Skip to main content

How Pleasure Works – Paul Bloom ****

I have to start this review with a confession and an apology to the author. When the book arrived for review in 2010 (no, not a typo), I was totally fed up with books about different human emotions. We had been absolutely drenched with the things, many of them rather tedious. So I put it to one side and forgot about it. A few days ago I needed a book to read, had nothing else to hand and discovered I’d made a big mistake – because the book is brilliant. So my apologies to Paul Bloom: the only thing I would say is that as an author I appreciate reviews however late they come and I hope he will too.
Bloom makes a wonderful exploration of what pleasure is and why we appreciate everything from basic animal desires like food and sex to much more complex enjoyment like reading a book or looking at an artwork. In doing so he digs into the real attachments we have – why, for example, we appreciate a ‘real’ original painting more than a perfect copy, even though the artwork itself is identical. And why we value a tape measure owned by J. F. Kennedy (one sold for $50,000) more than just an ordinary one off the shelf in a hardware store.
At the heart of Bloom’s argument is the rather philosophical concept of essences. Human beings have a tendency, he argues to associate invisible intangible essences with objects that change their value to us. The fact that in an objective sense these essences don’t exist doesn’t matter to us – and so from a psychological viewpoint they are important and real. If this sounds a little dull and philosophical don’t worry – Bloom’s writing is light and interesting and he makes all this stuff… a pleasure to read.
You may wonder when I think this book is so excellent why it has only got four rather than five stars. This is primarily because the subject, though fascinating, is frankly rather woolly. There is a lot in here that isn’t so much science as philosophy and guesswork (there’s  difference?). Because of that, I hesitate to give it the full whack. But it is a great read, there is fascinating material in there, and I’d really encourage you to give it a go. With the proviso of not giving it to anyone who’d be shocked by the description of S&M etc. it would make a great present too.

Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur