Pleasure junkies all around! Why it matters and why ‘the arts’ might be the answer: a biopsychological perspective

Abstract

Today's society is pleasure seeking. We expect to obtain pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography, games and gadgets whenever we want them. The problem: with this type of pleasure-maximizing choice behaviour we may be turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot. Pleasure-only activities are fun. In excess, however, such activities might have negative effects on our biopsychological health: they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms underlying choice behaviour. Choice behaviour becomes biased towards short-term pleasure-maximizing goals, just as in the addicted brain (modulated by the amygdala, posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex' (VMPFC), striatum, nucleus accumbens; ‘A-system’) and away from long-term prosperity and general well-being maximizing objectives (normally ensured by the insula, anterior VMPFC, hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); ‘I-system‘). This paper outlines, first, what ‘pleasure’ is and what ‘pleasure-only’ activities are (e.g. social media engagement, hyper-palatable eating). Second, an account is given of the type of action that might aid to maintain the neural systems underlying choice behaviour balanced. Finally, it is proposed that engagement with the arts might be an activity with the potential to foster healthy choice behaviour—and not be just for pleasure. The evidence in this rather new field of research is still piecemeal and inconclusive. This review aims to motivate targeted research in this domain.

A Theoretical Framework for How We Learn Aesthetic Values

“…Whether the pleasure from aesthetic value is phenomenologically distinct from other pleasures is an open question (Christensen, 2017;Nadal and Skov, 2018;Menninghaus et al, 2019;Skov and Nadal, 2020). On the one hand, neuroimaging studies show that a range of rewarding, pleasure-giving experiences are processed in the same brain regions.…”

Art is not special: an assault on the last lines of defense against the naturalization of the human mind

“…A majority of researchers in neuroaesthetics assume that cognitive or neural processes associated with experiences of art are art-specific (see Chatterjee, 2011;Pearce et al, 2016). Indeed, several recent psychological models of art experience (Pelowski et al, 2016(Pelowski et al, , 2017Menninghaus et al, 2017) are explicitly grounded on the premise that it is possible to identify psychological and neurobiological processes and functions that are specific to art, and that set the experience of art apart from -or even above (Christensen, 2017) -non-art induced experiences, such as enjoying a beer or a game of chess. The functions that such models assume to be specific to art include, among others, 'affect ', 'physiology', 'appraisal', 'meaning', 'novelty', 'transcendence', 'epiphany', 'catharsis', 'awe', 'pleasure', 'insight', 'harmony', or 'thrills' (all taken from Pelowski et al, 2017).…”

Why and How Should Cognitive Science Care about Aesthetics?

“…Although compelling in this case, evolutionary explanations reach their limit when it comes to explaining pleasures derived from cognitive mastering, unpredictability, or experiences that include negative emotions. To account for these cases, the explanatory framework needs to be broadened to include the self-rewarding nature of aesthetic processing [9] (e.g., 'savoring' a felt emotional state) [73,78], the exploitation of the brain's predictive coding system (especially in time-based stimuli with regular elements; e.g., music, poetry) [82][83][84], reference to social cohesion (as aesthetic experiences are often made in social contexts) [85,86], and developmental, emotional, and health-related benefits [87,88].…”