everyone’s research, pulling
out all the brain activity data for the moments that subjects rated as being
highly pleasurable, whether they were in the political opinion sample or the
consumer product sample or the chronic pain sample. I won’t provide the details
here, though this is an egregious oversimplification of a rather elegant
research design involving multiple control conditions and international data
feeds.
Generally, it’s difficult to link a brain region with
particular activities because brains are beautifully complex, function slightly
differently for everyone, and have all kinds of backup systems. For example,
say a baby is exposed to a minor insult in the womb, like her mom takes
painkillers at the wrong time. Mostly, the baby’s brain would just work around
the problem like the internet shunting around damage. Once she’s born, she’s
completely normal, but her neural topology is just slightly different from the
way it would have been. So you can’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s the lateral
orbitofrontal cortex shutting down and the nucleus accumbens lighting up so we
know she’s having an orgasm.’ I had data on a lot of orgasms by then and could
usually recognize one on the monitor from five paces, but occasionally I was
wrong.
You might think that we’d already know all about pleasure
centres. They were discovered in the 1950s, when Olds and Milner got rats to
ignore food and water in favour of stimulating their tiny brains. In the 1970s,
a weirdo called Heath tried to cure homosexuality by wiring up gay volunteers
as an alternative to sex. It didn’t work, but it did lead to a lot of
self-stimulation. For real.
The problem is that pleasure is a complicated state. Based
on later research, it looked like the ‘pleasure centre’ discovered by Olds and
Milner just stimulated an urge to keep stimulating it, like an irresistible,
insatiable itch that you scratch until you tear yourself to pieces. It’s a
vision of Hell.
Intense pleasure generally requires a desire that is then
satisfied, so you need hunger as well as satiation – it’s multi-staged. Like an
orgasm isn’t all that enjoyable without the excitement that comes before. Happiness
is something even more complex: it’s not clear what role pleasure plays in
happiness. It might be that happiness is a state of keenly remembering pleasure
in the past and anticipating pleasure in the near future, like the reverse of
post-traumatic stress. My own belief is that happiness also includes value
coherence, but I’m wandering off topic.
Anyway, I was explaining all of this to the guys, most of
which they knew so I was going into more technical detail to keep them
interested, and Chenko kept pushing for more and more information about what we
were doing in our research.
Oh, you want more detail about the team? Right.
As I said, there were five of us. Miguel is Columbian. He
was getting a Master’s degree in industrial design creating virtual
environments like the PA. In fact, that’s why he’d chosen the university. The
PA had developed a cult following, and he was planning to use it to pilot test
some of his design ideas. Miguel was the best-looking of all of us, and knew
it. He was the only one who didn’t show the effects of sunless days, sleepless
nights, and a diet of refined carbohydrates, and he was the only one who
maintained a normal social life. He went to the gym twice a week and to the
best hair stylist in town; he’d run his hands through his artfully tousled black
hair, looking glamorous and sophisticated. Not like my nondescript dishwater-blond
hair, which I’d lop off with kitchen shears whenever it started getting into my
eyes. I enjoyed looking at Miguel, but he was way too high maintenance.
Back to the guys. Naseer was Afghani, also in the industrial
design program but focusing on immersive video-gaming. He had been a
world-class gamer as a kid, and had a computer science degree from Kabul University. He
out all the brain activity data for the moments that subjects rated as being
highly pleasurable, whether they were in the political opinion sample or the
consumer product sample or the chronic pain sample. I won’t provide the details
here, though this is an egregious oversimplification of a rather elegant
research design involving multiple control conditions and international data
feeds.
Generally, it’s difficult to link a brain region with
particular activities because brains are beautifully complex, function slightly
differently for everyone, and have all kinds of backup systems. For example,
say a baby is exposed to a minor insult in the womb, like her mom takes
painkillers at the wrong time. Mostly, the baby’s brain would just work around
the problem like the internet shunting around damage. Once she’s born, she’s
completely normal, but her neural topology is just slightly different from the
way it would have been. So you can’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s the lateral
orbitofrontal cortex shutting down and the nucleus accumbens lighting up so we
know she’s having an orgasm.’ I had data on a lot of orgasms by then and could
usually recognize one on the monitor from five paces, but occasionally I was
wrong.
You might think that we’d already know all about pleasure
centres. They were discovered in the 1950s, when Olds and Milner got rats to
ignore food and water in favour of stimulating their tiny brains. In the 1970s,
a weirdo called Heath tried to cure homosexuality by wiring up gay volunteers
as an alternative to sex. It didn’t work, but it did lead to a lot of
self-stimulation. For real.
The problem is that pleasure is a complicated state. Based
on later research, it looked like the ‘pleasure centre’ discovered by Olds and
Milner just stimulated an urge to keep stimulating it, like an irresistible,
insatiable itch that you scratch until you tear yourself to pieces. It’s a
vision of Hell.
Intense pleasure generally requires a desire that is then
satisfied, so you need hunger as well as satiation – it’s multi-staged. Like an
orgasm isn’t all that enjoyable without the excitement that comes before. Happiness
is something even more complex: it’s not clear what role pleasure plays in
happiness. It might be that happiness is a state of keenly remembering pleasure
in the past and anticipating pleasure in the near future, like the reverse of
post-traumatic stress. My own belief is that happiness also includes value
coherence, but I’m wandering off topic.
Anyway, I was explaining all of this to the guys, most of
which they knew so I was going into more technical detail to keep them
interested, and Chenko kept pushing for more and more information about what we
were doing in our research.
Oh, you want more detail about the team? Right.
As I said, there were five of us. Miguel is Columbian. He
was getting a Master’s degree in industrial design creating virtual
environments like the PA. In fact, that’s why he’d chosen the university. The
PA had developed a cult following, and he was planning to use it to pilot test
some of his design ideas. Miguel was the best-looking of all of us, and knew
it. He was the only one who didn’t show the effects of sunless days, sleepless
nights, and a diet of refined carbohydrates, and he was the only one who
maintained a normal social life. He went to the gym twice a week and to the
best hair stylist in town; he’d run his hands through his artfully tousled black
hair, looking glamorous and sophisticated. Not like my nondescript dishwater-blond
hair, which I’d lop off with kitchen shears whenever it started getting into my
eyes. I enjoyed looking at Miguel, but he was way too high maintenance.
Back to the guys. Naseer was Afghani, also in the industrial
design program but focusing on immersive video-gaming. He had been a
world-class gamer as a kid, and had a computer science degree from Kabul University. He
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