How Pleasure Works

How does pleasure work? Why do we enjoy the pain of Tabasco sauce? Or enjoy horror movies when the sight of real blood makes us queasy? And why do we value original artwork over expertly rendered copies?

These are some of the questions tackled by Paul Bloom in his new book How Pleasure Works. (H/T to George for alerting me of its publication.)

I haven't read Bloom's book yet, but two online reviews (from The Times and Slate) give us the shape of some of his answers (which, based on what I'm reading, is similar to his earlier book Descartes' Baby, which I have read).

According to Bloom, one of the keys to pleasure, and human cognition generally, is that we are innate essentialists. We believe objects have an inner, hidden quality--an "essence"--that makes the object what it is.

In the world of art the "essence" is the spark of genius and creativity which we feel only exists in originals, not copies. The "essence" of, let's say, an original painting is that we feel something of the artist infuses the artwork. That these brushstrokes were from the actual brush of Monet or Van Gogh makes all the difference. Exact copies, while artistically identical, lack the "essence" of the artist. Originals have essences that copies lack.

The same goes for human relationships. Consider Capgras Syndrome where people believe their friends and loved ones have been replaced with exact duplicates. Copies, it seems, are also not enough in love and life. And it appears that something in the brain is devoted to tracking this difference, the distinction between the exterior and the interior, the appearance and the essence.

And this ability to distinguish appearances from essences might explain why we enjoy Tabasco sauce and horror films. Our enjoyment comes from the fact that we know that the horror film isn't real and that the pain of the Tabasco sauce will end. We can indulge these experiences because our brain tracks them as "copies." Real pain and real gore are in different categories.

And it's this craving for the real, unseen "essence" that may also (partly) explain faith and our enjoyment of the natural world. That there is an Artist out there--and that these are his or her brushstrokes in that cloud, butterfly, sunset, or face--makes all the difference.