This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

When they were teenagers, Ryan, Brown and four of his friends decided to visit a really old graveyard.

It was midnight and they all piled onto an ATV belonging to his friend David.

And this ATV is really just made for one person, so it's a vehicle with one big wheel in the front,

two big wheels in the back, and David was driving.

The rest of us were all kind of piled onto the back sitting on top of the wheel guards.

They took off down a dark country road.

There are no street lights. He's going about as fast as he possibly can, and nobody's

wearing a helmet, so if we crash, we're all dead.

Fearing for his life, Ryan spoke up.

And I said to David over the road noise, the engine noise, it'd really be nice if you'd slow down a bit.

And he decided that was actually a great opportunity to turn off the headlights.

So we're on this dark country road, no lighting, no seatbelts, no helmets.

Ryan panicked. I kind of freak out, I'm thinking he's going to kill us on the way to a graveyard,

no less. So I start yelling at him, telling him he needs to slow down and he just turned the lights back

on. And he is having none of it. He feels threatened, he feels challenged. So by the time we get to

the graveyard, I'm livid. I've been yelling at him for the past mile to slow down and turn on the lights.

And really after that weekend, we never really spoke much again.

He was not able to apologize for his behavior. I sort of apologize for mine, but I really wasn't all that

sorry. I felt like he'd taken my life and my friends' lives into his hands and treated them

callously and thoughtlessly and recklessly.

That story has stuck with Ryan, who went on to become a psychologist at Rice University in Texas.

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