How Pleasure Works by Bloom

Ref: Paul Bloom (2010). How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why we Like what we Like. New York.

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Summary­

  • The Psychological and Social Impact of Pleasure in our Lives.

  • We assign values to such everyday objects on the basis of their utility- what they can do for us.

  • A rule of pleasure is that it is an inverted U- when you first experience something, it’s hard to process and not enjoyable; upon repeated exposure, it’s easy to process and gives pleasure; then it gets too easy, and therefore boring or even annoying.

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Implict Bias

  • A mutually reinforcing cycle: Suppose you think Perrier is purer than tap water, somehow superior. This enhances your experience of how it tastes: when you drink Perrier, you enjoy it more. This, in turn, reinforces your belief, which enhances your taste, and so on.

  • If you are an audiophile and believe that expensive speakers significantly enhance your experience of music, then you will be biased to experience this, which will then reinforce your belief about the value of your expensive speakers.

  • Suppose you believe that gay men are effeminate. This will affect your experience, and you’ll be more prone to interpret an action by a gay man as being effeminate than if you saw the same behavior in a straight man. Your experience- hey, that gay man is quite effeminate!- will thus reinforce your stereotype.

  • By distorting experience, beliefs, including essentialist beliefs, garner support for themselves, which is one reason why it is so hard to change our minds about anything.

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Attraction

  • “Mere Exposure” effect: people like what they are familiar with. Mere Exposure applies to attractiveness, then, explaining some of the appeal of the girl next door.

  • One study found that a main factor in attractiveness has nothing to do with averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphism or anything like that- it’s whether the person is smiling.

  • In the largest study ever of human mate preferences, looking at people in 37 cultures, the most important factor for both men and women is kindness.

  • For the sake of charming the opposite sex. It is not hard to see how song and dance can impress- developing and maintaining a rhythm for an extended period is a useful display of intelligence, creativity, stamina, and motor control, all of which are positive traits in a mate.

  • Displays of cleverness, discipline, strength, speed, and so on capture our interest because they reveal relevant properties of an individual.

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Spirituality & Religion

  • Spirituality: This is the notion that there is more to the world than what strikes our senses.

  • Religion: consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

  • Eucharist: a ritual that millions of Catholics regularly practice, in which they describe themselves as ingesting the body and blood of Christ.

  • At the end of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, in which the hero Arjuna asks Krishna if he can see the universe for himself, and so Krishna gives him a “cosmic eye.” Arjuna then sees gods and suns and infinite space: “Things never before have I seen, and ecstatic is my joy; yet fear and trembling perturb my mind.” This is awe.

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Misc Quotes

  • Cuckolds: Men unknowingly raising the children of other men. The term comes from “cuckoo,” which is a bird that lays her eggs in the nests of other birds.

  • Virgin: Latin for young woman.

  • Charles Darwin on Marriage: In one of his love letters to Emma Wedgwood, a week before they married, Darwin wrote, “I think you will humanize me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.” Darwin’s Marry and Not Marry List:

    • Marry: Children, Constant companion (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved & played with, better than a dog anyhow, home, & somehow to take care of house, charms of music & female chit-chat, these things good for one’s health- but terrible loss of time.

    • Not marry: Freedom to go where one liked, choice of society & little of it, conversation with clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evenings, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books &c, if many children forced to gain one’s bread (but then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much), perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.

  • Virtual worlds will expand, making interactive daydreaming more attractive, and technological improvement will blur the distinction between reality and imagination.

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