What Is Pleasure?

The book How Pleasure Works, by Paul Bloom, is less about how pleasure works and more about exactly what pleasure is—or rather what the essence of pleasure is. Nevertheless, it is a delightful treatise from an evolutionary psychologist's point of view on why we enjoy certain things more than others. Obviously, there is a direct biological need for food, shelter, and reproduction of the species that presumably forms the basis for pleasure in all humans and mammals (and perhaps all species). But as Bloom points out, many pleasures associated with