Pleasure An extract from "The Science of Craving" Link
Pleasure is sometimes elusive and always transient. If only we could bottle it. Music, according to Kringelbach, is the closest we’ll come. “It is a tension-and-release kind of thing. You can keep it going for the longest time, waxing and waning, wanting and liking. If you’ve done one of these all-night dancing sessions, it’s fantastic. There’s a reason people do it, even if they have to break the law.”
In spring 2014, Kringelbach and colleagues from Oxford and Aarhus released a research paper on groove –music that makes people want to get up and dance and is, as the study puts it, “frequently observed in…funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music”. They took 50 drum tracks, 34 from existing funk songs, the rest designed for the experiment using Garageband software, and tested them on participants who were asked to report how much they liked them, and how much they made them want to move. “Good Old Music” by George Clinton’s Funkadelic (1970) scored among the highest. The secret, they found, is a perfect balance of complexity and predictability. “Medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure,” says Kringelbach. “The pleasure of groove is about balancing the pull and push of tension and release.”
Part of music’s appeal is that it unites us – dancing with someone is infinitely more fun than doing it alone. “If you want to talk about euphoric experiences,” Kringelbach says, “it’s all about other people.” Social pleasures, he says, are the most important. “They also make the link with well-being.” The amount of love and attention we receive from our carers during the first 18 months of life, Kringelbach says, “sets our hedonic threshold”. People who don’t get enough positive interaction early on are much more likely to become anxious or depressed young adults.
Although desire and pleasure often go hand in hand, it is perfectly possible to want something without liking it. Think of the crazy impulse purchases that are more about the frisson of shopping than the product itself. The cake that disgusts you, but you eat it anyway. The drugs you crave, even though they’re no fun any more. And as for that ex-lover...
A team at Stanford University have found that if we don’t get something we want, we desire it more while liking it less. For their 2010 study entitled “Lusting while Loathing”, 60 participants were recruited online to test (they were told as a cover story) new gaming and payment systems, with the chance to win prizes. Some of them won prizes, while others did not. Those who didn’t win even exhibited increased liking for items merely similar to the prizes they didn’t win.
Discussions of free will have arisen out of Berridge’s work because wanting and liking can happen both consciously and unconsciously. This is why urgent desires can be irrational and inconsistent, and fly in the face of what we know is best for us in the long run. Unconscious wanting can defy our best-laid plans to end an unhealthy relationship or not polish off that box of chocolates.
One of Kringelbach’s studies pinpoints the complex contrast between wanting and liking. Men and women who were not parents were given two tasks. First, they were asked to rate the cuteness of a series of babies’ faces. Men rated all the babies less attractive than the women did. Conclusion: men don’t like babies’ faces as much as women. But Kringelbach wondered if it was that men aren’t supposed to be moved by babies as much as women are – they are apt to feel that it’s not macho, or even that they might be taken for paedophiles.
For the second task, the subjects could press buttons either to keep the babies on the screen or make them go away. This time, the men made as much effort as the women to keep the adorable faces in view (both were equally ruthless in banishing the less cute). Conclusion: men want to look at cute baby pictures just as much as women do. “Here’s a really nice interesting difference between wanting and liking,” Kringelbach says, “based on a cultural phenomenon.”
Together with his Michigan colleague Terry Robinson, Berridge has sought to understand why addicts crave drugs, even after years of abstinence, and how this overwhelming desire could be separate from liking the drug of choice. They have found that addictive substances hijack the dopamine system, altering it permanently by a process they call incentive-sensitisation. We now know, he says, that “when exposed to addictive substances – cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, alcohol, nicotine and even sugar – neurons are releasing more dopamine, and also sprouting more receptors for a transmitter that makes them release the dopamine.” This is a permanent physical change, which remains even if they stop taking the drug (although dopamine production in general slows as we age).
What’s more, brains become sensitised to cues. If you use Pavlovian conditioning on rats to link a certain cue to cocaine or sugar, the rats will eventually end up wanting the cue more than the substance. This behaviour is also common in humans. For many addicts, scoring drugs becomes part of the ritual, eventually rendering the anticipation more pleasurable than the drug. The same may apply to checking our phones.
Studies in humans with Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by dopamine neurons dying, have reported that 13-15% of patients treated with dopamine-stimulating drugs experience Impulse Control Disorder (ICD) as a side effect. This is expressed in the form of gambling, compulsive sexual behaviour, binge eating and compulsive shopping and/or internet use. When they stop the medication, the ICD abates.
Dopamine is a powerful motivator, and itself a high, of sorts. When it is stimulated, subjects have reported that everything and everyone seems brighter and more desirable. “There are notions”, Berridge told me in Washington, “that dopamine’s anticipatory joy is a wonderful thing, and certainly it is, when you think of Christmas morning, window-shopping and things. Even if it’s all by itself, without the pleasure coming, people do become addicted to it.”
Some still believe that dopamine is a form of pleasure, but Berridge is adamant that they’re wrong. “It can be pleasant in situations, and it can exist on its own and almost look like pleasure, but it can also be quite unpleasant.” He cites the myth of Tantalus, which gave us the word “tantalise”. “Son of Zeus, condemned by the gods for his misdeeds, he’s always going to be tempted: fruits and water always just out of reach. A state of eternal maximal anticipation, but it’s not pleasant.”
On this November day, Ann Arbor is awash with rosy-cheeked undergraduates sipping Thanksgiving-themed coffee, tapping away on gleaming MacBook Airs. Surely the choice and messages we’re offered at every turn are feeding our dopamine system, in a similar way to addictive drugs? “That is a legitimate notion,” Berridge says. “The advertising, the availability of it all, these are tempting cues urging us to want...We are in a constant state of dopaminergic excitation in these cues. It’s not the cue itself, and it’s not the brain-dopamine activation itself, but put them together in a dopamine-reactive brain and whoof, you have this want.”
Some brains are more dopamine-reactive, and thus prone to addiction. “Roughly 30% of individuals are very susceptible.” Genetics, traumatic stress during childhood, gender (women are more prone) and other factors are all implicated. Along with pleasure rewards and their cues, novelty also activates dopamine. Even something as simple as dropping your keys once will fire dopamine neurons. Drop them a few more times and the neurons will get bored and take no notice.
It’s reassuring to know that, as Peter Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at ucla, writes in his new book “The Well Tuned Brain” (W.W. Norton), “our acquisitive mania, with all its unintended consequences, has emerged not because we are evil, but because in a time of plenty, such ancient instinctual strivings no longer serve their original purpose.” On the phone, he tells me he is fascinated by the idea that “the consumer wants something continuously if you can give them novelty,” and agrees that the market economy has intensified the dopamine-wanting system. “We have yoked fundamental biology, putting wanting, liking and reward together into a cultural vision of what is progress. We’ve forgotten how you constrain desire.”
Take the construct of money, he adds. You can eat to the point of being satiated. You can even have enough of sex. But people never feel they have too much money. “So we’ve built this interesting system which now drives the biology.”
Pride of place in Berridge’s lab goes to a group photograph of himself, other addiction specialists and the Dalai Lama. Mounted underneath, in the same frame, is a mysterious thin, white rod, which turns out to be an optical fibre used for manipulating the brain with light. “I figured, I won’t throw it away,” Berridge says. “It’s, er, the only optogenetics laser fibre that’s been held by the Dalai Lama.”
The picture was taken to commemorate the week he spent communing with the Dalai Lama in India in 2013. This meeting of minds had a profound effect on Berridge, and he was particularly struck by the effectiveness of meditation in taming our dopamine desires – not only among Buddhists.
Sarah Bowen, an addiction therapist in Seattle who was also invited on the Dalai Lama trip, has had significant success in helping recovering addicts by using mindfulness meditation. Over 12 months, this treatment reduced substance use more effectively than cognitive-behavioural therapy or the 12-step programme. It’s not a cure, and won’t work for everyone, because it requires commitment to get the benefits. But mindfulness’s tentacles are rapidly spreading throughout the Western world, perhaps because it’s one of the few palpable antidotes to the dopamine frenzy of modern life.
It’s not that meditation makes the wanting go away. “What it is doing”, Berridge says, “is giving the more cognitive mind a way of distancing itself from the urgency of those wants. It’s a practised mental gymnastic. A want occurs, but because you’re so practised, you can recognise that want, appraise it, feel it all around, focus on that, and the feeling of urgency as a feeling, without engaging in it.”
That’s not to say that self-control alone doesn’t stand a chance. Take the most extreme form of wanting: addiction. There are two main schools of thought on its hold over us, which Berridge and the Cambridge philosophy professor Richard Holton outline in a chapter of a recent book, “Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience”, edited by an Oxford neuroethicist, Neil Levy. The first is the disease model: addicts are driven “by a pathologically intense compulsion that they can do nothing to resist”. The second is that addicts’ decisions are no different from normal choices, and are dealt with intellectually.
Holton and Berridge call for a middle ground. The strength of dopamine/wanting in an addict’s brain is so fierce that it is hard to conquer. Addicted pilots and anaesthetists, who have to take blood and urine tests to keep their jobs, are remarkably good at avoiding drugs and alcohol when they have to. But not all addicts have such clear incentives, and people in these fields may have been disciplined in the first place. For the rest of us, there are ways to give self-control a leg-up.
Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow tests told children that they could forgo one marshmallow for the promise of two if they waited a while. Mischel tracked the children in later life and found a link between self-control and success. The controlled kids had resisted the marshmallow by simply making a decision and moving on without further discussion. They turned away from it, or tugged their pigtails to distract themselves from allowing it to arouse their senses. The children who deliberated, or lingered over the marshmallow, were more likely to cave in.
“It looks as though the best way of resisting is not to open the question,” Holton tells me, between mouthfuls of plum crumble in the dimly lit dining hall at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Free will is one of Holton’s areas of interest, and having read the empirical literature on the subject, he reckons you’re more likely to beat your desires if you rehearse a script, such as “I’m not having dessert,” and repeat it to yourself when dessert is offered, shutting down any last-minute internal wrestling. Or, as our grandparents might have put it, forewarned is forearmed. “The one thing you do”, Holton says, “is start to make people aware that this is what’s happening to them and give them the tools to regulate it themselves.”
“If we knew more about the way our brains work,” Whybrow says, “then we would know our vulnerabilities.” The Dalai Lama told Bowen (partly, Berridge suspects, to provoke) that her mindfulness for addicts was merely applying a Band Aid to the wound. But while it might be better to cultivate a civilisation in which people are immune to addictions and cravings, or at least where temptation isn’t shoved under our noses in the name of profit, this is the world we inhabit. As Berridge says, “we have a lot of wounds.”
My wife has a packet of marshmallows in her cookery draw. She never uses them. She doesn't know it, but I steal one a every month. They are the best tasting marshmallows on the planet.
Whenever you have an argument with someone, there comes a moment where you must ask yourself, whatever your political persuasion, 'am I the Nazi?'
Chris, you don't seem to be happy much about anything.
Ho hum.
Rufus
15 Jan 2017, 05:24 PM
Pleasure An extract from "The Science of Craving" Link
Pleasure is sometimes elusive and always transient. If only we could bottle it. Music, according to Kringelbach, is the closest we’ll come. “It is a tension-and-release kind of thing. You can keep it going for the longest time, waxing and waning, wanting and liking. If you’ve done one of these all-night dancing sessions, it’s fantastic. There’s a reason people do it, even if they have to break the law.”
In spring 2014, Kringelbach and colleagues from Oxford and Aarhus released a research paper on groove –music that makes people want to get up and dance and is, as the study puts it, “frequently observed in…funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music”. They took 50 drum tracks, 34 from existing funk songs, the rest designed for the experiment using Garageband software, and tested them on participants who were asked to report how much they liked them, and how much they made them want to move. “Good Old Music” by George Clinton’s Funkadelic (1970) scored among the highest. The secret, they found, is a perfect balance of complexity and predictability. “Medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure,” says Kringelbach. “The pleasure of groove is about balancing the pull and push of tension and release.”
Part of music’s appeal is that it unites us – dancing with someone is infinitely more fun than doing it alone. “If you want to talk about euphoric experiences,” Kringelbach says, “it’s all about other people.” Social pleasures, he says, are the most important. “They also make the link with well-being.” The amount of love and attention we receive from our carers during the first 18 months of life, Kringelbach says, “sets our hedonic threshold”. People who don’t get enough positive interaction early on are much more likely to become anxious or depressed young adults.
Although desire and pleasure often go hand in hand, it is perfectly possible to want something without liking it. Think of the crazy impulse purchases that are more about the frisson of shopping than the product itself. The cake that disgusts you, but you eat it anyway. The drugs you crave, even though they’re no fun any more. And as for that ex-lover...
A team at Stanford University have found that if we don’t get something we want, we desire it more while liking it less. For their 2010 study entitled “Lusting while Loathing”, 60 participants were recruited online to test (they were told as a cover story) new gaming and payment systems, with the chance to win prizes. Some of them won prizes, while others did not. Those who didn’t win even exhibited increased liking for items merely similar to the prizes they didn’t win.
Discussions of free will have arisen out of Berridge’s work because wanting and liking can happen both consciously and unconsciously. This is why urgent desires can be irrational and inconsistent, and fly in the face of what we know is best for us in the long run. Unconscious wanting can defy our best-laid plans to end an unhealthy relationship or not polish off that box of chocolates.
One of Kringelbach’s studies pinpoints the complex contrast between wanting and liking. Men and women who were not parents were given two tasks. First, they were asked to rate the cuteness of a series of babies’ faces. Men rated all the babies less attractive than the women did. Conclusion: men don’t like babies’ faces as much as women. But Kringelbach wondered if it was that men aren’t supposed to be moved by babies as much as women are – they are apt to feel that it’s not macho, or even that they might be taken for paedophiles.
For the second task, the subjects could press buttons either to keep the babies on the screen or make them go away. This time, the men made as much effort as the women to keep the adorable faces in view (both were equally ruthless in banishing the less cute). Conclusion: men want to look at cute baby pictures just as much as women do. “Here’s a really nice interesting difference between wanting and liking,” Kringelbach says, “based on a cultural phenomenon.”
Together with his Michigan colleague Terry Robinson, Berridge has sought to understand why addicts crave drugs, even after years of abstinence, and how this overwhelming desire could be separate from liking the drug of choice. They have found that addictive substances hijack the dopamine system, altering it permanently by a process they call incentive-sensitisation. We now know, he says, that “when exposed to addictive substances – cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, alcohol, nicotine and even sugar – neurons are releasing more dopamine, and also sprouting more receptors for a transmitter that makes them release the dopamine.” This is a permanent physical change, which remains even if they stop taking the drug (although dopamine production in general slows as we age).
What’s more, brains become sensitised to cues. If you use Pavlovian conditioning on rats to link a certain cue to cocaine or sugar, the rats will eventually end up wanting the cue more than the substance. This behaviour is also common in humans. For many addicts, scoring drugs becomes part of the ritual, eventually rendering the anticipation more pleasurable than the drug. The same may apply to checking our phones.
Studies in humans with Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by dopamine neurons dying, have reported that 13-15% of patients treated with dopamine-stimulating drugs experience Impulse Control Disorder (ICD) as a side effect. This is expressed in the form of gambling, compulsive sexual behaviour, binge eating and compulsive shopping and/or internet use. When they stop the medication, the ICD abates.
Dopamine is a powerful motivator, and itself a high, of sorts. When it is stimulated, subjects have reported that everything and everyone seems brighter and more desirable. “There are notions”, Berridge told me in Washington, “that dopamine’s anticipatory joy is a wonderful thing, and certainly it is, when you think of Christmas morning, window-shopping and things. Even if it’s all by itself, without the pleasure coming, people do become addicted to it.”
Some still believe that dopamine is a form of pleasure, but Berridge is adamant that they’re wrong. “It can be pleasant in situations, and it can exist on its own and almost look like pleasure, but it can also be quite unpleasant.” He cites the myth of Tantalus, which gave us the word “tantalise”. “Son of Zeus, condemned by the gods for his misdeeds, he’s always going to be tempted: fruits and water always just out of reach. A state of eternal maximal anticipation, but it’s not pleasant.”
On this November day, Ann Arbor is awash with rosy-cheeked undergraduates sipping Thanksgiving-themed coffee, tapping away on gleaming MacBook Airs. Surely the choice and messages we’re offered at every turn are feeding our dopamine system, in a similar way to addictive drugs? “That is a legitimate notion,” Berridge says. “The advertising, the availability of it all, these are tempting cues urging us to want...We are in a constant state of dopaminergic excitation in these cues. It’s not the cue itself, and it’s not the brain-dopamine activation itself, but put them together in a dopamine-reactive brain and whoof, you have this want.”
Some brains are more dopamine-reactive, and thus prone to addiction. “Roughly 30% of individuals are very susceptible.” Genetics, traumatic stress during childhood, gender (women are more prone) and other factors are all implicated. Along with pleasure rewards and their cues, novelty also activates dopamine. Even something as simple as dropping your keys once will fire dopamine neurons. Drop them a few more times and the neurons will get bored and take no notice.
It’s reassuring to know that, as Peter Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at ucla, writes in his new book “The Well Tuned Brain” (W.W. Norton), “our acquisitive mania, with all its unintended consequences, has emerged not because we are evil, but because in a time of plenty, such ancient instinctual strivings no longer serve their original purpose.” On the phone, he tells me he is fascinated by the idea that “the consumer wants something continuously if you can give them novelty,” and agrees that the market economy has intensified the dopamine-wanting system. “We have yoked fundamental biology, putting wanting, liking and reward together into a cultural vision of what is progress. We’ve forgotten how you constrain desire.”
Take the construct of money, he adds. You can eat to the point of being satiated. You can even have enough of sex. But people never feel they have too much money. “So we’ve built this interesting system which now drives the biology.”
Pride of place in Berridge’s lab goes to a group photograph of himself, other addiction specialists and the Dalai Lama. Mounted underneath, in the same frame, is a mysterious thin, white rod, which turns out to be an optical fibre used for manipulating the brain with light. “I figured, I won’t throw it away,” Berridge says. “It’s, er, the only optogenetics laser fibre that’s been held by the Dalai Lama.”
The picture was taken to commemorate the week he spent communing with the Dalai Lama in India in 2013. This meeting of minds had a profound effect on Berridge, and he was particularly struck by the effectiveness of meditation in taming our dopamine desires – not only among Buddhists.
Sarah Bowen, an addiction therapist in Seattle who was also invited on the Dalai Lama trip, has had significant success in helping recovering addicts by using mindfulness meditation. Over 12 months, this treatment reduced substance use more effectively than cognitive-behavioural therapy or the 12-step programme. It’s not a cure, and won’t work for everyone, because it requires commitment to get the benefits. But mindfulness’s tentacles are rapidly spreading throughout the Western world, perhaps because it’s one of the few palpable antidotes to the dopamine frenzy of modern life.
It’s not that meditation makes the wanting go away. “What it is doing”, Berridge says, “is giving the more cognitive mind a way of distancing itself from the urgency of those wants. It’s a practised mental gymnastic. A want occurs, but because you’re so practised, you can recognise that want, appraise it, feel it all around, focus on that, and the feeling of urgency as a feeling, without engaging in it.”
That’s not to say that self-control alone doesn’t stand a chance. Take the most extreme form of wanting: addiction. There are two main schools of thought on its hold over us, which Berridge and the Cambridge philosophy professor Richard Holton outline in a chapter of a recent book, “Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience”, edited by an Oxford neuroethicist, Neil Levy. The first is the disease model: addicts are driven “by a pathologically intense compulsion that they can do nothing to resist”. The second is that addicts’ decisions are no different from normal choices, and are dealt with intellectually.
Holton and Berridge call for a middle ground. The strength of dopamine/wanting in an addict’s brain is so fierce that it is hard to conquer. Addicted pilots and anaesthetists, who have to take blood and urine tests to keep their jobs, are remarkably good at avoiding drugs and alcohol when they have to. But not all addicts have such clear incentives, and people in these fields may have been disciplined in the first place. For the rest of us, there are ways to give self-control a leg-up.
Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow tests told children that they could forgo one marshmallow for the promise of two if they waited a while. Mischel tracked the children in later life and found a link between self-control and success. The controlled kids had resisted the marshmallow by simply making a decision and moving on without further discussion. They turned away from it, or tugged their pigtails to distract themselves from allowing it to arouse their senses. The children who deliberated, or lingered over the marshmallow, were more likely to cave in.
“It looks as though the best way of resisting is not to open the question,” Holton tells me, between mouthfuls of plum crumble in the dimly lit dining hall at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Free will is one of Holton’s areas of interest, and having read the empirical literature on the subject, he reckons you’re more likely to beat your desires if you rehearse a script, such as “I’m not having dessert,” and repeat it to yourself when dessert is offered, shutting down any last-minute internal wrestling. Or, as our grandparents might have put it, forewarned is forearmed. “The one thing you do”, Holton says, “is start to make people aware that this is what’s happening to them and give them the tools to regulate it themselves.”
“If we knew more about the way our brains work,” Whybrow says, “then we would know our vulnerabilities.” The Dalai Lama told Bowen (partly, Berridge suspects, to provoke) that her mindfulness for addicts was merely applying a Band Aid to the wound. But while it might be better to cultivate a civilisation in which people are immune to addictions and cravings, or at least where temptation isn’t shoved under our noses in the name of profit, this is the world we inhabit. As Berridge says, “we have a lot of wounds.”
Life would be boring if there was no form of pleasure.
Newjerk? can you try harder than dig up another person's blog. My first promo was with Billabong and my name in English is modified with a T, am Perth born but also lived in Sydney to make my $$ It's Absolutely Fabulous if it includes brilliant locations, & high calibre tenants..what more does one want? Understand the power of the two "P"" or be financially challenged Even better when there is family who are property mad and one is born in some entitlements.....Understand that beautiful women are the exhibitionists we crave attention, whilst hot blooded men are the voyeurs ... A stunning woman can command and takes pleasure in being noticed. Seems not too many understand what it means to hold and own props and get threatened by those who do. Banks are considered to be law abiding and & rather boring places yeah not true . A bank balance sheet will show capital is dwarfed by their liabilities this means when a portions of loans is falling its problems for the bank.
My wife has a packet of marshmallows in her cookery draw. She never uses them. She doesn't know it, but I steal one a every month. They are the best tasting marshmallows on the planet.
Buy her another packet, then you can take 2 per month
Blondie girl
19 Jan 2017, 04:43 PM
Chris, you don't seem to be happy much about anything.
Ho hum. Life would be boring if there was no form of pleasure.
You got that right Blondie girl, thats why god made these creatures...
Yes I think we ALL know your weakness is Asian women.
Careful you don't get fleeced, I'm aware of a tenant who met a lovely Filipino with a daughter she eventually moved in with him and he was asked to provide $ to her family and she didn't end up telling him straight out she owed some $ that was more than what she led on.
She split when he found she was not being honest with $.
Newjerk? can you try harder than dig up another person's blog. My first promo was with Billabong and my name in English is modified with a T, am Perth born but also lived in Sydney to make my $$ It's Absolutely Fabulous if it includes brilliant locations, & high calibre tenants..what more does one want? Understand the power of the two "P"" or be financially challenged Even better when there is family who are property mad and one is born in some entitlements.....Understand that beautiful women are the exhibitionists we crave attention, whilst hot blooded men are the voyeurs ... A stunning woman can command and takes pleasure in being noticed. Seems not too many understand what it means to hold and own props and get threatened by those who do. Banks are considered to be law abiding and & rather boring places yeah not true . A bank balance sheet will show capital is dwarfed by their liabilities this means when a portions of loans is falling its problems for the bank.
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