Excerpts from Bad Brains by James Kimmel Jr.
Your brain on revenge looks a lot like your brain on drugs—and there’s only one twisted way to get your fix.
Revenge is an act designed to inflict harm on someone because they’ve inflicted harm on us. We could yearn for anything after we’ve been mistreated, like a scoop of ice cream, a nap, or a relaxing massage. But what most of us really want is the other person’s pain—and for them to know that their pain is because of the pain they’ve caused us.
The desire for revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence.
Recent neuroscience discoveries reveal a chilling picture: Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. Brain imaging studies show that grievances—real or imagined perceptions of injustice, disrespect, betrayal, shame, or victimization—activate the “pain network,” specifically the anterior insula. The brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure. Pleasure can come from many things, but humans have evolved to feel intense pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us, or their proxies.
By understanding the desire for revenge as the result of an addictive brain-biological process, and that revenge is the primary motive for almost all forms of violence, we can, for the first time in human history, develop evidence-based public health approaches to prevent and treat violence.