Something You Should Know - The Science of Memory Manipulation & Why Wildlife is Invading Neighborhoods

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Starting point is 00:00:20 and every step forward feels like progress. Not another wrong turn. Visit camh.ca to help us forge a better path for mental health care. Today on something you should know, what's the leading cause of housefires? It's not your Christmas tree. Then understanding memory and the new science of memory manipulation. Memory manipulation means to either spark that memory back to life or turning down the emotional volume of a particularly traumatic experience or turning up the emotional volume of a particular positive experience that may have lost its luster

Starting point is 00:00:59 over time. Also, what to do and not do if the police pull you over. And why does it see more and more wild animals are moving into residential areas? They're not really moving into our areas. We're moving into theirs. So we get more and more of these animals who are trying to figure out how they're going to continue to make a living with all of these houses and people and manicured lawns. All this today on Something You Should Know. Get you and your crew to the big shows with Go Transit. Go connects to all the main concert venues like TD Coliseum in Hamilton and Scotia Bank Arena in Toronto. And Go makes it affordable with special e-ticket fairs. A one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel across

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Starting point is 00:02:14 You know, around the holidays, I think most of us are conscious of and careful about our Christmas trees. We want to keep them well-watered because we don't want a Christmas tree. tree fire. But Christmas tree fires are not the leading cause of house fires in the U.S. And that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of something you should know. Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Her brothers. So as dramatic and tragic as Christmas tree fires are,

Starting point is 00:02:43 they are not the leading cause of house fires. You know what is? Cooking, leaving pots and pans on the stove unattended. But there are other causes of fires you may not even be aware of, but you probably should be. For example, wrong wattage light bulbs. If you've ever thought to yourself, it's probably okay to use this 60-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket. You're not alone. A lot of people do. However, installing a light bulb with a wattage that is too high

Starting point is 00:03:14 for the lamp or light fixture is a leading cause of electrical fires. Batteries. If you store 9-volt batteries in your kitchen junk drawer, you could be putting your home at risk. when loose batteries roll around with other metals like screws or paper clips, the two terminals on the battery could short out and generate enough heat to start a fire. It's best to put a piece of electrical tape over the terminals or store the battery in its original package. Dust, believe it or not.

Starting point is 00:03:45 Built up dust can be a fire hazard if it collects in and around things like electronics, electrical sockets, and even floor heaters. and chimneys. Dead birds, raccoon nests, crack mortar, and built-up creosote are all common causes of chimney fires. If you use your fireplace, you should have your chimney swept out once a year. And that is something you should know. What is a memory, really? And what would it mean if you could change a memory?

Starting point is 00:04:20 Imagine taking a painful memory and softening it. or enhancing a wonderful memory and make it even better. But if you can change a memory, is it still a memory, or is it something closer to fiction? What's fascinating is that scientists are getting closer to doing exactly this, and it raises big questions about how memory actually works. We already know that our recollections are not perfect. Memories fade, distort, and lose detail. In a sense, we rewrite.

Starting point is 00:04:54 our memories all the time. But now, at least in lab animals, researchers can alter very specific memories with surprising precision. Here to explore what this means and where the science is headed is Steve Ramirez. He is an award-winning neuroscientist known for his TED Talks on memory manipulation. He's an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University and author of the book, How to Change a Memory, One Neuroscientist's Quest to Alter the Past. Hey, Steve, welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much for having me today. So before we get into the details of how memory manipulation works,

Starting point is 00:05:38 I think the big first question is, why would you want to do that? Why change a memory? We learn from our past. Our past is important to our future. yourself. If we change our past, why? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's at least two reasons why we would want to manipulate a memory. The first is to understand how does memory work. I mean, we can think of this as if you were to have a car at an auto shop, right? And you're trying to figure out what's wrong. You can hotwire the car or you can hit the accelerator,

Starting point is 00:06:15 you can listen to the carburetor, hear what happens to the engine. You're tinkering with bits and pieces of the car so that it can tell on itself and let you know what could potentially be funky here. It's the same thing with manipulating memories where when we turn them on or off, for example, we can begin listening in on what the rest of the brain and what the organism is doing. And that lets us know a bit of what's working, like how does memory work for that matter? The second reason is because we can turn on memories or turn off memories with the goal of restoring health to the brain. And I think that's really the real reason why we're doing all of what we're doing because we can imagine being able to turn on a positive memory for example

Starting point is 00:06:55 to try to alleviate symptoms associated with a given psychiatric disorder or to turn off a memory for the same reason as well so the goal here is to understand how does memory work and then can we use that knowledge to figure out how to restore health and well-being back to the brain that those memories exist in and so ultimately you would do what with this i mean is this something for everyday people, or is this something for psychiatric patients and scientists in a laboratory? It's a little bit of both. I think that the ideas that we're coming to terms with now about what memory is and what memory isn't, that is an everyday knowledge thing that I think is important for all of us. So, for example, we've known for a while that memories aren't like a tape recorder

Starting point is 00:07:42 of the past or like a carbon copy of the past, but they're a reconstructive process in that every time we recall a memory, we're constantly scribbling in new information and hues and tones and so on and contours of that memory change. So it's a dynamic process. And I think that's important for us to at least know or appreciate because it really begins then kind of scratching the surface of what does memory mean to us as individuals and what does that say about our own memories and our own even sense of identity, which is threaded over time by memory. The second thing here would be that the more we know about our own memories, or memories in general, then the better equipped we are to predict what happens when it breaks down. And that, of course, affects, that process affects millions of people as well, and ideally lead to treatments as well.

Starting point is 00:08:30 So when I hear the phrase, the term memory manipulation, which I've never really heard much before, when I hear it, I think of, okay, so you had a bad experience and the memory of that experience is, you know, causing you not to sleep and not to eat. I mean, it's a horrible memory, that you could manipulate that memory to make it less horrible to or make it go away or something. But that, I don't think that's what you're talking about, right? Right. I'm probably not going to want to erase a memory of my own from a high school breakup

Starting point is 00:09:08 that I couldn't get over for a few weeks because life taught me how to get over it and how to move on and grow as an individual. But when we start talking about it from the perspective of any disorder, then that's a different story because that does require some kind of outside intervention for us to be able to try to restore health back to the brain. So when we think about memory manipulation,

Starting point is 00:09:31 I think that if we have that goal of nourishing health in any capacity to a person, then we're in business because then the idea of manipulating memories has a larger goal in sight, which is our own well-being. So what exactly is memory, and how well do we understand it? I mean, do we really think, science really think, yeah, we've got this pretty well understood, or is this still a big mystery?

Starting point is 00:09:57 And it's interesting because we use the term memory in a couple of different ways. We'll talk about, say, a person who remembers everything, oh, he has a good memory. But we also use the word to refer to a specific memory. That's a great memory I have. So what is memory? I think we understand a little bit more than the tip of the iceberg, but we certainly don't understand the entire iceberg of what memory is. I like to think of it like this, that memory is what happens when an experience leaves

Starting point is 00:10:33 some kind of lasting change in the brain, and we can somehow revisit that change to make that memory pop back up to life. And we know that this can happen on the time. time scale of hours, I had a sandwich today for breakfast, or on the time scale of years, I got married about 15 months ago to decades. I remember my Pokemon card collection from when I was a kid, and I remember them in pretty vivid detail. So at some point, whether it was looking at my Pokemon card collection, or seeing my wife walk down the aisle, or putting my sandwich together this morning, all three of those left some kind of change in the brain

Starting point is 00:11:12 that had to exist over the span of days to years to decades that I can now revisit and tap into or pull the book out of the library, so to speak, so that I can revisit that memory. What that change is is exactly what we study in the lab and what thousands of researchers are studying today, because those changes can happen at the level of a brain cell all the way up to an entire brain, all the way up to the conversation that me and you are having and how we're altering each other's brains as well. And so when you remember something, when you activate your memory,

Starting point is 00:11:48 you're remembering what? Because, for example, when you remember that you got married, your memory probably, if we had a video of that, probably doesn't necessarily match the video. Like, your memory changes over time. And I remember hearing that when you remember something,

Starting point is 00:12:07 you're not so much remembering the event as you're remembering the last time you remembered it. I don't know if that's true or not, but memory is very inaccurate a lot of the time. Yeah, I think memory is such a flexible, silly, putty kind of thing that exists in the brain that it's certainly not like a video recording of the past. If anything, for instance, we might, the both of us might have gone to some ballgame, for instance, and we could have been sitting next to each other,

Starting point is 00:12:37 having the same exact experience, eating the same hot dogs, watching the same team, even rooting for the same team, and give it some time. And the way that we recount that day to all of our friends or loved ones is almost certainly not going to match up to each other's detail by detail. And it's almost certainly not going to match up to, you know, if we happen to be on the fan video, for instance, and we happen to have a recording of us for the nine innings of the ball game, that reality doesn't always have to match up with our internal subjective reality and our subjective realities don't always have to match up with each other's too. So on the one hand, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It just

Starting point is 00:13:17 means that we all have our own personal records of the past that we combine and recombine with new detail every time we recall them. It can be a little bit bad when we need to use that memory as an objective account of what happened because we know that memory isn't at all an objective account of what happened, since it's biased by all of our personal, subjective histories that we bring to the table. We're discussing memory and memory manipulation, and my guest is Steve Ramirez. He is author of the book How to Change a Memory, One Neuroscientist's quest to alter the past. Of the Regency era, you might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or is the time

Starting point is 00:14:00 when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency Era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency Era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency Era, wherever you get podcasts. Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales.

Starting point is 00:14:39 They're funny. They're weird. Sometimes they're a little bit scary. But don't worry, we rate every episode grim, grimmer, or grimist. So you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, grimist, and our new season, available now. So, Steve, what about those memories? And I'm sure this has happened to you where something will trigger a memory that you haven't thought about in years, maybe decades.

Starting point is 00:15:12 And so it must have been in there, dormant, and it pops into your head about, you know, it could be about high school or whatever. And you wonder, well, where did that come from? I haven't thought about that in forever. This is the exact style of question that actually keeps me up at night, because I'm convinced that we don't yet have an answer as to how the brain does that. We know that it does it. We know that you could be taking a stroll down the street and you randomly remember your prom, for example, or you randomly remember something from when you were five years old and maybe a memory that you have with a sibling or a parent. So for all intents and purposes, those memories didn't have any real evidence of existing in the brain in the decades since they were made since you hadn't recalled them before. and we had no reason to believe that they were even there, but give it the right cue or the right trigger in the world or maybe even the right thought that happens to spark that dormant memory back to life,

Starting point is 00:16:12 then that decades-old memory can come back and seemingly feel like it's full of pretty vivid detail as well. So this is just my hot take on this, but I think that the brain actually stores a remarkable amount of information more than we give it credit for. It's not necessarily that we're storing every bit of detail, of every second of every day. But the fact that we can recall memories that were quiet for decades and they can come back to life gives me some reason to believe that our brain contains a lot more

Starting point is 00:16:45 of our vast history than we originally thought. You know, when I hear the term memory manipulation, I think, well, we do that to ourselves because when I look back on my childhood, my memories of it are probably a lot better than the reality. was that I have a tendency and I think most people have a tendency to remember the good times and not remember so much the bad times that we paint a pretty rosy picture of the past. So in that sense, I'm manipulating my own memories, right? For sure. There's a lot of different theories as to why and how we manipulate our own memories. And the one that you hit on the head here is an optimism bias that can exist in people

Starting point is 00:17:29 that we tend to reflect on some parts of the past with more rosy colored glasses. And weirdly enough, we also tend to remember things sometimes as being worse than they actually were. So this is well documented in psychology. And I think it's because our brains are not at all objectively recording what's happening with experience. But we might be in a good mood and that might make us remember the good times of the past. Or maybe we're in a bit of a soured mood. And that makes us more likely to recall related. somewhat souring memories as well.

Starting point is 00:18:02 So here's a question I've often wondered about. The more you remember something, like if there's a memory that you run through your head over and over again, does the process of recollection do something to the memory? Does it either make it better because you're like sharpening it because you're remembering it over and over again? Or does the process of recollection distort it? One of the sort of inconvenient truths of this all, I thought was captured beautifully by

Starting point is 00:18:32 Daniela Schiller is a professor at Mount Sinai in New York, and she was giving a talk once and said that the inconvenient truth of this is that the memories that we hold dear, the ones that are the most real memories in our brain, are the ones that we don't recall, because those are the ones that are left untarnished by the process of recollection. To me, what that means is that, yeah, the memories that we don't recall, like maybe the memories that you haven't thought of in decades, the first time you recall it is the most real that you will experience that memory. And then the second and third and fourth time, it's not that it's less real. It's just warped a bit more. And it doesn't even have to be warped to the point of becoming a false

Starting point is 00:19:13 memory per se. It could just be that the different, again, the hues and contours and emotions and how we felt about that memory can also change. I think about this personally often when Sometimes I was recounting to my friends the other day the first time I went to go visit my family in El Salvador, and I was six years old when this happened. And if I really sit with that memory of having a dinner at my mom's village that she grew up in, a lot of the details are pretty consistently similar. I remember my grandparents were there, my mom and dad were there, a lot of my cousins were there. I remember the smells of there's the smell of horses outside and the smell of rice and beans inside that we were reading. but the different details really do begin to shape-shift. Like the color of the plate that I'm eating from or the shirt that I'm wearing

Starting point is 00:20:01 or the clothes that my family was wearing or even some of the sounds. Like was it chicken squawking or was it a cow mooing or was it just my nieces and nephews running around? That changes every single time I recall this memory to the point of I'm not sure at all what the actual accurate version of that memory is other than I remember where I was and when it was and what I was doing. But some of those details, I think, have certainly shape shifted more and more, the more I've recalled that memory.

Starting point is 00:20:32 But there are some consistent changes in people's memory in this way. You go back to the house you grew up in. And my experience in talking to people and my own personal experience is everyone does that and says, it's a lot smaller than I remember. It's always smaller. It's never, boy, that house is so much bigger than I remember. It's always smaller. There's a mismatch, which I think you intuited here beautifully, which is that when we're encoding

Starting point is 00:21:04 those memories or storing them in the brain, we're a smaller version of ourselves. We might be seven years old or 11 years old. So all we remember is our first person perspective of making that memory. When we're recalling it, of course, we're decades older. So presumably we're a bit bigger. We think of memory differently. We think of ourselves differently. And we've certainly warped what our childhood home more or less look like the more we've recalled it as well.

Starting point is 00:21:31 And that mismatch, I think, is exactly what we feel when we go back to our hometown or to our childhood home. That mismatch, I think, is a reflection of how much growth we've done in those ensuing decades since we first formed that memory. But it's a very real and well-documented and all too relatable of a phenomenon. And so when people talk about dementia, Alzheimer's, and people don't remember things, is the memory gone or is it in there and this is the kind of thing you do in trying to manipulate it to bring it back? Or what? Where's that memory? We don't have a surefire answer to that question yet, but we do know what experiments will get us there. And we do know that we will get an answer to that question about whether or not disease.

Starting point is 00:22:19 like Alzheimer's make memories gone and really stamp them out of existence from the brain or make them inaccessible by virtue of being the disease that it is. So I think about it this way, that for over a century really, neuroscience kind of thought of memory as it's a book that you put away in the library, you take the book out, and now we know that we scribble in new details when we recall that memory and then we put it back in the bookshelf. With Alzheimer's, the question is, is the edifice of books? Is the library itself burning down so that the physical cells that hold on to that memory are no longer there? Or is it that the librarian has temporarily checked out? And we can't access those memories,

Starting point is 00:23:10 even though the books are there, but we have no system of getting those memories out of the bookshelves anymore. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest success stories of neuroscience and memory research in particular in the 21st century, which is that in rodents, at least, in the mammalian brain nonetheless, in rodents, in almost all cases of amnesia that we know of, whether it's due to drug addiction or sleep deprivation or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or even brain cancer, in all cases where memories were thought to be lost, we've been able to artificially bring them back, and we've been able to find the cells that hold on to those memories and jumpstart those cells to thereby jumpstart that memory. So in rodents, that for me is, that keeps my

Starting point is 00:24:02 cup half full on this, because we had every reason to believe that those memories were erased. The human brain and the mouse brain are, they're not one-to-one the same thing, but there's a lot of principles that govern both of them, and there's a lot of biology that governs both of them, the same way that there's a lot of biology about our DNA that governs mouse DNA, for example. So I'd like to think that that gives us a bit of a framework now to begin asking in humans, let's entertain the possibility that these memories are actually there. And if so, how can we bring them back through some non-invasive means, ideally? That is where we hit the wall of where we are today,

Starting point is 00:24:37 because there's countless groups trying to figure out that exact answer to see if there's ways of restoring those memories that we had every reason to believe we're lost, but may not actually be lost, but just remain inaccessible. So my next question, well, before I ask my real question, I just have a yes or no question, have you manipulated, not necessarily you personally, but have you manipulated a memory in a person? Yes or no? No.

Starting point is 00:25:03 Okay. But if you did successfully manipulate someone's memory, what would that look like? So your hope is the person would wake up and say, now I remember it, now I don't remember, oh, now I remember it differently. Memory manipulation means to do what to the memory? Memory manipulation means to either spark that memory back to life,

Starting point is 00:25:33 so to bring it out of dormancy and to reawaken it so that it can exist in the brain for the person or the organism in general to recall, or to dampen some parts of that memory in any capacity. So turning down the emotional volume of a particularly traumatic experience, for example, or turning up the emotional volume of a particular positive experience that may have lost its luster over time. I think memory is one of those topics that everybody thinks about and wonders how it works and why it works the way it does. And to hear you say that we, you know, we're just at the

Starting point is 00:26:09 tip of the iceberg in understanding it means there's a lot of interesting things to come. I've been talking with Stephen Ramirez. He is an award-winning neuroscientist, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, and his book is How to Change a Memory, One Neuroscientist's quest to alter the past. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Stephen, I appreciate you explaining all this. Thanks. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

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Starting point is 00:27:20 for Ages 3 Plus. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I've had bears in my house. Not cute, cartoony bears, but big brown bears. One even got into a cupboard and unscrewed a jar of peanut butter and helped himself. Outside, I regularly see bobcats and coyotes, deer, rabbits, and I don't live out in the middle of nowhere. I'm in a normal residential neighborhood, which does border, mountains, and open land. And lately, it's not just me. More and more, we're hearing stories of people running into wild animals, on porches, in backyards, sometimes in kitchens. So what's going on here? Is it simply that we're building into the places where these animals once lived?

Starting point is 00:28:12 Have they become too comfortable around us and we around them? What are we supposed to do? Here to explain and offer some insight is Randy Minotaur. She is a true nature lover who has written more than 90 books, including The Bear at the Bird Feeder, why we're seeing more wild animals in our neighborhoods and how we can live in harmony with them. Hi, Randy, welcome to something you should know.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you for having me. So as I said, it seems like there are more incidences of people and animals encountering each other. I don't know if there really is an increase or because of cell phones, people are able to videotape and so it gets more visibility or what? Really, what's happening is the more that we expand our residential range and take over land that perhaps was farmland, or was woods or, you know, some kind of open land that was hospitable to animals, the more we do that, the more we take over their land, the more these animals, they're not really moving into our areas, we're moving into theirs. So we get more and more of these animals who are trying to figure out how they're going to continue to make a living with all of these houses and people

Starting point is 00:29:33 and manicured lawns in their environment. And we are seeing more and more of those animals becoming bolder as they spend more time around humans. Is there any other factor in that? And what I mean by that is I know places here in California and in New England where it's areas where there is not a lot of new expansion. There are no new houses around here. They haven't built houses around here in years because they can.

Starting point is 00:30:03 And I know back east there's some places like in Vermont that there's no new houses there, but the animal incidents are increasing or seemingly to increase. Is there any other factor that would play into that, or is it just mostly we're just encroaching on their land? Well, there are many different factors. One is the animals learning the availability of food and other resources that are offered by fraternizing with humans. So there's, you know, there are more opportunities for them to scavenge for the kinds of things

Starting point is 00:30:41 they want to eat. And some animals are omnivores, so they're willing to partake of whatever they happen to find on people's property. So that's why we're seeing, in particular, bears. And I did a lot of work specifically for this book on the situation in Asheville, North Carolina, know, where you're right on the edge of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which is where the bears live. But they're also finding it's really easy to get a meal by walking into somebody's garage and, you know, going into their easily accessible trash to find whatever

Starting point is 00:31:19 they may have thrown out that day. Bears do this. Coyotes do some of this. We're finding that coyotes in particular have developed a taste for chicken. So if you leave chicken bones in your trash there you might find them going through it and then of course the usual is the raccoons that have been scavenging for a very long time and some of the other animals that are finding this particularly advantageous for them but it does seem that well where i live and we were talking before we started the interview that that i live in an area where you know in the last three nights our ring cameras have caught a bobcat in our driveway, a bear. We have a bear that walks past our, into our driveway on its way to and from somewhere

Starting point is 00:32:07 almost every night. And it does seem as if they're less afraid of humans, that in fact, maybe before they would be a little more careful about encountering humans, they don't seem to care if we're around. That is absolutely the case. Some animals, in fact, really prefer to be around humans, particularly while they're raising their young because there are certain predators that will not approach human beings and don't want to be on their property. So foxes in particular are very fond of nesting under somebody's garage or their back steps or their porch and raising their kits right there where, you know, the usual predators won't go.

Starting point is 00:32:59 So there are some advantages like that. But it's true that the more time that animals spend around humans, the more they realize that we are not predatory, that we're not going to hurt them. So they get a little bolder. And the more they find food and other resources that they want from us, the more often we're going to see them, the more frequently they're going to visit. So in particular, the bear in your area doesn't sound like he's coming on to your property,

Starting point is 00:33:31 particularly to find his dinner for that evening. But there may be something right there in the neighborhood that he frequents. So he's coming, he just happens to pass by you. Yeah. Well, we have several. We have a new mama bear with her two cubs in the neighborhood. and we've had, I've told this story before, but we've twice had bears in the house, in the kitchen,

Starting point is 00:33:58 eating peanut butter out of our cupboard. And sitting down on the living room floor and we're standing there looking at them and they're looking at us. And they don't care, right? Well, I don't know about that. I think they seem to care, but not that much. Much. Like they kept our, they've seemed worried, but not too worried. But eventually, well, I had always heard, and this is what I wanted to ask you. So I had always heard that the way you get rid of a bear is you make a lot of noise, you make yourself big. You basically be an irritant and they get up and leave. And that's what I did both times. And that's exactly what happened. They got up and left.

Starting point is 00:34:43 Yeah. And that's the thing that in the end, you can still intimidate the bear, or at least. annoy it. I don't think I was intimidating, but I was being annoying. That will do it. But the thing about bears is they have an extraordinary sense of smell. So whatever you have in the house or in the garage, the garage is usually where they plunder, where they'll chew their way through a door or just knock it down and go in and get whatever they want out of the trash that they can smell.

Starting point is 00:35:19 But when it comes to getting into your house, then the question becomes, you know, what have you got that they are, that they can smell? And peanut butter would be a strong one for that. And how easy is it for them to break in? You know, it's a question of, you know, possibly making sure that you lock your door every night and don't just leave it open so that the screen door is there. It's nothing for a bear to go through a screen door. Yes, I'm aware of that in two occasions. The screen doors don't mean anything to them. Now, the scariest thing a person can do with a bear is come between the mama bear and the cubs.

Starting point is 00:36:03 That's going to be a bad situation no matter what you do. Right. Yes. We've been warned of that in this area. And there was an attack of a guy who just accidentally happened to hike through and was in between mama and her cubs. and Mama went after him, and he survived. But that's the only, and that's the thing, you know, people talk about how dangerous it is, and yet there are virtually no encounters where anybody's ever been hurt.

Starting point is 00:36:33 It seems like they're just looking for food and they're not looking for trouble. That's exactly right. Yeah, bears don't, you know, they have a natural aversion to human beings. So they don't want to be your friend. You know, they don't want to come in and have. if you pet them or anything like that, they really just want to get their food. But it does depend on the kind of bear, right? Grizzly bears are really dangerous, are they not?

Starting point is 00:37:01 They are. They absolutely are. They're two to three times the weight of a black bear. I mean, you could conceivably fight off a black bear, but you're not going to fight off a grizzly. So that's a bear you really want to avoid. And I've been within 30 feet of a grizzly. And when that thing gets up on its hind legs, you do not want to be in the vicinity. That is a terrifying thing. The best thing you can do with the grizzly bear is to play dead.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Just fall on the ground and cover your head and hope that the bear just ignores you and goes away. Boy, that would be so hard to do. That would be, that's like giving up. Well, that's exactly. But you're not going to fight the bear off. You're not going to scare it. You know, the bear knows it's way bigger than you. Generally speaking, for example, we have a lot of coyotes in our area.

Starting point is 00:37:55 But the same rule applies in that coyotes don't seem like they're looking for trouble. They're looking for food. But they look nasty or they can look nasty. But is that, again, a fairly safe assumption that if you see a coyote, I mean, people get very, scared but I don't think the coyote's that interested in you. No, coyotes don't naturally attack human beings or eat human beings. It's not a thing they do. So if a coyote is coming into your yard or onto your property, he's looking for leavings, you know, scraps that might be in your trash. If a coyote chases you, it's because it feels

Starting point is 00:38:46 threatened. So it wants that, it wants you the, um, the adversary out of its way as quickly as possible. So coyotes know if they chase you, you're going to run, you're going to go in the house and then they're done. Generally, coyotes eat deer and other small animals, rabbits and skunks and foxes that, you know, the other small things, rats, moles, things like that. So, uh, they're not they're not going to take on a human being for the most part, although there have been instances where they have chased children and even bitten children. So it is something that you want to keep in mind. Well, are coyotes everywhere? I mean, is there all over the U.S.? They are. Coyotes are one of the few animals that has really thrived since, you know, there was a point

Starting point is 00:39:41 a hundred or so years ago when agriculture moved in everywhere and coyotes and bears and not so much bears but but mountain lions and bobcats were you know picking up farmers chickens or their lambs or whatever the small animal was and grabbing those for their own meal so a bounty was sworn out on all of these animals that farmers and other hunters could kill as many as they wanted, and they would actually make money doing this, that the city or county would pay them for having done this. So that wiped out many animals. Mountain lions in particular have really struggled since those days. And they're gone. They're completely extirpated from the eastern United States. But coyotes somehow thrived in this

Starting point is 00:40:37 environment, even though they were killing them like mad, they somehow managed to just keep expanding their territory. So they're now in all 48 states, which is pretty amazing when you think about how resilient this particular species is. So there's always this question, because there's always somebody in the neighborhood you hear that's, you know, feeding the wildlife. You know, they leave food out for the bears or whatever. And you think that can't be a good idea. It's a terrible idea. You know, you absolutely should not be doing that. Once you start feeding the animals deliberately, and then now I'm going to leave birds out of this,

Starting point is 00:41:20 bird food and bird feeders do not make birds dependent on humans. They're just part of the routine, part of the where they stop off to get a little food before they go on to their next feeding place, and they continue to do that all day. other animals, particularly bears, raccoons, once that animal becomes what we call habituated to humans feeding it, it will become more and more aggressive about getting that food. That's when the bears start to break into your garage or come into your house because somebody has been feeding them and they know that we are food sources. That's not a good situation and in that kind of situation very often the bear in particular has to be taken out

Starting point is 00:42:10 and destroyed and that's a terrible shame so so feeding the animals is that is just a rotten thing to do to the animals it's not fair to them they are perfectly capable of finding their own food well there is often this attitude and and it may be correct but when you tell people about scary encounters in and around your home with animals, with wild animals, you often get that, well, they were there first. I mean, this is their home too, and yeah, maybe. But that doesn't make it okay, particularly if you've got bears that are coming into your home. Nobody wants that.

Starting point is 00:42:58 Honestly, even the bear doesn't want that. They just want the peanut butter. I'm curious, not just about bears, but wildlife in general, it would seem that once a bear or a possum or a raccoon or anything comes to your house and eats food there because it's in the trash or whatever, they remember that and come back or they just, they're looking for food wherever they can find it. Well, both things are true, but they do remember where they got an easy meal. so that's a thing to keep in mind and especially when these animals are feeding young or when they're getting ready for their winter hibernation they need a lot more calories and so throughout the fall in particular they need lots more calories that they can they can pack on so that they can make it through several months without actually eating anything so knowing that

Starting point is 00:44:00 that's when they're going to be looking for more food. So that's suburb and fall, essentially. And discouraging that, making it more and more difficult for them to get food from you, they will eventually get discouraged. But they do remember where they got an easy meal and they will come back over and over. And that's not just bears. It's just wildlife in general. Yeah, that's squirrels. That's groundhogs. That's bobcats generally don't eat what what we eat. They're looking for fresh kill. So they're not, you know, you may see them cross your yard, but they're not going to hang out there. One thing I've never understood is, so we have a bobcat and we know it's the same one because it doesn't have a tail. It's like it lost its tail. Some

Starting point is 00:44:50 chopped it off or I don't know, but it's clearly there's no tail. And so we know when we see it's the same, it's the same one, but we only see one. Well, you can't have one without parents, and is there only one? And there's only a couple of bears. Are there more bears than we think there are? Probably, yeah. Bobcats are kind of loners. They're not going to be coming together in big groups.

Starting point is 00:45:19 So you're seeing the one that this is that cat's territory. And yes, there could well be, you know, many animals, we tend to think about animals as families the way humans are, but many animals do not wander in family groups. They break things up. Well, I can say from experience, even listening to you say, you know, bears and coyotes aren't really coming after people. But when there is one a few feet away from you and you lock eyes with it, that is truly frightening. And it sure seems like it's happening more and more, so it's good to know what to do and what not to do and try to figure out how we can peacefully coexist.

Starting point is 00:46:03 I've been speaking with Randy Minotaur, who is a real expert on this topic, and she's author of a book called The Bear at the Bird Feeder, why we're seeing more wild animals in our neighborhoods and how we can live in harmony with them. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Randy. Good to have you on. Great.

Starting point is 00:46:22 much, Mike. I'm glad to be able to share this with people. If you get pulled over by the police, there are a few things worth remembering. First of all, police learn in their earliest training that approaching a car they've pulled over is extremely dangerous. Why? Because they have no idea what's going on in your car. You know you're a nice person and all things are fine, but they don't know that. You could be a drug dealer or a kidnapper or an escape prisoner. Many police officers have been attacked, shot, and killed on traffic stops. So what does that mean to you? Well, anything you can do to show that you're not a danger will help the situation and maybe even get you out of a ticket. So

Starting point is 00:47:10 roll your window down all the way and turn on your interior light. This way the officer can talk to you and can see you and notice that you don't have anything to hide, like a weapon. Put your hands on the steering wheel, because police are trained to watch your hands and see where they go. If you start rummaging through the glove compartment or start putting your hands in your pockets, you escalate that fear that you could have a weapon. You should stay inside the car unless you're asked to get out, and be calm and polite. Don't volunteer more information than required and only provide what's legally asked.

Starting point is 00:47:49 You should know your rights, too. You can politely refuse an unwarranted search, unless they have probable cause, and you have the right to remain silent in many situations. And if asked a question you're not sure about, you can choose not to answer or respond with, I prefer not to say. And that is something you should know. Remember, there are literally hundreds of episodes of something you should know,

Starting point is 00:48:14 so as you go about your business during the holidays, we're always here with hundreds and hundreds of episodes to listen to and keep you company. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Do you ever find yourself lying in bed and your brain then decides this is the perfect time to remind you of everything? And then your brain starts racing and you start thinking and sleep seems impossible. This is why I really like Catherine Nikolai's podcast called Nothing Much Happens. It's simple. It's soothing. and it works. Each episode is just a calm, cozy bedtime story. There's no drama, nothing intense,

Starting point is 00:48:55 nothing to follow, you don't have to write anything down. It's just simple repetition and these really peaceful sensory details that give your brain permission to settle down and go to sleep. Millions of people use it as part of their nighttime routine, and I totally get why. They recently did a story I love called The Guest Room. It was all about, you know, clean sheets and fresh towels and those things I love that helped me sleep. You really should try it tonight when you go to bed. You really should try it tonight when you go to bed. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes every Monday and Thursday. The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robert Ince and I'm sat next to Brian Cox,

Starting point is 00:49:40 who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series. Eels. And what else? It was fascinating, though. The Eels. But we're not just doing Eels, are we? We're doing a bit. Brain computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, signs of the North Pole,

Starting point is 00:49:55 and Eels. Did I mention the Eels? Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Segas O.C? Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - The Science of Memory Manipulation & Why Wildlife is Invading Neighborhoods

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