#human pleasure

[bloodclotbitch]

People without trichotillomania do you ever enjoy plucking out hairs or get the urge to pull them out, like at least your eyebrows sometimes?? Or do you just never feel that way??

[smexydilflover]

Hopefully in another life animals are not enslaved for human pleasure.

[letsfucknowandgofromthere]

you and I

[theyrrabs]

On a highway, the median is green forever...

Animal Collective, On A Highway

[ryuusea]

"Woe betide the human being who doesn't know what happiness is; yet woe to the writer who tries to define it"

A substantial portion of our mental machinery seems to exist in order to assess reward (a proxy for pleasure), but virtually all of that machinery allows a broader range of options than might (from a gene's-eye view) be ideal. We see this with enjoyment of sugar -- a hot fudge sundae just about always brings pleasure, whether we need the calories or not -- but also with more modern compulsions, like addiction to the Internet. This compulsion presumably begins with an ancestral circuit that rewarded us for obtaining information.

But once again we have a system that hasn't been tuned precisely enough: it's one thing to get a kick from learning which herbs help cure open wounds, but another to get a kick from learning the latest on Angelina and Brad. We would probably all be better off if we were choosier about what information we sought, à la Sherlock Holmes, who notoriously didn't even know that the earth revolved around the sun. His theory, which we could perhaps learn from, goes like this:

A man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowl edge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon i t ... It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Alas, Sherlock Holmes is only fictional. Few people in the real world have information-gathering systems as disciplined or as finely tuned as his. Instead, for most of us, just about any information can drive our pleasure meters. Late at night, if I allow myself access to the Internet, I'm liable to click here (World War II), click there (Iwo Jima), and then mindlessly follow another link (Clint Eastwood), only to stumble on a fourth (Dirty Harry), rapidly chaining my way from topic to topic, with no clear destination in mind. Yet each tidbit brings me pleasure. I'm not a history scholar, I'm not a film critic; its unlikely that any of this information will ever come in handy. But I can't help it; I just like trivia, and my brain isn't wired precisely enough to make me more discriminating. 

-- Kluge by Gary Marcus