In 1993, Michael Stokes shot two people in a Connecticut restaurant after obsessing over imagined slights from a coworker. Yale researcher James Kimmel Jr. found that fantasizing about revenge activates the brain's reward system like addiction, intensifying rage and redirecting suicidal thoughts toward violence.
In 1993, a man named Michael Stokes walked into a restaurant in Connecticut and shot 2 people. One of them was a former coworker named Wanda who had rejected his romantic advances. Researcher James Kimmel Jr. at Yale studied the case, and what he found was disturbing. Michael Stokes had been suicidal. He was planning to kill himself. But then he started imagining how Wanda would react to his death. In his mind, she was laughing. Mocking him. Those imagined scenes, scenes that never actually happened, filled him with so much rage that he redirected his plan. Instead of harming himself, he decided to harm her. James says this reveals something unsettling about revenge. It activates the same reward circuits in the brain as addiction. The more you replay the fantasy of getting even, the more your brain craves it. And over time, it can override rational thought entirely. Michael Stokes was sentenced to decades in prison. His life was destroyed by a reaction to something that only ever existed in his imagination. The lesson for the rest of us: the stories we tell ourselves about other people's intentions can become the most dangerous stories of all. For more insights about the science of the mind, tune into Hidden Brain on Apple, Spotify, or hiddenbrain.org.
