Satisfaction : The Science of Finding True Fulfillment

by Berns, Gregory

• ISBN13: 9780805076004
• ISBN10: 080507600X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Summary

"Opening with a revealing description of the brain's basic appetite for information, Satisfaction proposes a new way of understanding the roots of human motivation. While most of us assume that we more or less live by the "pleasure principle" (the more pleasure, the better), Berns describes how our brains actually crave just the kind of challenge and adversity that we tend to regard as satisfaction's opposite." "Satisfaction offers more than a new understanding of how to seek and achieve the emotion most integral to our lives - it also encourages us to begin to think differently about where we find satisfaction and what motivates us to seek it in the first place."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University. Profiled twice in the Science section of The New York Times, Berns and his research have been featured in media as diverse as O, The Oprah Magazine; Forbes; Nature; Money; New Scientist; Psychology Today; Self; Reader’s Digest; International Herald Tribune; and on CNN, NPR, and the BBC. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and children.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
The Slave in the Brain	1	(17)
For the Love of Money	18	(29)
Puzzling Gratifications	47	(24)
The Sushi Problem	71	(28)
The Electric Pleasuredome	99	(21)
It Hurts So Good	120	(26)
Running High	146	(29)
Iceland: The Experience	175	(35)
Sex, Love, and the Crucible of Satisfaction	210	(37)
Epilogue	243	(4)
Notes	247	(24)
Acknowledgments	271	(4)
Index	275

Excerpts

There is no reason to think that the pleasures of sex would be completely spared the fate of the hedonic treadmill. Familiarity leads to boredom, and with it the incessant reduction of all pleasures that can threaten the sexual glue binding many couples together. While novelty is a sure-fire way of creating great experiences, the belief that matrimonial harmony depends on stability, fidelity, and constancy stands in direct opposition to this. As in everything related to satisfaction, and perhaps also relationships, the tension between what is predictable and safe versus what is novel and dangerous, is constantly being played out.

Satisfaction—that state of blessed contentment, mystical enlightenment, tranquility, a sense of something beyond your own existence—is ephemeral at best. Everything I have encountered inside the lab and out in the world suggests that satisfaction is not the same as either pleasure or happiness, and that searching for happiness will not necessarily lead to satisfaction. It is in the quest for satisfaction that you find it; within any quest you encounter novelty and your brain changes as a result. Novelty can take you far, but like everything, it too is subject to habituation, and the risks associated with pursuing novelty for its own sake may be substantial. How, for example, can you incorporate it into a long-term relationship?

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Excerpted from Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Berns
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