Paul Bloom
The title of this book intrigued me. It had never really occurred to me that all my various pleasures might actually have a grand unifying explanation. Could the pleasure of slight tipsiness be somehow explained by the same "new science" as the joys of watching ocean waves crash to shore? Does the gratification of catching out a public figure in a lie have any similarities, scientifically, to the bliss of 330-count Egyptian cotton sheets? Oliver Schroer's music, sun dancing on water, the expression on an infant's face, a good laugh, chatting with my kids at bedtime, coffee, the way old friends remember the younger me - could all these pleasures really be tied together somehow? Is there some newly discovered pleasure centre in the brain that they all manage to light up, for instance, and does that tell us something about "how pleasure works"?
In a word, no.
In fact, I've come to the conclusion that this book simply has the wrong title. It is not about how pleasure works. And, to be honest, there's almost no new science at all, and certainly not a specific new science elucidating the workings of pleasure. The science that is included does not really do all that much to explain why we like what we like.
It feels like an accidental packaging error - as if you found New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream in a carton labelled Cherry Garcia - but it's more likely the result of too much focus-group testing by the publisher's marketing team. In any case, the discrepancy was a niggling irritation throughout the reading of an otherwise delightful book, and I found myself trying over and over to come up with something more accurate. I'm no title writer, but allow me to proffer these:
The Real Thing: Why We Value Authenticity;
The Value of Stuff: Why Seemingly Ordinary Things Can Have Special Meaning;
Spending $48,875 on John F. Kennedy's Old Tape Measure and Other Curiosities of Human Behaviour.
The good news is that the book inside is an even better book than the one the original title promises. As indicated by the proposed new ones above, this book explores why we find value in certain things and not others. Paul Bloom, a psychologist (and displaced Canadian) at Yale, suggests that it has a lot to with how people tend to view objects as having "essences."
He argues that this explains why a sweater said to have been worn by George Clooney fetches more money if it is unwashed than if it has been dry-cleaned: One feels that some of the beautiful man's essence might still cling to the fibres. Your own child's baby shoes have incalculable value, whereas an identical pair never worn by your infant may be meaningless. A real Vermeer painting is highly esteemed, whereas a brilliant knockoff is not; it has less to do with the quality of the painting than its history.
This "essentialism", he says, is with us from childhood. Children apparently believe that if you take out a dog's insides, it's not a dog any more, but if you remove its outer features, it still is. Bloom describes an experiment conducted by his colleague Frank Keil: "He showed children pictures of a series of transformations: a porcupine surgically transformed so as to look like a cactus, a tiger stuffed into a lion suit, a real dog made to look like a toy. The neat finding is that children rejected such radical transformations as changing the category - regardless of what it looks like, it is still a porcupine, a tiger or a dog. Only when the children were told that the transformations occurred on the inside - the innards of those creatures were changed - could they be persuaded that these transformations lead to a real change in category." Our explanations may change as we get older, but our belief in essence seems to endure.
Bloom examines why we like certain foods (and can't tell the difference between pâté and nicely presented puppy food), why it matters which identical twin you have sex with and what happens when a world-class violinist plays a $3.5-million Stradivarius in a subway station. He argues that what we really treasure is the presumed essence of the pâté, the twin or the performer. That in itself is a provocative observation and he does an excellent job of thoroughly exploring the implications; to contort it into an explanation of pleasure is, in my opinion, unnecessary, not to mention unconvincing.
Bloom is a superb writer. His gift is in writing beautifully but plainly, and anticipating everything a reader will need to know in order to appreciate the point he will ultimately make. He provides a grand tour through biology and psychology, but brings a philosopher's eye. Though the book is not as much about pleasure as I had expected, it was a great pleasure to read.
Alison Motluk is a writer whose essence is only partly based in Toronto.