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How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like Paperback – June 20, 2011

by Paul Bloom (Author)

86 customer reviews

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“Engaging, evocative. . . . [Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling.”―NPR

Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A book that is different from the slew already out there on the general subject of happiness. No advice here about how to become happier by organizing your closest; Bloom is after something deeper than the mere stuff of feeling good.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“Should stoke your neurons into a frenzy and leave you wanting more.”
- Mary Carmichael, Newsweek.com

“Sigmund Freud, Mr. Pleasure Principle himself, would have approved.”
- Time

“Scholarly yet spy…. Bloom salts the book with all manner of pungent, apposite points…. A heartening, well-developed argument.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“A gracefully written book and a lot of fun.”
- Peter D. Kramer, Slate

“Drawing on his own research as well as studies in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and philosophy, [Bloom] makes a powerful argument for essentialism at the crux of human pleasure.”
- Maywa Montenegro, Seed Magazine

“In this eloquent and provocative book, Paul Bloom takes us inside the paradoxes of pleasure, exploring everything from cannibalism to Picasso to IKEA furniture. The quirks of delight, it turns out, are a delightful way to learn about the human mind.”
- Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

“This book is not just a pleasure, but a revelation, by one of psychology’s deepest thinkers and best writers. Lucid and fascinating, you’ll want to read it slowly and savor the experience.”
- Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

“How Pleasure Works has one of the best discussions I’ve read of why art is pleasurable, why it matters to us, and why it moves us so.”
- Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“This book is a pearl, a work of great beauty and value, built up around a simple truth: that we are essentialists, tuned in to unseen order.”
- Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

About the Author

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. He is the author of Descartes’ Baby and How Pleasure Works. He has contributed to The Atlantic, the New York Times, Science, and Nature. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (June 20, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780393340006
ISBN-13: 978-0393340006
ASIN: 0393340007
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 86 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1059 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Cognitive
- #1204 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Emotions
- #1601 in Books > Science & Math > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Psychology

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Interesting, But a Bit Light

April 20, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A fairly good book exploring, in a mostly critical and adaptionist view, why we find pleasure in the things we do. The earliest chapters, exploring baseline concepts such as food and sex, tended to be the most grounded with the most research backing. Later chapters tended to veer too much toward speculation and philosophy.

The author also tends to be a bit hit and miss in narrative abilities. At times he's engaging and the style is not unlike "Freakonomics". However, where that book typically took time to really dig apart some of the cited examplesor experiments, this book tends to just reference studies or examples in a passing fashion.

Another minor issue I have with the book is that the author tends to try and explain things as having a REASON or a PURPOSE too much. For example, in a chapter about art, he seemed to get hung up on their needing to be an evolutionary reason for this element of humanity. However the author has either forgotten or doesn't know that there are many examples of evolution not doing away with adaptions that are no longer relevant but are not overtly harmful. For example, male nipples (a remnant of the fact we are all conceived female), 3rd molars (largely redundant based on how heavily our food is processed now and how little chewing we do, relatively speaking), the appendix (again, largely irrelevant due to not having to eat raw vegetatian all the time), or a set of muscles in the shoulders that are largely useless now that we don't spend our days hanging in trees. So, point being: our appreciation of art may not have an evolutionary advantage but merely be a nice side effect of having a brain geared towards open-ended problem solving and non-linear critical thinking (as an aside, they've found that proto-humans had both more white matter in their brains and were leaving many more examples of art than Neanderthals were, but how would a tendency to waste time painting pictures have helped proto-humans survive AND thrive better than our now dead ancient cousins?). And the author does this multiple times, not bringing up or considering the possibility of the "redundant" factor in evolutionary history (although he does on occasion mention the possibility of certain ideas or elements being just fortunate side effects, but only in a "last possibility" sort of way.

Overall it's a good book. It introduced some new ideas about human psychology and evolution to me, and brought up some interesting points about what we prioritize in terms of pleasure. However, the book tends to be a little light on its explorations and in-depth discussions, especially in later chapters.

5 people found this helpful

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Kihm R. Sanders

Unprepared for an amazing surprise

July 20, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

It's amazing how much I enjoyed reading about a subject that I didn't really want to hear about! As a food fanatic, the last thing I thought I wanted to know about was food waste. Huge portions, sure, bring them on. Unhealthy, fatty, sugar-laden junk food, I can't get enough. Information on the fast food business, latest marketing temptations, and unhealthy food trends? Sure, I live for this information. But food waste? Doesn't sound appealing to me. Even if it's out there, and growing as a problem, I probably don't want to hear about it.
That's what I thought. Jonathan Bloom's book is absolutely riveting, and his areas of exploration are so varied, complex, and well described that I ate this book up like a Taco Bell triple crunchwrap! This man has done his homework, and his writing method is so entertaining that you tend to forget that you are learning all kinds of horrible facts and truths about food waste in our modern world. Examples abound of all kinds of preventable waste going on all around us, from the farms that feed us, the supermarkets that provide the offerings, and our own lazy and entitled habits at home and in restaurants. The most startling revelations, to me, was the prevalence of this activity all around us, and how our cultural attitudes have fostered notions that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the way we squander and waste food. Best of all, Bloom offers solutions that are available to us right now, and simply require our own cooperation to set in motion. For a book that I began reading with obvious reservations came a truly inspiring and exhilirating experience, and taught me a lot about a subject in which I thought I was well-versed. Highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Fascinating content that makes you look at your own "pleasures"

September 3, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a really interesting book packed with rich content well documented with 24 pages of references. There are very few pages that do not reference one or more other researches. So the critiques that say there is no science here puzzle me. Perhaps the problem is that the research is from the "soft" sciences: sociology, and psychology. If a reader thinks real science can only be physics, chemistry and biology, then they would not recognize this research. However, I am familiar with much of this research and it is solid.

This book is written to be readable probably much as this college professor teaches the subject to his college students who have notoriously short attention spans. Every teacher knows these days you have to be half scholar and half entertainer if you are to get your students to tune in to you instead of their smart phones.

I think Bloom does an excellent job of covering a wide spectrum of where we find our pleasures and showing you why. As an author myself I can see that one distraction from the content is the actual book design which includes the font, margins, spacing, chapter headings, paper and cover stock and the cover design. The cover artwork is okay but the paper stock of the cover and interior of the book are decidedly cheap which I think makes you take the content less seriously. Every woman knows "packaging counts" and it is true in book design as well. Even when a big publisher like W.W. Norton agree to publish your work, an author should fight for at least input on the book design.

Despite the cheapy feel of the book in your hand, the content is well worth considering...it may make you think twice before you spurge on that special something you really cannot afford.

3 people found this helpful

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