Seeking pleasure: food, sex & music – University of Oxford

‘Pleasure is fundamental to us,’ says Morten Kringelbach who holds a dual appointment as senior research fellow at the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University and professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He should know – he’s been studying the basis of pleasure and how the emotion is generated by the brain. ‘It’s what gets us up in the morning, or guides us in choosing whether we want coffee or tea.’

‘It’s no accident,’ he points out, ‘that food and sex are our primary sources of pleasure. They are critical for our survival, so having dedicated pleasure networks in the brain that tend to make us seek them out makes absolute sense.’

Being around other people is also pleasurable, he says. Social interactions are part of what sustains us as humans, and pleasure plays a key role in this. ‘It’s one reason why food is more enjoyable with other people, for example.’

On top of the basic pleasure-inducing elements of food, sex, and other people which have helped our survival, there are the higher-order sources of enjoyment such as music, art and beauty, or monetary rewards. But these are processed in the brain in similar ways. ‘Brain scanning experiments have shown that music hits the same parts as food or sex,’ says Professor Kringelbach.

His work can also tell us about when this impulse goes wrong. This is very important in depression, which can be associated with less engagement with other people and a lack of normal feelings of pleasure in situations where it might be expected. But, to understand that, the layers of systems and brain processes involved in experiencing pleasure, both conscious and unconscious, must be stripped back.

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via Seeking pleasure: food, sex & music – University of Oxford.

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