Pleasure and Anxiety

Thursday, in a post on The Science of Orgasm, I mentioned that I’d developed an argument that pleasure is a function of all the activity in the nervous system. In this post I present a slightly revised version of my discussion in Beethoven’s Anvil (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 84-88. You can find the citations in that book, as well as the immediately preceding argument, on why it doesn’t make sense to talk about pleasure centers.

Go With the Flow

In The Sweet Spot in Time John Jerome was interested in the pleasures of athletic excellence and proposed an informal theory about what he calls the Sweet Spot Theory of Performance. By “sweet spot” he means that spot on a baseball bat, tennis racket, or golf club that affords the squarest contact with the ball, transfers energy to it most efficiently, and thus minimizes jarring transmitted back to the hands. That spot, he assures us, is not myth but a mechanical fact. Generalizing from that, he argues that the superior athlete “is the one who in effect reaches the sweet spot of the arc for each segment of his or her skeleton as he or she goes through the athletic motion.” The pleasure of sport—at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating someone else in competition—is simply the feeling one gets when the body is working at its best.

The pleasure of music, I submit, is like that. Musicians certainly know the kind of physical pleasure that Jerome talks about, as do dancers. But so do people who only listen.

Jerome is focused on the smoothly functioning athletic body. But muscles cannot contract and flex in just the right way unless the nervous system controls them just so. The smooth motion is in the body, but the pleasure is in the nervous system. Even if a listener does not move his body, his nervous system does have to follow the sound. I am suggesting that a great deal of the pleasure we take from music lies in overall dynamic character of the activity itself—it is a property of the neural weather. Some weather feels better than other weather. This is not a matter of some brain center detecting some property in the neural weather and signaling good or bad. Rather, we are talking about the overall state of the brain. You don’t need to detect this state because this state is you; it is your mind.

We are now in familiar territory. The idea that music is linked to motion is an old one, one explored by Charles Keil in his essay “Motion and Feeling through Music” and validated by studies that show activity in motor areas of the brain when people are listening to music. Musical pleasure is an example of flow, a term coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is not special either to music or athletic performance, but is a capacity inherent in the nervous system and can happen during a wide range of activities. In Csikszentmihalyi’s model, flow is a function of the conditions of task performance. Where one’s skill exceeds the demands of a task by a considerable margin, the task is boring. Where task demands exceed one’s skill by a considerable margin, the task provokes anxiety—which we’ll examine in more detail in the next section. One feels flow only when the task demands are just a little beyond one’s current skill. In that situation one must be fully alert and attentive in order to perform the task and, if one is so, then it is possible to perform the task well. Thus flow represents a style of action, not some specific set of activities.

The idea of musical pleasure as flow does not preclude the possibility that music stimulates specific “pleasure centers,” especially if theose centers then emit neurotransmitters which further enable well-coordinated activity. Any such centers that are activated through music will contribute to that music’s pleasure. But musical pleasure does not depend on such centers. In general I would expect that music is pleasurable in proportion to its capacity for exercising the inherent properties of the brain, especially the rhythmic properties. Thus:

Pleasure as Coherence: Musical pleasure is the subjective awareness of overall neural flow where that flow is well-timed and coherent.

Further, this musical flow is not under the control of any particular brain system but reflects the joint interaction of all active neural systems, at all levels of interaction. The pleasure-center view would have us believe that musical flow is regulated by those specific pleasure centers. If musical pleasure is not localized in a few centers, it follows that musical flow is not regulated by those centers. We have mutual adjustment and interaction here and there, indeed everywhere, but no omniscient master dictating the terms of the neural dance. Music’s pleasures have no master.

Anxiety

Pleasure, of course, has its opposite in pain. So far as we can tell, the nervous system doesn’t have anything that can be called a pleasure system. By contrast, the nervous system certainly does have pain receptors, a pain system, and pain centers, though the exact workings of this system are mysterious. The basic purpose of the pain system is to warn the organism about (possible) physical damage, which is detected by receptors in the skin. The neurology of pain is thus quite different from that of pleasure, its nominal opposite.

I believe that, in fact, the functional opposite of pleasure is not pain but anxiety. Just as pleasure is the subjective experience of a coherent overall pattern of neural activity, so anxiety is the subjective experience of an incoherent pattern. In Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation of flow, anxiety is the overall pattern of neural activity that occurs when you try to perform a task that is far too difficult. You simply have not mastered the necessary mental or physical routines. You fumble and fidget, lose track of where you are, and can’t think of what to do next. This is all quite uncomfortable; you feel anxious.

The literature on the neurobiology of anxiety is quite extensive and varied. While I certainly haven’t examined it in full, the materials I have read are not about some center or centers which detect or create anxiety. Rather, the literature on anxiety is about fear, traumatic experience, conflict, the anticipation of harm or danger, the centers involved in such anticipation, and the biochemical and physical consequences of anxiety. I have no particular reason to doubt or reject any of this, at least in principle. It is all relevant. What I am saying, however, is that the net result of these various causal forces and factors is badly-timed and incoherent neural flow. Thus, Michael Posner and Marcus Raichle assert that “Adults who report themselves as able to focus and shift attention also say they are less prone to depression and anxiety than those who report themselves as less able to control their attention.” When I read that I see problems with neurodynamics; a conflicted brain will not be able to shift smoothly from one state to another. Then we have Jeffrey Gray’s theory of anxiety which links it to mismatches between expectations and actuality as detected in limbic structures.

Thus, in parallel to our concept of musical pleasure, we have:

Anxiety as Incoherence: Anxiety is the subjective awareness of overall neural flow where that flow is poorly timed and incoherent.

What, does this really mean? Let me offer an analogy that Norbert Wiener used in some speculations on psychopathology in Cybernetics: traffic jams.* Wiener wasn’t so much interested in the flow of cars over roads as he was in the flow of electrical signals through complex communications networks. But in both cases, an overload of traffic leads to breakdowns.

One thing that both anxiety and traffic jams have in common is that they are symptoms. Traffic jams can have various causes—construction, an accident, a sobriety check point, outflow from a sporting event, and so on. Similarly, anxiety has many causes. Some anxieties may reflect inner conflict of the sort best worked out in psychotherapy; others may reflect phobias that can be handled through some kind of behavioral therapy. Csikzenmihalyi talks of task difficulty as a cause of anxiety. And some anxiety results from rational assessments of genuinely threatening situations.

Keeping all of this in mind, imagine a band of proto-humans somewhere on the African steppe. Things in this particular group are getting pretty edgy, for whatever reasons—independently of any other causal forces, social life certainly produces stress. Somehow, the group members start stomping their feet in the same rhythm and start vocalizing wildly, each singing her own line yet all of them somehow managing to blend together in a fine raucous mix. They do this for an hour or so and the anxiety starts dissipating as the rhythmic actions recruit more and more neural circuits into the flow, dissolving the neural traffic jams. Whatever the root causes, the symptom has been alleviated.

Such things, of course, need not be confined to the distant past. We do it all the time, and not by happenstance. We seek out music, and ritual, and use them to bring coherence to our inner lives.

* * * * * 

In my view, then, both pleasure and anxiety are subjective states reflecting the overall pattern of activity in the nervous system. Neither one can be localized in certain centers such then, when the center is stimulated, one feels pleasure or anxiety. From this it follows that the desire for pleasure is not a desire to satisfy the goal of some specific neural system in the way that, for example, the desire for water reflects the activity of circuitry that monitors the body’s water balance.

One can remember that this or that activity gave pleasure, or anxiety. And one can anticipate that such activity will do the same in the future. Such anticipation can certainly influence decisions about what one will do. That is quite different, however, from getting a drink of water because one feels thirsty or putting on a sweater because one feels cold.

There is nothing in this conception of pleasure and anxiety that makes them exclusively human feelings. Surely animals can and do experience both. But it is not at all obvious to me that animals can remember or anticipate either. Could it really be the case that only humans among all creatures can set pleasure itself as a goal for activity?

---

* Prompted by news of a 60-mile long traffic jam in China, The New York Times recently held a little discussion of traffic jams. Benjamin Seibold, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, described traffic jams that happen without any actual blockage of traffic:

There are other types of jams that occur in dense, but flowing traffic. These so-called "phantom traffic jams'' can happen without any obstacles on the road. Instead, they are a property of the flow. Traffic models and simulations show that once traffic volume exceeds a critical threshold, small perturbations in the flow amplify, and traffic waves develop. These traffic waves, so called "jamitons," can travel backward along the road, forcing drivers to brake and accelerate constantly.

When that happens in the nervous system, we feel anxious. The trick, of course, is to figure out just what the neural correlate of such dynamics would be.