“How Pleasure Works” by Paul Bloom

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

By Paul Bloom

2010

304 pages / 7 hours and 1 minute

Nonfiction

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Okay. He had me at the title. I like to think of myself as a discerning reader not easily seduced by catchy titles or subtitles that promise too much. But who could resist a book entitled How Pleasure Works along with the promise of the subtitle The New Science of Why We Like What We Like? Pleasure is one of those basics of life about which we often reflect fleetingly but seldom sit down to really consider. Why is it that I find freshly baked chocolate chip cookies almost irresistible and the much better for me Brussels sprouts almost intolerable?

Or something more interesting still, thanks to a friend’s generosity I have an autographed picture of Sandy Koufax. (If you don’t know who Sandy Koufax is, just go and look it up.) It brings me great pleasure. But what if I were to discover tomorrow that it was a fake? That it had not been signed by Sandy Koufax but by a 10-year-old named Luther Jones? Though nothing changed, everything changed. Looking at the picture every morning would no longer give me the pleasure that it did before. Isn’t that a little weird? Or why would one spend so much for an ax that Abraham Lincoln supposedly used?

Chapter 2 in the book made me wonder if this book was going to be one of my mistakes. I admit I’m a bit obsessive compulsive when it comes to books, so once I start something I feel obliged to finish it. Paul Bloom is a Yale psychology professor, so I figured this couldn’t go too bad. Well...

Are you ready for a little Hannibal Lecter? (If you don’t know who Hannibal Lecter is, just go look it up.) I mean the real one. In 2003 a German computer expert advertised online for someone to kill and eat. What fool is going to reply to that, right? The number was approximately 200. I won’t tell you the whole story. It’s juicy (unfortunate pun) but over several weeks after he killed his victim he defrosted and ate 44 pounds of him – on the best china by way of candlelight, of course.

But lest we get distracted from the point, this is an example of what Bloom calls essentialism. That is, our cannibal is trying to eat the essence of the victim. In a less provocative way, I unconsciously believe that by having an actual autograph of Sandy Koufax I can somehow draw closer to his essence.

So what is interesting about this book is that Bloom argues you cannot understand pleasure purely by the sensory experience. There’s something deeper going on here. The book does begin from the presumption of evolutionary psychology, which some readers might find off putting. Fortunately, this is not one of those incredibly wearying books about how to be happy. Please spare me. There are no 10 steps to greater happiness. Rather, it offers a deep dive into the mystery of what gives us pleasure. It is hard to imagine that we will understand much about human beings until we understand something about that.