On the Bookshelf: 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.
Think of Grand Central Terminal in New York. All the trains represent potential things that you might do, but all the trains are only going through the terminal once. So you can only do one thing at a time, just like we only have one body to dedicate to a task. You need a mechanism for deciding what to do, for switching the tracks of the trains that are constantly vying for access to your physical body. The striatum controls the trains, decides which destination, and dopamine is the signal to switch tracks.
If you do something at which you are highly practiced, then you have little opportunity to encounter something novel or unexpected, so dopamine and satisfaction may be low. But when you do something that takes you beyond what you have done before, you are in unknown territory and novel information will flow into your striatum, pumping out dopamine, which in turn forces you to act on the information. The release of dopamine in response to the novel information is the essence of a satisfying experience.
We have all been taught that stress is not a good thing, and we should try to minimize it because it can lead to heart disease and hypertension and even depression. But what you found seems to be counterintuitive.
Of course it is important to keep levels of stress manageable, but it is not as simple as saying stress is bad. In fact, some stress is good because it releases a very important hormone called cortisol. While dopamine is a neurotransmitter, cortisol is a hormone that is produced in the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys. It is known that cortisol is released in response to mental, physical, and psychological stress, and it has been thought of in a negative way. But the paradox with cortisol is that it can do many positive things as well. Without it, we wouldn't be able to survive at all. When it gears up the autonomic nervous system to help us deal with stress, it activates the body in a general way so it can run or fight or do whatever you can do to deal with the stress. Cortisol goes up, for example, after exercise. But with dopamine in the striatum, cortisol interacts synergistically. Novelty releases dopamine, stress releases cortisol, and when they come together they create an intense feeling of satisfaction.
Is there an evolutionary angle to this?
The old evolutionary model that the brain exists to help us survive and reproduce is fine but too broad. If you go beyond that, the thing that helps us to survive and reproduce is the capacity to adapt in the world and to learn. The world is so unpredictable; most animals have brains like sponges absorbing so much in their drive to learn. Our brains are just primed for novelty. Nature never said you had to be happy. It said you had to learn to adapt to the world.
But if novelty and stress are so great, why do we shy away from them?
I think that the best answer is an analogy. Exercise is great for us, but often times we just sit on the couch and don't exercise because it hurts. The brain is not so different from a muscle; it can be conditioned. You can learn to work through things. That is the message I would give. Certain highs are anxiety producing but once dealt with produce a feeling of satisfaction in its place. There is priming and toughening of the systems in the brain, so it makes no sense to tackle the most anxiety-producing phenomenon. You can work up to it, like a training process. Anxiety is a forward-looking emotion. It's always about what is going to happen; it is not generally an emotion that is backward looking. Worrying about the past is more like depression. An anxious brain is trying to make predictions about what will happen, so the best way to sate that need and assuage that feeling is by doing what you may be anxious about.
But we can ' t all go sky diving. How do working people get some novelty in our lives?
I would say stop pursuing happiness and pursue satisfaction. One should be concentrating on things that give you a sense of commitment and achievement. Seek new experiences. When you think about it, the capacity for novelty that any inanimate object can give you is limited. The greatest source of novelty is other people. Fundamentally they are unpredictable, even if you have been married to them for 20 years. You don't know what the other person will do; there is the element that perhaps they will do something I won't like. Traditionally in most interactions, especially relationships, it is very easy to avoid that. You quickly find out what the other person's buttons are, and you avoid pushing them. It lulls you into the sense that you know each other, but in fact you don't. The only way to find out is ask, and when you do, you discover that novelty, you face that challenge. And you can achieve real satisfaction.
So when Mick Jagger complains that he " Can ' t Get No Satisfaction, " what is his problem?
He wasn't trying hard enough.