Pleasures of the Brain (Series in Affective Science) [Hardcover]

Informative, insightful, and comprehensive, Pleasures of the Brain was quite the pleasure to read; if you could insert a microinjection and scan my brain, you might have seen my orbitofrontal cortex light up while reading it. However, it is not a light read by any means for the average person. The following is a synopsis and review of the book from an undergraduate student's perspective, including positive highlights as well as personal inhibitions about it.

At first glance, I was a little overwhelmed at the style and structure of the book. It seemed as if each chapter was structured the same exact way that a scientific paper would be, so it looked like a collection of nineteen scientific papers written by experts on the topic of pleasure and hedonic experiences. However, by the end of reading it, my overall opinion of the book was that it was a fantastic book for the purposes of what I needed it for, which was as a textual resource for a research project on the relationship between pain and pleasure. Packed with information, this book does appeal to an audience of a higher education, particularly in graduate school or other scientists. Although it had the consistent technical jargon of a scientific approach to the topic, the book had an interesting and at times, a bit unsettling characteristic, which was the fact that the style of the writing tended to differ from chapter to chapter (or paper to paper, you could say) due to each chapter being written by different scientists. These different scientists tended to focus on different aspects of pleasure, some from a purely neuroanatomical perspective whereas others took on a more psychological or metaphysical approach.

The book can be pretty much summed up into three parts: animal research and studies on pleasure, human research and studies on pleasure, and clinical applications of these studies and what we know about pleasure thus far. In the animal unit, the authors cover an overview of pleasure hotspots in the rat brain, the role of specialized corticolimbic circuits that are related to pleasure in rats, and the neural coding for pleasure in the ventral palladium (an area associated with reward processing). They also then go deeper into pleasure as a conscious awareness instead of just a sensory input with the relationship between pleasure and cognition, and the neuroethology of pleasure in nonhuman primates.

In the human unit, the authors start off by explaining the nature and the function of pleasure in daily life from a psychological perspective. Then, they take an evolutionary approach by linking the primary sensory and social pleasures that we experience to survival and procreation- why would we need to develop such a system? Afterwards, they cover a wide array of human pleasure perception from sensory input such as the olfactory system, emotional pleasure, the gustatory system, and pleasure associated with sex and health, which is hard to find reliable literature that will take a scientific approach to such a topic. However, they did a great job of professionally explaining the neural systems and neurotransmitters involved in excitement and orgasms as well as from a neuropsychological and pharmaendocrinological perspective. Then, the main editor himself goes into the general theory for the mechanisms and the neuroanatomy of pleasure in the human brain and another author goes into what's known about dopamine and how that affects the perception of pleasure. Finally, pleasure evoked by music and the arts is explained and is concluded by psychological research on the meta-awareness of the pleasure and how that affects how pleasure is perceived. Research in this area can be a little more easily tangibly measured due to the fact that humans can speak and express different levels of pleasure perception which you wouldn't have in other animals.

The last part of the book goes into the clinical applications of what's known and will be known about pleasure in both the animal and human systems. They briefly explain how pain relief and pleasure can be related and discuss cases in which even placebos have modulated pain. Then they describe the use of pleasure electrodes and brain stimulation therapy for patients with severe chronic pain and how it can provide pain relief to patients with phantom limbs, for example. Finally, Leknes and Tracey finish up the book with a conceptual and empirical overview of pleasure in the mind and the brain.

So what did I like about certain parts of the book?

I liked the idea that it gave me a much greater depth in my viewpoint of what pleasure really is. Berridge explains it well: "Pleasure is more than the sensation that causes it. Pleasure is an additional niceness gloss painted upon the sensation. Pleasure must be actively generated by brain hedonic circuits to transform a mere sensation such as sweetness into something nice." It's not just a sensory input, but it involves a much more complicated process of the coding and processing of the input and the associations that result in various degrees and intensities as well as types of pleasure. Several of the different authors agreed on the idea that it should be more considered from a reward and punishment system, although from different angles, reward doesn't always mean pleasure and punishment doesn't always result in pain. This book did a fantastic job of providing different approaches to understanding pleasure and did it all with great scientific writing- very logical and well thought out explanations that were fairly manageable for me to grasp.

So what did I not like about certain parts of the book?

First of all, my research topic is actually about the relationship between pleasure and pain, if there is one, and the evolutionary and clinical implications of such a neurological connection. From glancing through the table of contents before attaining the book, I thought that it would address the relationship, because in my head, they were opposite connections so they had to be neuroanatomically connected, somehow. Not only was there very brief parts in the book that ever even addressed the subject of pain (very briefly in some of the clinical chapters but that was the shortest part of the book), but there were too many differing opinions on the idea of pain and pleasure as being on a continuum. Some argue that they are two different types of mechanisms. For example, Green says, "Pleasure actually appears much more complex than `the opposite of pain.' If it is simply `the opposite,' how do we explain the fact that some people derive pleasure from pain?" However, in the clinical chapters, particularly Leknes and Tracey admit to there being scientific evidence for overlapping neural pathways for the processing of pain and pleasure. The book briefly describes both scientific evidence for different pathways and shared pathways, which I guess is good in the sense that it provides and much more neutral perspective on the issue, but it was greatly confusing for me in terms of reaching a conclusion. However, it very well may be that I may not be able to come to a well scientifically supported conclusion myself.

Therefore, to sum up my review, I thoroughly enjoyed the book even though I wasn't able to find the supporting evidence that I was hoping to find, and it gave a much deeper and wider understanding of what pleasure is, the psychological and neuroanatomical processing, and the current debates and theories being discussed still today. I recommend that readers take a very scientific and almost skeptical approach to the book, and constantly question how and why the scientists have made the claims that they have made in this book, because as I mentioned earlier there are opposing viewpoints and things mentioned in the book that have been disproven with current research that had been widely accepted as truths from previous research so science can change in the matter of years. Do not let the jargon or the structure deter you- it is so enlightening from a curious young scientist's view so if this is a topic of interest to you, please read it!

Because I'm a poor college student, I didn't buy my copy but rather borrowed it from a local university's library. That's what I recommend to do for those who would just like to explore the topic area in general, but for those with a deeper thirst for knowledge, it might be useful to purchase your own copy here from amazon and have it to possibly look up other papers that have been cited in the book as well as after each chapter. That way, you could get a better idea of some of the specific methodology or analysis used or how the conclusions were drawn in specific experiments.