as you want. Forgive. As Jesus said, don't forgive seven times, forgive somebody 70 times seven. And neuroscientists would say, well, that's a great idea. Not because it's a pathway to heaven or something. It's a great idea because the more often you forgive, the more you are controlling your pain and healing yourself and the more often you're taking away that revenge craving and the more often you're activating your decision making capacity, self control and wisdom.

[Mike Carruthers]

I don't know if this is like a subset of what you're talking about here, but I, I know people who were wronged years ago and they still won't let it go. They hold onto it. I imagine they're still plotting their revenge in their head and they might even be able to do what you're talking about and imagine what forgiving is like. But they're so entrenched in what happened a long time ago that they can't get out of it.

[James Kimmel]

Right. And that's, you know, you're describing there a person who's truly struggling with revenge addiction. Right. It's slowly destroying their lives. And so I developed, and we've studied at Yale, a way of helping them and actually also people helping people who have shorter term revenge desires, but they can't seem to move beyond them. And that's called the non justice system or miracle Court. The miracle court non justice system process. And there's a free app for this called the Miracle Court. Anybody can use it. You get to put on trial anybody who's ever wronged you for anything in your life, dead or alive, whether you can reach them or not. And the way it works is you play all the roles yourself. So you be, you first testify as the victim to yourself and then you testify as the defendant, the person who wronged you and you try to put yourself in their shoes. And explain what their defense to this would be and what their side of the story was. Then you play the judge and the jury. You get to be the judge, not somebody in a courtroom. This is even better than that because you get to decide guilt and innocence and you get to hand down the sentence. And then you, you imagine becoming the warden and carrying out that sentence and punishing the person. And this enables you to kind of safely gratify your revenge desires without doing it in real life so that you're not harming yourself or anyone else. And then in the last and final step, you become the judge of your own life, in which you decide whether it was really useful to continue trying to punish this person or whether. And that's when you get to imagine what it would feel like to forgive, whether it might feel better to actually forgive this whole thing and move on with your life. And you have to decide. And we all do. If you think about it, Mike, every day, every moment, with every grievance or victimization, we have to decide at some point are we going to move on from this or are we going to keep nursing it as someone who.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, and I think this applies to everyone. Everyone has entertained thoughts of revenge when they've been wronged. And it is a strange feeling when you isolate it and think about it. So I enjoy hearing your explanation of it and also what to do about it. I've been speaking with James Kimmel. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and he is author of the book the Science of Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. James, this was great. Thanks for doing this.

[James Kimmel]

Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure and an honor to be on your show today at Capella University.

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[Mike Carruthers]

Some people can look at a snake and get totally creeped out. Others see a fascinating creature. What are snakes? They look so different than most everything else crawling around the Earth. Are they smart? How do snakes move? How do they slither around? Why do they shed their skins? Do they make good pets? I mean, there are a lot of questions about snakes. And here to answer those questions is Stephen S. Hall. Stephen has had numerous cover stories in the New York Times Magazine, where he also served as story editor. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, Wired, Science, Nature, Scientific American, and other places. He is author of a book called How Nature's Most Malign Creatures Illuminate Our World. Hi Steven. Welcome to Something youg Should Know.

[Stephen S. Hall]

Thank you for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what is a snake? Where does it fit into the chain of living creatures on Earth? What is it?

[Stephen S. Hall]

It's a vertebrate, which means that it has a backbone. But other than that, it doesn't resemble many other vertebrates, which include us and other mammals and birds. And so it's truly unique in part because of the fact that it does not have legs, even though it did have legs tens of millions of years ago. It kind of turned them back in because it found out that it could find its way into almost any habitat or any narrow space, any covert hiding place very easily because it didn't have legs and arms to manipulate. So it actually turned out to be a very good adaptation for self protection. They range in size from 3 inches to 30ft. They can live up to three decades. They can eat every day. Some of them don't eat but one meal a year. And they are adapted to virtually every environment on the planet Earth except Antarctica. They can live in saltwater seawater, deserts, jungles, rainforests, swamps, high altitude, sea level altitude, temperate climates, equatorial climates. And they're cold blooded, which means in all these different environments they're basically able to gauge the temperature and warm themselves enough to maintain metabolism even though they can't generate their own heat.

[Mike Carruthers]

Snakes don't have a great reputation amongst humans. A lot of people are afraid of snakes. They're kind of grossed out by snakes. There's something about snakes. What is that?

[Stephen S. Hall]

People detest snakes for the most part. There have been kind of informal surveys. You know, what animal do you most detest? And snakes almost always top the list. Spiders rank high, but never quite surpass snakes in their degree of Loathing. One of the things that was really interesting is that this loathing is attached to fear, but it's different from fear and it was not always the case. So one of the things that's been fascinating to me is to go back and see how ancient cultures, we're talking about Egyptian culture, Greek culture and antiquity, snakes were really prized as animals that were kind of messengers and intermediaries between humans and nature. They played a part in origin myths. In ancient Egypt, for example, they're associated with healing. In ancient Greece, in Mesoamerica, they were these intermediary animals that could pass between the living world and the afterworld and also were harbingers of essentially meteorological, associated with meteorological powers like rain, storms, lightning, all of which were ultimately attached to agricultural fertility and even more ultimately to survival. So they, as a symbolic animal, they've always been a creature that humans have had a sort of special relationship with.

[Mike Carruthers]

So can you explain how a snake moves? Because they don't have feet, but yet they can slither around pretty fast. So how does that work?

[Stephen S. Hall]

It's a very complicated process. It involves a lot of tendons, a lot of muscle contractions, using muscles to push against the surface that they're navigating on. And this coordinated activity with all these contractions and muscle activity allows them to navigate a vastly different number of terrains. So one of the interesting things that came up with researchers who were doing studying locomotion is that for most terrestrial animals, presumably including humans, when you encounter a cluttered, obstacle strewn landscape, you have to sort of slow down to pick your way through it. With snakes, it's exactly the opposite. They can push against obstacles, they use obstacles as a way to accelerate and actually go faster. I think it's a great kind of metaphoric testament to their ability and quality of taking what would normally be an adverse situation and turning it into a competitive advantage, as it were. Again, they're very shrewd animals that are able to use what's confronting them in the environment to their advantage.

[Mike Carruthers]

Their reputation of being poisonous, of killing animals and people and stuff. Is it well deserved or are most snakes pretty harmless or what?

[Stephen S. Hall]

Most snakes prefer to have nothing to do with humans or other animals. Given a choice, they would just disappear into the brush. And it's an interesting question about whether the fear is justified. It depends on where you live. In the United States, the number of people who die from a snake bite, minimal. It's roughly five people a year. In India, nearly 60,000 people a year die from snakebite. So it's a very dire public health issue there. In fact, Kofi Annan, that used to be the Secretary General of the United nations, once said that snakebite is the most significant tropical disease you've never heard of. It kills about 138,000 people a year in the world, mostly in rural and poor areas. So if you're in a developing country, the fear is extremely legitimate. In the United States, we're very adept at taking care of people who have been bitten by snakes. And that's why the. The number of fatalities is so low. I was actually curious to compare it to other forms of, you know, unfortunate death. You know, lightning causes 28 deaths a year on average. Bee stings like 70 or so deaths a year. Accidental falls cause 44,000 deaths a year. Snake bites roughly five. So the fear, at least in a developed country with good medical care, it's kind of out of proportion to the actual actuarial risk, if you will.

[Mike Carruthers]

So one of the snakes that you hear about, or certainly we've heard about in this country, is the rattlesnake. What is that rattle? What is that? And why is it so unique among snakes?

[Stephen S. Hall]

A rattlesnake is a pit viper. And the rattles are attached at the end of the tail. They are added with each shedding of skin. And it doesn't actually sound like a rattle. It's a little bit. I like, liken it a little bit more to almost like a cicada's sound. It's more of a buzz than. Than a rattle. I actually attended a workshop for rattlesnake handling in California in the course of my research. And it was really interesting to be in the position of picking up a snake, a rattlesnake, with tongs, but being able to handle it and see in many ways that there was no aggressiveness. There was no attempt like that. One of the new technologies, it's not that new anymore that's changed. Our perception of snakes is radio transmitters, because you could. They were injected into or inserted into rattlesnakes, and it allowed researchers to follow individual snakes because each snake was. Was tagged with a particular frequency and. And could be distinguished. And in the course of doing this, they began to realize that rattlesnakes have social behavior. The mothers stay with their. Some snakes are kind of chill, if you will. They don't rattle even if you get close to them. Others are a little bit more anxious and rattle when you're still quite far away. Some of them like to hang out with other snakes and avoid other snakes. There's A sociality that was never understood because we didn't have the technology to see it. But once we begin to see individual snakes, we can begin to see these different behaviors.

[Mike Carruthers]

The rattle is just a noisemaker, right? It's not like it doesn't have a stinger in it or anything. It's just an alarm.

[Stephen S. Hall]

Exactly. It's a warning. It's an alert. If you're getting too close, I'm sensing threat. And again, the snakes are not being aggressive in seeking people out. They're kind of warning you that you're getting close to them, and they might perceive that as a threat. Now, there's a fascinating anecdote from God, it's almost a century now, of a woman named Grace Olive Wiley. And she was a librarian in Minneapolis who liked snakes, and she collected lots of snakes, and she bred snakes, including rattlesnakes. And she had such a large collection that she was ultimately invited to be a curator of reptiles at the Brookfield Zoo, which is right outside Chicago. But she had a habit of kind of letting venomous snakes kind of circulate and, quote, escape from their cages in the zoo, in the reptile house, and consequently was fired. But she had this theory that snakes were so chemosensitive, and that is that they recognized chemical signatures so acutely that if she threw clothes that she had worn and hadn't washed into the cages of snakes when they arrived, venomous snakes, that they would become habituated to her scent and would not perceive her as a threat. And then she went on to handle, free. Handle these very venomous snakes. We're talking about rattlesnakes, cobras. And there are pictures of her practically nuzzling these serpents, you know, wrapping them around her neck, holding them without a problem. She ultimately succumbed to the bite of a cobra that had not been habituated in the same way. Now, a lot of people think. Think that she was kind of a little bit off the mark in terms of her knowledge. But when I mentioned this to people who are experts in chemo sensation in reptiles now, they actually surprised me by saying, you know, that's actually entirely possible because these animals have such an acute sense of chemical perception that they might well recognize a scent as being associated with. With another animal that is a human that's not threatening. So that was pretty surprising to me. And it talks. It speaks to this incredible chemical acuity that these animals have.

[Mike Carruthers]

How smart are they? Are they. Yeah, how smart are they?

[Stephen S. Hall]

Well, I think you could say that they learn. There was a scientific group actually in Brooklyn, in the 1970s that had snakes running simple mazes. That's pretty amazing. Apart from intelligence, one of the most interesting qualities from the point of view of their brains is that all their sensory inputs arrive in the visual center of the reptile brain. It's called the optic tectum. And what that suggests, although it hasn't been sufficiently investigated, is that snakes are examples of synesthesia. That is, you know, they have this ability to sort of taste colors or smell, touch, that sort of thing, where they conflate senses because they all come to the same place. It's not like different parts of the brain are talking to other different parts of the brain. It all gets melded into one kind of sensory map of the outer world. And that's a really incredible notion to ponder. That's a completely different sensation of the external world than anything we can possibly imagine. And it's pretty interesting.

[Mike Carruthers]

Snakes lay eggs, right? That's where new snakes come from. Eggs. Some do and some don't, and some don't.

[Stephen S. Hall]

Some give a live birth.

[Mike Carruthers]

Oh, I. You know, I never knew that. I thought all snakes were egg layers.

[Stephen S. Hall]

Nope. And some of them engage in parthenogenesis. In other words, they create clones of themselves without a sexual partner. So it's asexual reproduction. This actually gets to one of the more interesting aspects of snakes, according to this genomic scientist I spoke to then at Harvard. But he's just saying that snakes kind of break all the rules. Some of them lay eggs, some of them have live birth. Their chromosome structure is some of them resemble dogs and birds, and others resemble mammals. You know, some of them eat once a. Once a day, some of them eat once a year. In other words, there's just this terrific variation in terms of biological mechanisms and processes, reproduction being one of them, that they don't follow the rules.

[Mike Carruthers]

And so we all have seen somewhere along the roadside some snake skin that the snake has shed. And what's that about?

[Stephen S. Hall]

Well, snakes shed their skin after a certain period of time. It varies between species, but the skin starts to get a little bit fuzzy and duller. And then they basically find a sharp object like a rock, and from head to toe, just kind of wriggle out of their old skin. And suddenly it's like you just bought a new suit. It looks absolutely pristine and beautiful. And because of this color variation in stakes, they look absolutely great.

[Mike Carruthers]

It seems unusual that all these very different kinds of snakes, some give birth, some have eggs, some do this, some do that. They're so different, but they're still part of the same Species.

[Stephen S. Hall]

The flip side of that, and again, this has just emerged in the last couple of years, is you can tell these sort of evolutionary stories where snakes have independently evolved the exact same qualities, even though they share no common ancestry and no common lineage. There was an article in Science a couple years ago that, that looked at three different types of spitting cobras. These are cobras who actually spit their venom. They don't bite you, but they spit it. They evolved in completely different places. They independently evolved the anatomy that allowed them to spit as opposed to bite. They independently evolved the behavior to spit specifically at the eyes of something that was threatening them, only at the eyes. And they specifically and independently evolved venoms that contained a component that caused excruciating eye pain. So this. They all started in different places at different times, and yet they arrived at the same kind of solution to the problem of a threat. And it's really fascinating that, that as an example of what's called convergent evolution, which is different species in different places end up looking or doing things that are quite similar, just because it's an advantage to develop those qualities.

[Mike Carruthers]

I wanted to ask you about snakes as pets. I know people sometimes have snakes as pets, but what kind of pets are they? I mean, do they have personalities?

[Stephen S. Hall]

If you talk to people who have snakes or study snakes, they will tell you that they have distinct personalities. I had a number of people, researchers, including rattlesnakes, that they have personalities. Some of them are kind of ornery, some of them are very calm. There's a term in herpetology is ambassador snakes. And it's basically a snake that's very docile, is not going to bite, easily handled, doesn't mind being handled. You know, they take him to schools and for parties and birthday parties and things like that because they're totally normal children. And people are fascinated by the fact that these animals do have personalities. And some of them are very calm and easy to handle and kind of curious. When I was in Florida, we were looking for pythons. We found this sort of a baby blue racer. But the person I was with, the woman python hunter, in fact just scratching the snake under its chin and it was just moving its head around looking at it. It was kind of curious, actually. So this idea of them being inert, asocial animals is really not correct at all. And if you talk to anyone who owns a snake, they'll tell you that they really become habituated to their, to their owners.

[Mike Carruthers]

I think I speak for a lot of people listening when I say I now know more about snakes than I did before. And as I listen to you talk, I'm thinking maybe one of the reasons why people are so turned off by snakes and even repulsed by them is because they're so different. They don't have feet or legs, their tongues dart out, and they don't interact with people much. So we don't really know much about them and but now we know more about them. I've been talking with Stephen S. Hall. He is author of the book How Nature's Most Malign Creatures Illuminate Our World. And if you'd like to read that book, there is a link to it at Amazon in the show notes Stephen, thanks. This was very enlightening. Social media allows you and anyone else to tell the world about your latest accomplishments. The question is, does anybody really care? And the answer is, not as much as you like to think. In fact, self promotion often backfires. In an article in the journal Psychological Science, the humble brag, as it's often called, is often not well received by others. Posting a photo of your new car on Instagram or Facebook, or bragging about your promotion to coworkers not only doesn't get the reaction you might think, it often gets the opposite reaction. Think about it yourself. You probably experience emotions other than pure joy when you're on the receiving end of someone else's promotion. Yet when we engage in self promotion ourselves, we tend to overestimate other people's positive reactions and underestimate the negative ones. The idea that by telling others about our accomplishments improves how people view us might seem right, but in fact it often has the opposite effect. And that is something you should know if you enjoyed this episode. All we ask in return is that you share it with people you know. It's easy to do with the share function on pretty much every podcast app, which helps us to grow our audience and we appreciate the help. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[What Went Wrong? Podcast Host]

Christian Bale was preparing for his role in American Psycho, dressing the part, hitting the gym for the first time in his life, even getting his teeth redone. There was just one he didn't actually have the part. Leonardo DiCaprio did. Listen to our podcast what Went Wrong? Every other week as we unearth the chaos behind Hollywood's biggest movie flops and most shocking successes available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Amy Nicholson]

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

[Podcast Host]

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the League Veep or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

[Amy Nicholson]

We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know Joe Pesci was miscast cast in Goodfellas.

[Stephen S. Hall]

And I don't he's too old.

[Amy Nicholson]

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

[Mike Carruthers]

It is.

[Amy Nicholson]

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites.

[Podcast Host]

Must sees and encase you Mistims.

[Amy Nicholson]

We're talking Parasite, the Home Alone from.

[Podcast Host]

Grease to the Dark Knight.

[Amy Nicholson]

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

[Podcast Host]

And we talk about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of like Ganja and Hess.

[Amy Nicholson]

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

[Podcast Host]

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your.

[Amy Nicholson]

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