Neuroscience of Pleasure
Pleasure is what drives us to do anything and everything in life.
So how does our brain decide what we enjoy?
What does too much pleasure look like, and how can we make sure the pleasures we pursue in life are healthy?
Tune in to learn more, and look out for a few more mini-episodes along this topic next month.
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REFERENCES
The Neuroscience of Happiness and Pleasure by Morten L Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge
Neuroscience of Affect: Brain mechanisms of pleasure and displeasure -- Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach
The Neuroscience of Pleasure and Happiness By Luciano Marinelli
A neuroscience perspective on pleasure and pain -- Dan-Mikael Ellingsen, Morten Kringlebach, and Siri Leknes
General Outline of Episode
When you think of pleasure, what comes to mind?
Something feels good. (orgasm, being with people you enjoy, laughing, etc.)
When you think of pleasure in the brain, what do you think of?
Dopamine!
Is all pleasure created equally?
Is liking something, wanting something, and feeling pleasure from something the same thing?
On the podcast we’re looking at the neuroscience of pleasure.
So what do we think is pleasure? It’s when something feels good, like an orgasm or being out in nature or laughing with friends. In some ways, pleasure is considered just a passing feeling or something we’re in persuit of, but the truth is that pleasure is what drives us to do anything and everything.
Kringlebach and Berridge” state “pleasure and reward are important”. They are today and they have always been throughout our evolution. We need a normal pleasure response because this is why we get anything done! We have to like things to feel rewarded about doing things. But when the brain misfires this can look like pain, depression, or addiction. So what is this in the brain and how can we make sure it's healthy?
This is the Neuroscience of pleasure
What is pleasure?
Marinelli” Happiness can be divided into two different conceptualizations: hedonia and eudaimonia (coming from Aristotle). Hedonia is a state of subjective well-being.” Specifically lasts a short period of time and occurs due to something sensory - like yum! That food was great”. Marinelli states “Eudaimonia is an inner feeling of satisfaction and psychological harmony” this is not short-lasting, does not need anything external and is about living in congruence with your values, specifically “pleasure combined with engagement and meaning is how we achieve eudiomonia.”[Add example of eudaimonia]
Kringlebach and Berridge - pleasure is never merely a sensation - they argue that even our most basic first pleasure of food requires “specialized pleasure-generating neural circuitry to add the positive hedonic impact to the sweetness that elicits ‘liking’ reactions”. They state without this, even something like chocolate or ice cream is neutral or honestly completely unpleasant (described in details below) [4,5,8].
They also state that pleasure has objective features. We notice that conscious experience but our brain evolved so that pleasure motivated us. How we experience pleasure is an evolutionary drive - we feel pleasure due to neurons on our mesocorticolimbic circuitry because, without it, we die out - meaning pleasure is also about wanting
Kringlebach and Berridge also say a way to understand happiness is “liking” without “wanting.” “That is, a state of pleasure without disruptive desires, a state of contentment” There is also wanting and liking and that is engagement with the world (I did the thing, I got the thing, I like the thing) “A little incentive salience may add zest to the perception of life and perhaps even promote the construction of meaning” However, too much “wanting” without liking and we start to see addiction and unhappiness. But pleasure is not any single component but rather the “interplay of higher pleasures, positive appraisals of life meaning and social connectedness, all combined and merged by interaction between the brain’s default networks and pleasure networks.”
Pleasure is both an affective state (emotion reaction) and Conscious affective feelings or experiences of emotions, but it is more than just a feeling it - it is also a reaction
But when we are talking about pleasure, we are essentially talking about rewards (specifically what our brain gives us). In talking about rewards we need to look at motivation (cognitive incentives), pleasure (both conscious and hedonic) and learning (cognitive process/coding (does my brain like this thing) and associative learning (positive reinforcement). These all impact different areas of the brain, depending on how we are engaging with this thing we try to simplify as pleasure. Also some of this is conscious and as we have definitely learned, coding is unconscious. .
Kringlebach and Berridge state this is all about evolution and pankseep and Viven state that drive enough alone - all animals are driven to survive and procreate and rewards drive life. But they state humans are likely unique in that we are conscious of it and can contemplate it. “The advanced human ability to consciously predict and anticipate the outcome of choices and actions confers on our species an evolutionary advantage, but this is a double-edged sword, as John Steinbeck pointed out as he wrote of “the tragic miracle of consciousness - because we know what happiness is, we know it ends”
Which also brings us to the other side of this - which is pain. And pain, like pleasure, is both part of the evolutionary drive and is all about coding. How we code something changes it from pain to pleasure.
Dan-Mikael Ellingsen, Morten Kringlebach, and Siri Leknes state it is the context, the coding and the sensory information that determines the value. “The meaning, and consequently the pleasantness, of a gentle touch can be fundamentally different depending on whether the toucher appears as attractive and friendly, as opposed to unattractive (Gazzola et al., 2012) or threatening (Ellingsen et al., 2014).” So in other words yes you were just trying to give her a compliment but for her, that was sexual harassment. You thought it was pleasure, it was actually pain, because they are on a continuum.
Dr. Anna Lembke talks a lot about this -specifically the hedonic shift. Imagine there is a teetertotter in your brain and moves up and down. This is your brain responding to pleasure or pain - because they are a continuum. Say you are without food, the longer you go without food the more hangry you get, the more miserable you get, the more sluggish you get -pain. You finally get to eat food and because that pendulum or tettertotter has moved so far one direction - this is the best food you have ever had. It tastes amazing and your brain floods with pleasure. Imagine you keep eating and eating and eating - now you get uncomfortable, it doesn’t taste as good and you start to get sick. That is pain.
Pain and pleasure are what drive survival but they are on a continuous shift whether that is the suffering side of pleasure or the avoidant side of motivation. There are two sides to this coin.
What is the brain’s role? (answer before or after #3) is this more in detail for 2
Brain exists to motivate (keep you alive)
Brain exists to make sense of the word (code everything)
These two goals are a lot of where this gets divided - some areas are found deep in the brain, some are cortex. We have some widespread specifically for coding (senses) but the specific pleasures are in that hotspot areas! Specifically going back to the NA and VTA and Ventral Pallidum. Hotspots are “Analogous to scattered islands that form a single archipelago, hedonic hotspots are anatomically distributed but interact to form a functional integrated circuit.” so they are divided but they talk and there is a hierarchy and if we get a consensus - we really like something.
Kringlebach and Berridge “It is important, however, to again make a distinction between brain activity coding and causing pleasure.” Neural coding we’ve talked about a lot - its how we figure out how to make sense of the world. Causation is “generally inferred on the basis of a change in pleasure as a consequence of a brain manipulation”. “Coding and causation often go together” or coding can happen alone. What is this thing/do I like it but also helps rate if I’m done, do I want more, do I want this again and coding will change if we get way to much of the thing sometimes -becuase we do try to have off switches. OFC is essentially also coding if something is unpleasant due to an experience with that thing (I got stung by sniffing a rose, I don’t like any roses) and in this area of the brain we are doing the ‘Do I like this, combined with reinforcement of that brain calculation we talked about last time (cost/benefit analysis). Marinelli states the orbital frontal cortext is part of the default network. What is meant by that is its “a neural circuit which is active during passive moments and when remembering past events or imagining future events”. So we have both a conscious and unconscious understanding of pleasure because of the brain. As far as the unconscious goes we know though other areas do code including mid insular cortex (deeper in the brain- remember this is connected to disgust as well) ACC (thought to be active for emotional coding) and medial surface. In short -brain codes. And the brain is not great at coding on a neutral basis - it wants to code for pleasure or pain.
Why does this matter? Pleasure is not just the feeling - it's also the motivation. It's the like as well as the want. However, we can want the thing without liking the thing. Irrational wanting without liking can occur and sometimes this is adduction or other extremes -this shows that we can want something we don’t like, don’t expect to like and shouldn’t like because of brain override. Remember hedonic hotspots are all over your brain. The deeper in the brain - the older they are - the more chance they have to override.
Basically in the brain, we have hotspots both subcortical and in the cortex where talk to each other through dopamine (brain texting/messaging/dms). A single hotspot is a lot of little pleasure mechanisms concentrated together to increase pleasure, but are also connected to a larger network so multiple parts of your brain can fire. NA and VP are a part of this (na to vp to hypothalamus - for example - and we like food). Add in opioid neurotransmitters if firing in NA and we really like the thing and want more.
Kringlebach and Berridge - OFc identifies and gives us motivation for more, sensorimotor feels physically in the body if this is good- theory of mind/insula kick in if it's with other people, ACC fires so we will feel happy, insular dopamine sends out signals looking for consensus, Nucleus accumbens fire and fire a lot of its hedonic, Insular opioids and cannabinoids fire if it's real hedonic, Ventral Tagmental Area hopefully fires because that is what is suppose to regulate you. And we learn that more is good if our medial prefrontal cortex and serotonin also get involved and we learn that more is bad amygdala, hippocampus and arcuate nucleus gets involved
What happens when your brain experiences pleasure? Essentially your brain’s orbitofrontal cortex is like “Hey I like this thing”. Spericially it rates how much I like this thing. It also helps to increase how much I like this thing based on what’s going on in my body (am I thirsty? Wow this water tastes amazing). Coding takes place everywhere, OFC helps to determine if we like the thing we just coded. Hotspots might fire (ooo this is nice) dopamine helps connect those hotspots. Neural firing occurs in your neucleas accumbens and ventral pallidum and gives us a sense of ‘wow this is awesome”, and opioid neuroVmpfc and insula continue to code (we should do more of this thing, we should do less of this thing” and “cost/benefit to liking this thing, continuing to like this thing, how to get more of this thing”.
What can we do about the information we just learned?
Is pleasure all the same?
How can we have both pleasure and pain
How can we avoid too much pain or pursue more pleasure?
Pain and pleasure can help balance each other - Anna Lembke will argue this heavily, as covered in Hidden Brain - she argues when we have pain it balances out not over-shifting into pleasure to keep our balance and advocates for something like starting your day with a hard workout. Ellingsen, Kringlebach, and Leknes also argue that pleasant experiences can help dampen pain (good to know the next time you give blood) but conversely, when we are in pain we have a hard time feeling happy which is illustrated in depression and anhedonia that can come with chronic pain conditions.
That’s because there is a lot more overlap than we think there is. Humans like to think that the pleasure of eating ice cream and the pleasure of sex and the pleasure of getting a task done feel so different to us. And while there are subtle differences - for your brain its largely the same. Also there is a “there is a high degree of superimposition, in anatomical and functional terms, between areas of the brain and the neurotransmitter systems responsible for the regulation of physical pain and those responsible for the regulation of” pleasure. So basically motivation, physical pleasure, emotional pleasure emotional pain and physical pain - pretty much all the same to your brain. Remember that’s why you can technically take a pain med for emotions and it will impact it (this is not a recommendation only explaining the brain). Because there is overlap that is why there can be pain from pleasure and pleasure from pain - a) there can be traffic jams in our system and b) they can balance one another
Self Harm
But its important to know how similar they are because this can explain things like self-harm - which seems illogical to a lot of people because we often think of wanting to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. We somewhat covered this in the neuroscience of pain from pleasure - but essentially pain can release endogenous opioids such as b-endorphins and enkephalins and endocannabinoids. Endorphins, endocannabinoids, and enkephalins feel good - they can feel very good. They can also make us feel a little numb or floating due to their algesic factors. Remember on an evolutionary standpoint one of the things humans are good at is endurance or getting through it. Our body evolved to help in this so it releases a numbing response to survive somehow. It is also hypothesized that all of this impacts our want. If we never feel pleasure or happy, we just want to be numb.
Addiction (how do we avoid addiction, or add liking back into the mix?
Also remember how Kringlebach and Berridge said this was all about balance - when we have a balance between wanting and liking means we experience pleasure without addiction. “Achieving the right hedonic balance in such ways may be crucial to keep one not just ticking over but actually happy.” Taking a mental assessment - when we feel a pull to something - is this serving us? Does this make us happy? Are other ways to feel happy?
We are wired for connection Kringlebach and Berridge state that in humans (and social creatures) social interactions are actually “fundamental and central to enhancing the other pleasures”. We need each other and because of that social interaction is key to happiness. Dr. Perry argues this is huge for anything that becomes harmful - its so important to increase our social network because that is huge for the amount of pleasure we feel so we seek out pleasure less in other areas that can become harmful or addictive.
Final Thoughts
Remember our wants and our likes can change - though it is easier to change a dislike to a neutral instead of a like, changing a neutral to a like is feasible. So we can learn to want and like something we wouldn’t think we would. Or vice versa.
Lastly, most studies on this will show a major change regarding childhood/developmental harm or trauma on the development on these opioid and dopaminergic transmission. All that is to say, be careful on how you judge and at the same time make sure people are safe.
Finally last note goes to Marinelli who reminds us that “even though pleasure may contribute to achieving happiness, it will never cause happiness and life satisfaction by itself.”
