Name: How Pleasure Works
ISBN: 9780393066326

How Pleasure Works

Humans have an incredible spectrum of emotions and feelings that can be felt on any given day. The book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom, shows us just that. He introduces the reader to a realm of psychology that has been understudied called cognitive psychology. Mr. Bloom, who has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, takes the reader on a rather interesting, odd, robust, and sometimes even taboo ride into the reasons why humans react happily and enjoy pleasure in some things in life while others not. He introduces food, sex, art, and different forms of human entertainment as the multiple variations of pleasure we experience. The general direction of the book argues that pleasure is not just a response to certain stimuli, but instead your thoughts are mainly responsible for how much pleasure we actually get from that stimulus. Mr. Bloom has a very engaging, intriguing, and curious writing style that explains some very tough subjects and makes them more accessible. He provides many great examples in this book, including the results of some of his own research in the field. I highly recommend this book to anyone slightly interested in how and why we get pleasure out of the simple things in life, or even the most emotional and/or physically challenging things. Check this book out!

What Hacker News says

yborisJun 2021

There's a whole field of Positive Psychology studying happiness (and pleasure) and yet the article doesn't mention it once.

The researchers have uncovered a tremendous amount about this topic (see Paul Bloom's "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like", "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert and the multi-author paper "If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right"), and philosophers have thought about this topic for centuries.

The best reconciliation of philosophy and (recent studies in) psychology of it all is by Michael Bishop and his book: The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Philosophy-Psychology-Well-...

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otakucodeApr 2018

It's not 'taste perception' that is affected. It's literally taste. People aren't lying or tricking themselves, the pizza literally tasted worse if they knew it was Dominos in those studies. They've done similar studies with wine. They took professional sommeliers and gave them cheap wine in bottles with expensive labels, and expensive wine in bottles with cheap labels, and had them try them while lying in fMRI scanners. The bottle it came out of had monumental effects on the taste centers of the brain.

The book 'How Pleasure Works' goes over a lot of this sort of research and is quite interesting. The 'American Association of Wine Economists' (which isn't what it sounds like) also does tons of research on things like this. It's thanks to them we know that people can't actually tell the difference between expensive patte and wet dog food.

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