Linden - The compass of pleasure: how our brains make fatty foods, orgasm, exercise, marijuana, generosity, vodka, learning, and gambling feel so good

Pleasure never comes sincere to man;

but lent by heaven upon hard usury.

John Dryden, Edippus

Phil was probably passed out somewhere, enjoying his dead fathers legacy. I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldnt think of anyone whod ever loved me that much. My uncle had already promised his to the mail lady.

Donald Ray Pollock, Bactine

B angkok, 1989. The afternoon rains have ended, leaving the early evening air briefly free of smog and allowing that distinctive Thai perfume, frangipani with a faint note of sewage, to waft over the shiny streets. I hail a tuk-tuk , a three-wheel motorcycle taxi, and hop aboard. My young driver has an entrepreneurial smile as he turns around and begins the usual interrogation of male travelers.

So you want girl?

No.

I see. Long pause, eyebrows slowly raised. You want boy!

Uh, no.

Longer pause. Sound of engine sputtering at idle. You want ladyboy?

No, I answer, a bit more emphatically, nonplussed at the idea that I give the impression of desiring this particular commodity.

I got cheap cigarettes Johnnie Walker

No thanks.

Undaunted, he moves on to the next category of his wares, now with lowered voice.

You want ganja?

No.

Coke?

No.

Ya baa [methamphetamine tablets]?

Nope.

A whisper now. Heroin?

No.

Voice raised back to normal. I can take you to cockfight. You can gamble!

Ill pass.

Just a little bit irritated now. So, farang , what you want?

Prik kee noo , I respond. Those little mouse shit peppers. I want some good, spicy dinner. My driver, not surprisingly, is disappointed. As we tear through the streets to a restaurant, blasting through puddles, Im left wondering: Aside from various shades of illegality, what do all his offers have in common? What is it exactly that makes a vice?

We humans have a complicated and ambivalent relationship to pleasure, which we spend an enormous amount of time and resources pursuing. A key motivator of our lives, pleasure is central to learning, for we must find things like food, water, and sex rewarding in order to survive and pass our genetic material to the next generation. Certain forms of pleasure are accorded special status. Many of our most important rituals involving prayer, music, dance, and meditation produce a kind of transcendent pleasure that has become deeply ingrained in human cultural practice.

As we do with most powerful forces, however, we also want to regulate pleasure. In cultures around the world we find well-defined ideas and rules about pleasure that have persisted throughout history in any number of forms and variations:

Pleasure should be sought in moderation.

Pleasure must be earned.

Pleasure must be achieved naturally.

Pleasure is transitory.

The denial of pleasure can yield spiritual growth.

Our legal systems, our religions, our educational systems are all deeply concerned with controlling pleasure. We have created detailed rules and customs surrounding sex, drugs, food, alcohol, and even gambling. Jails are bursting with people who have violated laws that proscribe certain forms of pleasure or who profit by encouraging others to do so.

One can fashion reasonable theories of human pleasure and its regulation using the methods of cultural anthropology or social history. These are valid and useful endeavors, for ideas and practices involving human pleasure are certainly deeply influenced by culture. However, what Im seeking here in The Compass of Pleasure is a different type of understandingone less nuanced, perhaps, but more fundamental: a cross-cultural biological explanation. In this book I will argue that most experiences in our lives that we find transcendentwhether illicit vices or socially sanctioned ritual and social practices as diverse as exercise, meditative prayer, or even charitable givingactivate an anatomically and biochemically defined pleasure circuit in the brain. Shopping, orgasm, learning, highly caloric foods, gambling, prayer, dancing til you drop, and playing on the Internet: They all evoke neural signals that converge on a small group of interconnected brain areas called the medial forebrain pleasure circuit. It is in these tiny clumps of neurons that human pleasure is felt. This intrinsic pleasure circuitry can also be co-opted by artificial activators like cocaine or nicotine or heroin or alcohol. Evolution has, in effect, hardwired us to catch a pleasure buzz from a wide variety of experiences from crack to cannabis, from meditation to masturbation, from Bordeaux to beef.