Satisfaction

How nice it would be to earn money without working for it.

But the lab results yielded by the author, an American neurologist, betrayed this innocent expectation. In an experiment with two machines, one that allowed the subjects to receive money by pressing a button and one without a button, the corpus striatum of the former subjects were found to be more active. The activation of this section of the brain will produce dopamine, inducing satisfaction.

Nothing is as sweet as the fruits of one’s labor. The human brain does not like sloth. The author confirms that given a choice, even mice would prefer to work for their food rather than have it for free.

As one who teaches psychiatry at Emory University, the author defines satisfaction as the only emotion that bestows meaning on one’s behavior. This emotion is different from pleasure. Pleasure could be derived from winning the lottery, but satisfaction is based on a conscious thought to achieve a certain goal.

Instead of outlining abstract metaphysical theories, the author explains the mechanisms of satisfaction through specific subjects such as whether money brings satisfaction, how much food should one eat to reach satisfaction, and the relationship between exercise and sex with this emotion.

Novelty induces the production of dopamine, leading to satisfaction. As we basically live in an unpredictable world, our brain is often stimulated by new surprises.

In order to identify this phenomenon, the author sprayed Kool Aid and water randomly to the subject’s tongue through a thin hose, and observed the difference in blood levels through the brain through the fMRI method.

As a result the brain shone more brightly when the subject could not predict whether the Kool Aid or the water would be sprayed. Dopamine reacts in novel situations. Also, more dopamine is produced before, rather than after a certain task is achieved.

The level of dopamine neurotransmitters is roughly similar for each person, but reduces steadily after adolescence. The rule where disuse leads to degeneration also seems to apply to the brain.

The book might have been monotonous if it stopped merely at an introduction of neurological theories, but the feature that differentiates this book is the method in which the author explores his subject. He personally enters the fMRI scanner, interviews chefs, participates in puzzle tournaments, and volunteers for medical examinations in marathons. He travels to Cuba and Iceland to see how people achieve satisfaction, and visits sado-masochism clubs in order to study the relationship between sex and satisfaction.

The incident in which the author strives to understand masochism, or pleasure through pain, by becoming an experimental subject for a behaviorist at MIT is comical. The author wears a tube suit in which cold water throughout the body excluding the arms, in which warm water is circulated. The author discovers that he is concentration on his arm, and exclaims after shedding his tube suit: “This is happiness!”

The author defines the relationship between pain and pleasure in that the biological path of pain and pleasure is similar, where masochism uses pain to delay satisfaction that is devoid of pain.

The author goes further to introduce his sexual experience with his wife in his search for novelty of sexual satisfaction in a familiar relationship. We will stop here in order to allow the readers to enjoy the book.

Title: Satisfaction; (2005)

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