Pleasures of the brain.
نویسنده
چکیده
How does the brain cause positive affective reactions to sensory pleasure? An answer to pleasure causation requires knowing not only which brain systems are activated by pleasant stimuli, but also which systems actually cause their positive affective properties. This paper focuses on brain causation of behavioral positive affective reactions to pleasant sensations, such as sweet tastes. Its goal is to understand how brain systems generate 'liking,' the core process that underlies sensory pleasure and causes positive affective reactions. Evidence suggests activity in a subcortical network involving portions of the nucleus accumbens shell, ventral pallidum, and brainstem causes 'liking' and positive affective reactions to sweet tastes. Lesions of ventral pallidum also impair normal sensory pleasure. Recent findings regarding this subcortical network's causation of core 'liking' reactions help clarify how the essence of a pleasure gloss gets added to mere sensation. The same subcortical 'liking' network, via connection to brain systems involved in explicit cognitive representations, may also in turn cause conscious experiences of sensory pleasure.
منابع مشابه
Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being.
BACKGROUND: How is happiness generated via brain function in lucky individuals who have the good fortune to be happy? Conceptually, well-being or happiness has long been viewed as requiring at least two crucial ingredients: positive affect or pleasure (hedonia) and a sense of meaningfulness or engagement in life (eudaimonia). Science has recently made progress in relating hedonic pleasure to br...
متن کاملThe connection of imaginary immateriality to hereafter pleasures and pains in Sadra`s philosophy
This article has no abstract.
متن کاملThe human sexual response cycle: brain imaging evidence linking sex to other pleasures.
Sexual behavior is critical to species survival, yet comparatively little is known about the neural mechanisms in the human brain. Here we systematically review the existing human brain imaging literature on sexual behavior and show that the functional neuroanatomy of sexual behavior is comparable to that involved in processing other rewarding stimuli. Sexual behavior clearly follows the establ...
متن کاملDiscovery Medicine
Discovery Medicine, Volume 9, number 49, Pages 579-587, June 2010 Abstract: Over fifty years ago the discovery that rats would work to electrically stimulate their brains suggested the intriguing possibility that bliss could be achieved through the use of ‘pleasure electrodes’ implanted deep within the brain. Subsequent research has failed to bring about this brave new world of boundless pleasu...
متن کاملHedonic hot spots in the brain.
Hedonic "liking" for sensory pleasures is an important aspect of reward, and excessive 'liking' of particular rewards might contribute to excessive consumption and to disorders such as obesity. The present review aims to summarize recent advances in the identification of brain substrates for food 'liking' with a focus on opioid hot spots in the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Drug micro...
متن کاملThe Authority of Competence and Quality as Extrinsic † - forthcoming in
John Stuart Mill’s hedonism is notoriously ambiguous. The most important ambiguity concerns his reliance on an axiologically significant notion of quality of pleasure. (Hereafter: “quality”.) His resulting “higher pleasures doctrine” has given rise to a number of interpretive disputes concerning, for instance, the nature of quality, the relative value of higher pleasures in comparison to lower ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Brain and cognition
دوره 52 1 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2003