Getting satisfaction
What could be better than happiness?
Satisfaction, says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns, a professor at Emory University and author of the new book Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment (Henry Holt, September 2005). Berns, 41, has spent his career looking at the parts of our brains (the " neural correlates, " in the words of neuroscientists) responsible for such nuanced actions and feelings as economic decision making, rewards, motivation, and social conformity.
" I have searched for new ways of thinking about the brain, " he writes in his book. " Because how the brain works tells us something crucial about being human. "
One of the deepest and most rewarding feelings that a human can experience is a sense of satisfaction. But where does satisfaction come from? By combining his neuroscientific research and expertise — in his lab at Emory he has neuroimaged the brains of people in the midst of a pleasurable or challenging task — and studying people engaged in satisfying activities, Berns has discovered some of the secrets to achieving this special state.
You said that your experiments turned upside down everything that you understood about what humans really wanted. How so?
I thought the same things that most everyone thinks: that we want pleasure and happiness. But I don't think that is the case at all. We may think that we want that, but the whole issue of what our brains want and how we have evolved reveals something very different. Our brains are wired to respond to novelty and activity. Happiness and pleasure are passive emotions, and you don't really have to do much to achieve them. But satisfaction has an active component.
You talk about ultramarathoning — people running 100 miles in 24 hours — gourmet cuisine, and crossword puzzles. What do all these have in common?
They have in common two elements that are important ingredients for satisfaction: novelty and challenge. But the way they play out is quite different. In crossword puzzles, the challenge is not physical, it's mental. Every crossword puzzle is different, so it is always a new challenge in that sense. When you can figure it out, there is a definite feeling of satisfaction, that feeling of aha! Ultramarathoners stress their systems intensely, to the point of incredible physical pain and exhaustion. Gourmet cuisine may not be challenging, but the novelty of indulging our senses that way can leave us feeling intensely satisfied.
You describe the biology of what gets triggered to create feelings of satisfaction. As you describe it, dopamine and the striatum are crucial to making us feel satisfied. How? We have known about the neurotransmitter dopamine for about 50 years, and it has always been linked to pleasure. In rat studies, we have found that dopamine is released in response to things that we think cause pleasure, like food, water, and sex, and also drugs of abuse. But over the last ten years, we began to understand that dopamine was not released strictly with pleasure but also when you encounter something that you didn't know about before. The striatum is a key region for two reasons. First, it has the most dopamine receptors of any region in the brain and is where the interaction between the individual and the environment happens.
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