This is your brain on pleasure (even the guilty kind)

It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229783535/ultimate-world-cruise-tiktok-reality-show. Neuroscientists say the pleasure response helps us survive as a species. So why do we feel embarrassed by some of the things we love the most? Even if you don't have these negative emotions, experiencing – and studying – pleasure is not as straightforward as it might seem. For a long time, neuroscientists thought the concept of "pleasure" referred to a singular system in the brain. But as research into the subject grew, scientists realized that pleasure is really a cycle of "wanting" and "liking" – each with separate neural mechanisms. Today on the show, producer Rachel Carlson https://www.npr.org/people/1112796909/rachel-carlson explores this cycle with researchers, who weigh in on the science of pleasure. Even the kind that makes us feel guilty. Read more of Rachel’s story https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/06/15/nx-s1-5006168/guilty-pleasure-meaning-brain-science on guilty pleasures. Interested in more brain science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with producer Rachel Carlson. What's up, Rachel?

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Hey, Emily. Do you remember the field trip we went on to this bookstore?

• 0:29Emily Kwong?

  Yes.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Yes, we went to Ripped Bodice. For anyone who doesn't know, it's the store that's basically devoted entirely to romance novels.

• 0:36Emily Kwong?

  But this isn't like your mom's Fabio bookstore. It's like romance novels across all different kinds of genre and storytelling. It's really cool.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Recently, I kind of entered that world. Like, I got sucked into this whirlpool that's called Book Talk, which, if you don't know, is basically lots of TikTokers reviewing books. And a lot of the time, they're kind of spicy.

• 0:58Emily Kwong?

  Like what? What have you been reading?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  So I started reading these romance fantasy books about dragons. And they were so fun, Emily. Like, so fun. But I felt really embarrassed about how much joy they were bringing me. It's kind of like I didn't even want to be enjoying them.

• 1:15Emily Kwong?

  Oh, that's kind of sad.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  It was kind of sad. And I was really frustrated with myself, A, for liking the books in the first place, but then, B, for being frustrated that I liked them, like, not allowing myself to just enjoy them.

• 1:27Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, this is like a guilty pleasure for you.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  And pretty much immediately, I was like, I need a better excuse to think about all of these conflicting feelings more. So I called pleasure activist Sammy Schalk in what would be the start of the reporting journey for this episode.

• 1:43Emily Kwong?

  So what did Sammy say?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  That it's a wider problem than just me.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  I think there's a way that people just don't take seriously folks who are too...

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Open and joyful. I think there's an association with childhood, too, of it being childlike, to really unabashedly love something. And as adults, we're supposed to have restraint within our emotions, and that includes our joy.

• 2:07Emily Kwong?

  I feel this too much. I feel like as an older sibling, especially, I always feel pressured to tone it down.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  I totally get that. And after talking to her about some of these social aspects of pleasure, I really wanted to know, what is going on in our brains to make us feel so bad about feeling good? So I turned to someone else. He describes his job as studying the good things in life.

• 2:31Emily Kwong?

  That sounds like a dream job.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  It's so awesome. It's such a good job description. Morton Kringlebeck is a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and the director of an entire center dedicated to studying how humans flourish. And he reminded me, basically, that at its core, the point of experiencing pleasure is the survival of humanity.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  We need to be able not just to survive for ourselves, but also survive as a species, which means that the fundamental pleasures are the ones where we can have some food that gives us the energy to go on, but also sex that allows us to basically work as a species.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Pleasure is so important. And researchers like Morton have started to understand that it's really not just one thing in the brain. Pleasure happens in this cycle. We want something, we like something, and we learn that we like it. But like everything else in life, this cycle can fall out of balance.

• 3:28Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, the neuroscience of pleasure. What it is, where it lives in the brain, and how to have a healthier relationship with the things that just feel good. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:43Speaker 05

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• 5:02Emily Kwong?

  Okay, Rachel, so you revealed earlier that pleasure, it's not just like a feeling, it actually works in a cycle. What does that mean?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Right, so I've often thought about pleasure just as this singular experience. I do something I like and then I feel good.

• 5:18Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, same.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  And for a long time, researchers also thought that was the case.

• 5:22Speaker 06

  When I started in this field several decades ago, I thought that there was one unitary system in the brain that mediated both wanting and liking for rewards. I think most neuroscientists did think that at the time.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  That's Kent Barage. He's done a bunch of work with Morton, and he's a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan. And as he studied pleasure, he saw that there were these different components in the brain, liking and wanting.

• 5:44Emily Kwong?

  Oh, so it's not a unitary system at all? These are separate parts, liking and wanting?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  They're separate, but usually these two things, wanting and liking, go together. But there are cases where they get separated or fall out of balance, like in addiction.

• 5:58Emily Kwong?

  That's so interesting. So Rachel, walk me through how this pleasure cycle unfolds.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  So it all starts with the wanting stage. You and I both drink coffee, so let's take the example of our morning coffee. Say I get to work around. 7 a.m. and I haven't even seen or tasted any coffee at this point in the morning, but I'm anticipating taking that very first sip.

• 6:20Emily Kwong?

  This is how most of my mornings go.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:22Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  And maybe like around 7:30, you might be motivated enough to get up from your desk. I usually am, and I'll go and make myself a cup of coffee.

• 6:30Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  So scientists can actually measure this motivation by looking at how much work someone will do in order to get to their goal. So say I do get up, but there's no more coffee in the office coffee pot. I'm devastated, but how much effort am I actually willing to put in to go get some?

• 6:47Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Will I make a new pot? Will I leave the office and drive to go get more coffee?

• 6:53Emily Kwong?

  Hmm, okay, so that's the wanting part of the cycle.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's like measuring the motivation, which is wanting.

• 6:59Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Researchers mainly see this in the brain's reward system, which is a group of areas deep in the brain, like the nucleus accumbens and the ventral striatum, parts of the amygdala. They're all queuing us up basically to expect something good.

• 7:13Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so once you move beyond the desire and you finally get that cup of coffee and it smells as good as you thought it would and it, and then it tastes really good, what happens next? Is that the liking part?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  That's the liking. And Kent and Morton both say we can measure this liking in a few different ways. So researchers can look at something like whether or not a rodent, which is the animal of choice for most of these studies, eats the food that it's given. So like if you give a rat sugar water.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  The sweeter the sugar water is, the more the rat will lick its lips.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And caregivers have done this with babies basically forever. You give the baby some food and look at its facial reaction to see if it likes it or not.

• 7:51Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, okay.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And if the baby does like it, it might lick its lips or stick its tongue out. And if it doesn't, it's probably spitting that food right out.

• 8:01Emily Kwong?

  The opposite of liking.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Emily Kwong?

  So when it comes to pleasure overall, though, I, I tend to think of dopamine, the feel-good chemical. Does that have a role to play in any of this?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  I'm glad you asked that because we've often heard about dopamine in relation to pleasure just in general.

• 8:17Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  But it's actually specific to the experience of wanting. That's the first part of the cycle we talked about.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  Dopamine is the most famous reward neurotransmitter in the brain. But it turns out it doesn't actually generate pleasure the way we once thought it did. It does, however, generate intense wants and urges for these pleasures in life.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Kent's talking about the difference between wanting something and actually enjoying that thing once you get it.

• 8:42Emily Kwong?

  Oh, OK.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And he says if you lower the dopamine levels in rats, or even in humans, they can still like things, that second part of the pleasure cycle, but they just might not be as motivated to work for those same things.

• 8:55Emily Kwong?

  Gotcha. So dopamine truly is related more to the first part of the cycle, the wanting and desire?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 9:01Emily Kwong?

  And you said that happens in the brain's reward system. So where do we see liking in the brain?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Emily, this is my favorite part of all the research Kent and Morton told me about. Liking lives inside of these tiny sites in the brain in rodents. They're like little buttons nestled right inside of those reward structures we talked about in their brains.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  We call them hedonic hotspots.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  These hotspots form like an interconnected web in the brain, and they can even be stimulated with drugs to produce either more pleasure or less pleasure.

• 9:31Emily Kwong?

  Earlier, you kind of hinted that these two components, wanting and liking, they can get separated, out of whack with each other?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. Sometimes parts of the cycle do fall out of balance, like with addiction, which we mentioned earlier. But I do want to be clear, there are lots and lots of theories of addiction. We really could have whole episodes on them. But some of Kent's research suggests that the brain might be kind of stuck in the wanting stage. A person might be extremely motivated to do something, even if over time, that thing doesn't actually bring them pleasure.

• 10:02Emily Kwong?

  OK, even if they don't experience the liking stage?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Exactly. And Kent talked about how many of us can also see this pattern to a lesser extent in our daily lives.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  We can all have wants triggered by reward-reward cues, things like foods and consumer items and video games and little social messages. These things can trigger dopamine release, mesolimbic activation, and we want to engage with them.

• 10:26Emily Kwong?

  Even if we don't even like them?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:28Emily Kwong?

  This feels consistent with a lot of people's relationship to social media.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:32Emily Kwong?

  OK, so just to go back to like the origin point of this episode, you're sharing that you love these dragon romance novels.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:40Emily Kwong?

  But... You feel a little guilt. Where does that guilt part come from?

• 10:45Speaker 02

  So there's not a ton of neuroscience research that specifically focuses on guilty pleasures in the brain. But I did ask Morton to think about his previous research and then hypothesize how having some of these negative emotions about the things we actually like might change those good feelings.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  They engage these kind of higher social networks. And those social networks then have the power to make us change how it is that we are running through that vicious cycle.

• 11:14Emily Kwong?

  Ah, the power of other people.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, it's big. So this idea of a guilty pleasure could be an example of something we really do like, but don't want to like. Or it could just be a way of signaling to other people, like, hey, I'm separate from this thing that I enjoy. It's kind of hard to say.

• 11:32Emily Kwong?

  OK.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Although there is some behavioral research that suggests feeling guilty about doing something might actually make us enjoy that thing more.

• 11:39Emily Kwong?

  OK, tell me more about that, about liking something even if you should feel guilty about it.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I talked to Kelly Goldsmith about this. She's a behavioral scientist and professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. And she did a whole series of studies in 2012 testing the associations between guilt and pleasure.

• 11:57Emily Kwong?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  She and her team basically got people to be thinking about guilt without being consciously aware of it.

• 12:02Emily Kwong?

  How'd they pull that off?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So they'd have participants do things like unscramble a bunch of words. And for some groups, those words were related to guilt.

• 12:10Emily Kwong?

  Huh.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  And then that group would go do another kind of task. So like for one of these studies, Kelly gave participants unlabeled chocolates. And then they rated how much they liked the chocolates and how much they'd be willing to pay for them. And you can probably guess which group said they liked the candy more.

• 12:28Emily Kwong?

  The ones thinking about guilt?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this pattern was true for a bunch of other studies Kelly did.

• 12:33Emily Kwong?

  Humans are fascinating. We're just like a conundrum of contradictions.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Totally. And Kelly did tell me about how it's really easy to say, like, this one thing is bad and this one thing is good. But a lot of the time, as we know, in science and in life, that's so not the case.

• 12:50Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  And things that we identify as bad might be good or vice versa.

• 12:54Speaker 07

  Our lives are so constrained, most of us, most of the time. We show up for work, we eat the breakfast, we get our kids to school. It's like holding down a spring. And when you just get a chance to let go of that spring a little bit and do something a little bit naughty, it can actually feel pretty excellent.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like, the joy of...

• 13:09Emily Kwong?

  Rebellion, but I do recognize how it can get out of hand. So how do we go about honoring our pleasures in a healthy way?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Emily, this is something I heard from pretty much every person I talked to that, for the most part, we really should just lean into the things, plural, that make us happy. Morton talked about how some of the most fulfilling pleasures give us a sense of meaningfulness, so being part of a community, cooking with friends and family, doing social activities.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  I think the take home message from my research is that it's not really about moderation, and it's not really about will. It's about variation. It's about realizing that there are many different pleasures out there. And most importantly, you shouldn't be somebody who just does it for themselves. You should share the love.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  This reminded me of something Sammy told me, too, about how when we emphasize our negative feelings about a certain pleasure, we really risk cutting off potential connections with others, connections that could bring us the kind of meaningfulness and pleasure Morton and I talked about.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  One of the things that I really try to encourage folks when we're talking about pleasure activism is to address what I call like the pleasure police in your head. Because just because somebody else doesn't like something doesn't mean it's not good.

• 14:24Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, we don't have to be all or nothing about the things that give us pleasure.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  It's like what Kelly said, nothing has to be entirely bad, nothing has to be entirely good. We really exist kind of in these in-between spaces, and so does our pleasure.

• 14:37Emily Kwong?

  Rachel, thank you for diving into something so complicated in this liminal space of pleasure and all of its attendant parts. You are a queen, and I hope you can enjoy those books without shame henceforth.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I will let you know.

• 14:53Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Rebecca Ramirez, who was also the editor. It was fact checked by Rachel Carlson. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace, without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu. This message comes from EasyCater, the workplace food platform. EasyCater helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget. With employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 24/7 customer support, all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com.