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A review by angelakay
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom
4.0
A fun and quick read. Still in the philosophical vein, yes, but generally grounded in science, so it's all good. While yes, the only things any of us technically enjoy are dopamine & seratonin, Bloom works one level up from this & divides the book into several broad categories of things that give humans pleasure:
* Foodies (food & drink)
* Bedtricks (sex)
* Irreplaceable (sentimentality)
* Performance (arts & sports)
* Imagination (books, movies, TV, video games, etc.)
* Safety & pain (horror/tragedy, sadism/masochism)
In each section he talks about the evolutionary basis for why we like different these things, including lots of interesting examples & research results. Having been a psychology minor, a good chunk of it was work I was already familiar with, but there was definitely plenty of new ideas & information that was fun to learn about. There are connections to aesthetics & ethics in some sections, but everything is grounded in research or at the very least scientific hypothesis reasonably based on research. Interesting & worth the time.
* Foodies (food & drink)
* Bedtricks (sex)
* Irreplaceable (sentimentality)
* Performance (arts & sports)
* Imagination (books, movies, TV, video games, etc.)
* Safety & pain (horror/tragedy, sadism/masochism)
In each section he talks about the evolutionary basis for why we like different these things, including lots of interesting examples & research results. Having been a psychology minor, a good chunk of it was work I was already familiar with, but there was definitely plenty of new ideas & information that was fun to learn about. There are connections to aesthetics & ethics in some sections, but everything is grounded in research or at the very least scientific hypothesis reasonably based on research. Interesting & worth the time.