PLEASURE AND THE HUMAN BODY

Pleasure and the Human Body

Pleasure and the Human Body

Introduction

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner's bank balance. They found that the wealthier a man is, the more frequently his partner has orgasms. Women's orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner. Experts believe the phenomenon is an “evolutionary adaptation” that is hard-wired into women, driving them to select men on the basis of their perceived quality. (Scruton, 1994)

The study is certain to prove controversial, suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers. However, it fits into a wider body of research known as evolutionary psychology which suggests that both men and women are genetically predisposed to ruthlessly exploit each other to achieve the best chances of survival for their genes. The female orgasm is the focus of much research because it appears to have no reproductive purpose. Women can become pregnant whatever their pleasure levels.

Discussion

Except that some scientists think the issue of pleasure in the brain is far from settled. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, neuroscientist Kent Berridge is carrying out experiments that just don't fit the picture. He thinks the electrodes were filling those patients and rats not with pleasure, but with a subtly different feeling - desire. Heath and other researchers, he thinks, mistook wanting for liking. Meanwhile, Edmund Rolls at the University of Oxford has been finding pleasure in a completely different brain area, the orbitofrontal cortex just behind the eyes. And Scruton and others are discovering that opioids, not dopamine, may be the real key to transmitting feelings of pleasure. (Scruton, 1994)

No one can quite agree how all the findings fit together, but they are gradually evolving into a new model of how and where pleasure is registered in the brain. The basic idea that pleasure is a reward for doing something that promotes survival remains important, but pleasure is turning out to play a much wider role. It seems to be involved in all types of decision making, from choosing food to solving mathematical problems. Pleasure helps us plan our movements and allows our brains to filter and sort the mass of smells, sights, sounds and other information that bombard our senses. It may have been the origin of all our emotions. Perhaps even consciousness itself evolved from the simple sensing of pleasure and displeasure.

At first glance, the "reward centre" idea seems hard to fault. The self-stimulation experiments, beginning with rats in the 1950s and followed by the human experiments in the 1960s, seemed perfectly clear. Modern brain-imaging studies have confirmed that the centre works overtime whenever you're enjoying something, whether it's sex or chocolate, drugs or music. And chemical analysis shows that, whatever your pleasure, dopamine fuels the circuit. "Dopamine was the pleasure transmitter," says Berridge. "The evidence seemed so strong. If you shut down dopamine signalling by giving a drug that blocks dopamine receptors, you dilute the reward value of ...