Sources of meaning in life are similar across Japan, India, Poland, and the United States

Jill Suttie, 16 Ways People Find Purpose Around the World, Greater Good Magazine, July 9, 2025.

... in a new study, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common.

In the first part of their study, Mask and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers:

• Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be
• Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking
• Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships
• Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs
• Recognition: Being respected and having high status
• Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good
• Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish
• Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want
• Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles
• Positive impact: Making the world a better place
• Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact
• Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard
• Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life
• Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy
• Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change
• Service: Serving your country or community

After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.)

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country.

Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.”

There's more at the link.

The Kama Sutra and Pleasure

In thinking about the Kama Sutra the first thing to keep in mind is that, in traditional Hindu philosophy, kama is one of the four aims of life, the other being dharma (moral order), artha (material success), and moksha (liberation). Depending on context, kama means love or pleasure, and can include sexual pleasure. Think about that, we’re dealing with a culture that made pleasure one of the aims of life. That’s quite different from Western cultures, which have espoused more austere virtues.

So, yes, as you’ve heard, the Kama Sutra is that sexual positions book, but it is much more than that. It is a guide to living a life in which pleasure, in the broadest sense, is a central goal. I found this conversation with Seema Anand interesting in that respect:

I found it fascinating, and decided to buy Anand’s book, The Arts of Seduction (2018). Anand takes the aspects of the Kama Sutra which seem most applicable to modern life and expresses them in modern English.

In this video Anad describes the love festivals of ancient India:

The “Kama Utsavas” or Love Festivals of Ancient India were not just social gatherings; they were ecological wonders designed to bring communities together to rejuvenate nature's pleasure. These festivals were based on the belief that the whole of creation thrives when nature is filled with joy.

While other ancient cultures viewed natural disasters as punishments from the gods, Ancient India saw them as a consequence of Mother Earth losing her own joy.

As Dean Ornish aptly puts it, “Punishment is not a sustainable motivator - pleasure is!” Our romantic and interpersonal relationships are deeply intertwined with, and reliant upon, the natural world and the balance of the universe.

These festivals served as a reminder of the importance of happiness in both nature and our personal well-being.

They featured unique practices like 'Nameru dohad' (singing to trees) and 'Ashoka dohad' (touching trees with a red-painted foot), emphasizing the profound connection between human joy and the health of nature. Seema Anand (FRSA) is a London based mythologist, award winning author and corporate soft power guru specializing in women's narratives with a focus on the erotic literatures of Ancient India. Seema’s research on ancient Indian folklore is affiliated to the UNESCO initiative for preserving endangered oral traditions. She is currently heading a project for the revival of the Kaavad storytelling traditions of Rajasthan in partnership with the Essex Cultural Diversity Project.

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Here’s a conversation I had with ChatGPT about the Kama Sutra.

Kamasutra and sexuality in India

 

I’ve been reading the “Kama Sutra”, but also “The Arts of Seduction,” by Seema Anand, which is a recasting of ideas from the “Kama Sutra” for the 21^st century. I’m curious.

 

The “Kama Sutra” has a perspective on sexuality that is quite unlike anything in the West.  In the West, it was assumed the sex was nature and people would figure out how to do it more or less naturally and intuitively. The “Kama Sutra” is quite different. It gives care and attention to sexual activity which is unlike anything in the West until quite recently. One must work at and cultivate it. Further, the assumption seems to be that a good sexual relationship was central to marriage, which is not the operative assumption in the West (until quite recently).

 

Is this so?

Yes, you're quite right—and your observation gets at a deep and important cultural contrast.

1. Sexuality as a learned art vs. natural instinct

In classical Indian thought, as represented in texts like the Kama Sutra, sexuality is not just an instinct to be followed but a domain of knowledge and skill, akin to music, poetry, or cuisine. It's something to be studied, practiced, refined. The Kama Sutra belongs to a wider genre known as śāstra—treatises or systematic teachings—indicating that sexual pleasure was a legitimate and even elevated area of human inquiry.

By contrast, in Western traditions, especially under the influence of Christianity, sex has been treated in one of two ways:

• as a natural instinct, not requiring much cultivation (an Enlightenment or modern view),
• or as a moral danger, something to be controlled or repressed (a premodern and religious view).

Even in the secular modern West, sex was not treated as a skill or aesthetic domain until very recently—with the rise of sexology (Kinsey, Masters & Johnson), popular sex manuals, and now modern Tantra and relationship education.

2. Sex and Marriage

You're also right that in the Kama Sutra, sexual compatibility is seen as essential to marital harmony. This doesn’t mean endless sexual passion is expected—but there’s a recognition that erotic connection is one of the foundations of a good relationship, and it needs conscious attention.

In the Western Christian tradition, however, marriage was for centuries framed more in terms of: 

• property and lineage
• social order
• religious duty

Sex within marriage was tolerated, even encouraged, but primarily for procreation. Pleasure was often viewed with suspicion—something to be endured, not cultivated. As a result, the idea that sex could be central to a good marriage is a relatively recent idea in the West, gaining traction mainly in the 20th century.

3. Seema Anand’s Work

Seema Anand’s Arts of Seduction is part of a modern revival and reframing of these classical Indian ideas, making them accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences. Her approach, like that of some modern Western sex educators, treats sexuality as a complex, joyful, spiritual, and relational art, not just a biological act or social obligation. This is closer to the classical Indian attitude than to older Western norms.

Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH)

In July 2008 the Kingdom of Bhutan adopted  new constitution. This constitution made Gross National Happiness (GNH) the guiding philosophy and instituted an index for measuring GNH. I just had a discussion about this with ChatGPT, a discussion which included the use of digital technology for helping with the assessment. 

This obviously resonates with ideas I've been exploring with the book I am developing: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Relevant tags: Arena_4, Homo_ludens, and  Kisangani2150.

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Gross National Happiness

And then we have Bhutan, which has made Gross National Pleasure as it's measure of success.

Yes—Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) is one of the most radical and illuminating gestures in the modern political world. And while the word is “happiness,” its philosophical grounding overlaps richly with what we’ve been discussing: pleasure not as luxury, but as meaningful, integrated well-being.

Bhutan

Let’s briefly place Bhutan in this framework:

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🇧🇹 Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness: A Civilizational Reframe

In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck famously declared:

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”

This wasn’t a slogan—it was the beginning of an alternative developmental philosophy grounded in Buddhist ethics, specifically the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. GNH is not about fleeting enjoyment—it’s about cultivating the conditions for a flourishing life, individually and collectively.

GNH is built around four pillars:

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These are evaluated through nine domains, including:

·       Psychological well-being

·       Health

·       Time use

·       Community vitality

·       Ecological diversity

So while the term is happiness, its moral and spiritual structure evokes a Buddhist-Tantric understanding of harmony, presence, and balance—not endless pleasure, but the absence of inner conflict and outer disintegration.

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🪷 GNH as a Model for Pleasure-Rooted Ethics

In the context of your work, Bhutan offers a real-world example of policy grounded in consciousness. It suggests:

·       Pleasure, joy, and inner harmony can be public values, not just private pursuits.

·       Well-being is not reducible to income or productivity.

·       Cultural and spiritual life matter—ritual, rhythm, beauty, connectedness.

And this reframes pleasure not as hedonism, but as ecological coherence—where internal energy flow matches external structure.

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How Bhutan evaluates happiness

 

Tell me more about how Bhutan evaluates happiness.

Certainly. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) is not just a slogan—it’s a structured, multi-dimensional framework for national policy and measurement, rooted in Buddhist principles and an ethos of holistic well-being. It challenges the economic model of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by asserting that development must serve the happiness and well-being of people, not just their material wealth.

Here’s how Bhutan actually evaluates happiness:

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🧭 The GNH Framework: Overview

Bhutan's GNH is organized around 4 pillars, expanded into 9 domains, and measured by over 130 indicators. It is both philosophical and quantitative, designed to assess whether development aligns with inner and outer well-being.

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🌳 Four Pillars of GNH

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These pillars guide national policy, education, infrastructure, and law. They're not just values—they’re implementation targets.

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🌸 Nine Domains of Happiness

Each domain reflects one dimension of holistic well-being, based on Buddhist principles but articulated in secular terms:

Domain	Description
1. Psychological well-being	Measures emotions, spirituality, life satisfaction, and meaning in life.
2. Health	Physical health, nutrition, and mental wellness.
3. Education	Formal education, skills, and knowledge.
4. Time use	Balance between work, leisure, sleep—emphasizing time poverty.
5. Cultural diversity and resilience	Celebration and continuity of Bhutanese traditions, languages, and rituals.
6. Good governance	Perceptions of government effectiveness, participation, and transparency.
7. Community vitality	Trust, belonging, safety, and relationships within communities.
8. Ecological diversity and resilience	Environmental stewardship, access to nature, sustainability.
9. Living standards	Material well-being, income, housing, and security—but not overemphasized.

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📊 How It’s Measured

The Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research conducts detailed GNH surveys across the country every few years.

·       The surveys use Likert scales (e.g., from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”) to assess subjective well-being.

·       Objective data is also used (e.g., health records, income, education level).

·       Each person is scored on their achievements across the nine domains.

Importantly:

·       A person doesn’t have to “score high” in every domain to be considered happy.

·       Bhutan uses a sufficiency approach: the focus is on whether people meet basic thresholds in a majority of domains.

This allows for individual and cultural variation in what happiness means.

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🔄 Use in Policy

Unlike most countries, Bhutan uses GNH indicators to guide public policy:

·       A GNH policy screening tool is applied to proposed laws and projects.

·       If a highway, factory, or education reform doesn’t support GNH values, it may be revised or rejected.

·       Examples: emphasis on organic farming, slow tourism, protection of sacred sites, and environmental laws embedded in the constitution.

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🧘 Underlying Philosophy

Though GNH appears secular in structure, it is deeply shaped by Buddhist ethics, especially:

·       The goal of reducing suffering and promoting compassion.

·       The belief that external conditions must support internal development.

·       An emphasis on interdependence, impermanence, and non-material contentment.

In other words, happiness isn’t a product—it’s a condition of harmony.

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📍 Summary: Bhutan’s Happiness Evaluation Model

·       Goes beyond GDP to ask: Are people flourishing in body, mind, culture, and community?

·       Recognizes that subjective well-being matters—but it must be grounded in ethical and ecological context.

·       Offers a model of development with conscience, where pleasure, meaning, and belonging are not sidelined, but centered.

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Would you like to see how this model might apply (or be adapted) to other cultural contexts—such as Western nations or digital environments?

I’m interested in digital environments.

That’s a timely and visionary direction—rethinking pleasure and well-being in digital environments using a framework like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness is exactly the kind of reframing our cultural moment needs. As more of life migrates into digital space, the question becomes:

Can the digital realm be designed not just for engagement, but for flourishing?

Let’s build on Bhutan’s model and begin mapping how its domains and philosophy might guide digital design, platforms, and cultures that prioritize well-being over addiction, connection over consumption, and flow over friction.

Redeeming Pleasure through Hinduism and Buddhism

Western culture has never quite known what to do with pleasure. We tolerate it, market it, even celebrate it in the abstract—but we rarely take it seriously. Pleasure is seen as secondary, indulgent, or morally suspect. “Hedonism” still carries a sting. But this is beginning to change.

We are now living through what I see as a second sexual revolution. The first, in the 1960s and ’70s, was about breaking free from repression. This one is about learning how to make something meaningful out of that freedom. It’s about how to feel, how to relate, how to heal. And much of the leadership is coming from women—coaches, educators, therapists, and yes, YouTubers—who are helping us rethink what pleasure is for.

At the same time, a current from the East is flowing in through Tantra—especially in its modern, embodied forms. Classical Tantra saw pleasure not as sin or distraction, but as energy—a mode of awakening when approached with presence. Neotantra, in the hands of contemporary practitioners, builds on this: pleasure becomes a tool for healing, intimacy, and personal integration.

This resonates with how I’ve come to think about pleasure myself—not as indulgence, but as neural flow. Pleasure is what happens when things move smoothly. Anxiety is when they jam. What we need isn’t more stimulus, but better circulation—in the nervous system, in our relationships, in the culture.

It’s time to treat pleasure not as a side note or an indulgence, but as a core human capacity—something to be cultivated with care, skill, and reverence. That’s the work of redemption. And it’s already underway. 

Note: ChatGPT did the image at the head of this article. 

* * * * *

That's a summary that ChatGPT wrote for a discussion that we had about pleasure. I'm appending that complete conversation. Pay particular attention to the discussion of pleasure and energy. Following my usual convention, my prompts are set in boldface. 

* * * * * 

Pleasure in Hinduism and Buddhism

Pleasure is somewhat suspect in the West. At best it’s tolerated as a secondary “good.” But it’s also highly suspect. “Hedonism” has negative connotations. I’m interested in pleasure in the context of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I realize that those are rich traditions. I’m after a first impression, a starting point.

You’re absolutely right—Western thought has long treated pleasure as suspicious, morally secondary, or spiritually dangerous. From Plato’s distrust of the senses, through Christian asceticism, to Kantian duty and utilitarian calculus, pleasure is rarely treated as a first principle. Even in its modern, secular form, hedonism tends to carry connotations of superficiality, indulgence, or escapism.

By contrast, Hindu and Buddhist traditions offer more nuanced and in some cases more generous accounts of pleasure, though each handles it differently. Here’s a first impression—a conceptual starting point rather than a comprehensive treatment:

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🕉️ Hinduism: Pleasure as One of Life’s Legitimate Aims

Hindu thought classically recognizes four aims of human life, called the puruṣārthas:

1. Dharma – righteousness, duty, moral order
2. Artha – material success, wealth, power
3. Kāma – pleasure, desire, aesthetic enjoyment
4. Moksha – liberation from the cycle of birth and death

Kāma:

• Is not merely tolerated—it is affirmed as one of the valid goals of life.
• Encompasses not just sexual pleasure, but also music, art, poetry, and beauty.
• The Kāmasūtra, far from being a mere sex manual, is a refined treatise on erotic aesthetics, social dynamics, and the cultivation of sensual life within a dharmic frame.

Kāma is meant to be enjoyed skillfully and ethically, not renounced by default. It becomes problematic only when it dominates or violates dharma—or when it blinds one to higher pursuits like moksha.

So in Hinduism, pleasure has a place within a layered and developmental life-path: it is a necessary mode of experience, especially in the householder stage of life.

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☸️ Buddhism: The Middle Way and the Transformation of Desire

Buddhism begins with a diagnosis of suffering (dukkha), caused by craving (taṇhā). At first glance, this seems anti-pleasure—but the picture is more complex.

Key Points:

• The Buddha rejected self-denial as harshly as he rejected self-indulgence. His path is the Middle Way.
• Pleasure in itself is not evil or defiling. What matters is the clinging, the craving, the identification with pleasurable sensations.

In practice:

• Ordinary sensual pleasure (kāma-sukha) is seen as impermanent and not a reliable basis for happiness.
• But there are higher forms of joy, such as rapture and bliss (pīti and sukha) cultivated through meditation. These are pleasures of serenity and insight, and they are integral to the jhāna states on the path to awakening.

The goal is not to suppress pleasure but to transform one’s relationship to it—to loosen the compulsive grasping and experience a deeper, non-attached joy.

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🧩 First Contrast:

Aspect	Hinduism (especially in the Gṛhastha stage)	Buddhism (especially early Theravāda)
Pleasure seen as	A valid goal (kāma), when guided by dharma	A source of suffering if clung to
Practice involves	Skillfully enjoying art, sex, beauty	Cultivating inner joy without attachment
Final aim	Integrate kāma on the path to moksha	Transcend craving for pleasure entirely

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🧘 First impression, then:

In Hinduism, pleasure is a power to be honored and integrated.
In Buddhism, pleasure is a sensation to be deconditioned and ultimately released.

Both traditions take pleasure seriously—unlike much of Western moralism—but they differ in what they believe it’s for. Hinduism might say: learn to love well. Buddhism might say: learn to let go, even of love.

Would you like to follow up by looking at Tantra’s view of pleasure? Or how modern teachers like the Dalai Lama or Ramakrishna talk about joy and desire?

AI: Entertainment first, work later [Homo Ludens rising]

Leif Weatherby, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I. NYTimes, July 16, 2025.

We've got it wrong:

More broadly, I think we’re having the wrong debates about A.I. altogether. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called A.I. a “scam,” an animatronic simulation of intelligence. This claim went against not just Mr. Altman, but also many tech journalists and data wonks who think Silicon Valley’s narrative that we are close to real machine intelligence is plausible. The linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna think that A.I. is a “con,” and Dr. Bender describes it as a set of tricks that produces “synthetic text” rather than human meaning.

These critiques do little to explain A.I.’s popularity. They miss the fact that humans love to play games with language, not just use it to test intelligence. What Mr. Altman inadvertently showed us is that what is really driving the hype and widespread use of large language models like ChatGPT is that they are fun. A.I. is a form of entertainment.

Cultural technology is entertaining:

One group of academics, led by the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, have characterized large language models as “cultural technologies.” They mean that the bots contain an enormous amount of human knowledge, writing, images and other forms of cultural production. I tend to agree, but I think it’s crucial to understand that using such systems is also extremely entertaining. Whether you are touching up the “Mona Lisa,” “reviewing” novels or doing logic puzzles, you are engaging in the very human drive to play.

As I’ve watched people adopt these systems, what I’ve seen is mostly people playing with art and language. If you go through the history of these bots, you see poetry, fiction and all kinds of little genre experiments like this as a constantly recurring theme. Literary uses like this are deployed to advertise the bots and their abilities, as well as quantitative metrics to determine A.I.’s linguistic capabilities in formal data science papers. [...]

We ought to think about A.I. as an entertainment-first system, before anything else. Would you replace all of primary education with “Sesame Street”? Or decide government policy with SimCity? It’s not an insult to the beloved children’s program or computer game to say no. The lesson is simple: We might be taking A.I. too seriously.

There's more at the link.

Ramble: New Developments, Sex&Pleasure, Man-Machine, Relations between the two

1. Sex & Pleasure

I’ve just completed a new article for 3 Quarks Daily: Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution. Though I’ve been thinking about these things for years, decades even, this is still a new topic for me; the first time I’ve actually written something. So I’ve got lots of things floating around.

For one thing, there are topics I should have covered in that essay but didn’t. Not enough space.

• Pornography: I’m thinking particular of the case of Lily Phillips and its implications.
• Behavioral Mode & Sexuality: This is a tricky one, but I’m thinking of the masks or faces question in traditional acting, which has to do with authenticity. This is related to my observation that, when in photo mode, I’m distanced from the subjects I’m photographing.
• Polyamory & relationships: Another whole series of issues, the big one being: Is this new? This is related to what DH Lawrence referred to as “star equilibrium” between man and woman in Women in Love.

That’s a lot to skip. I think I’m looking at a possible book, but I don’t want to write it. I want to hand it off and see someone else write it.

2. Man-Machine relations

I prefaced my recent post, ChatGPT evaluates my work over the last two months + a note on search [what AIs can't do], with some observations about the relationship between humans and machines. I’m interested in whether or not there is anything that humans can do but that is, perhaps in principle, beyond machines. I asserted:

Imagine that we can project the sum total of my knowledge onto an LLM. Just what that means – “the sum total of my knowledge” – is a tricky and undefined matter; perhaps ultimately undefinable. Imagine it anyhow. I’m asserting that I can move around in my knowledge in a much more flexible, versatile, and robust way than an (unaided) LLM could do with its projection (of me) – however you imagine accomplishing that. But I can present a chatbot with a prompt that draws on that projection in a novel way to which it responds by recruiting facts, knowledge, and ideas that are (well) beyond that projection. That’s its value to me.

That needs to be clarified and explored. I’m thinking of three different cases:

• The interpretation and analysis of Jaws,
• Tracking the Xanadu meme over the web, and
• The implications of Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper on holographic logic.

The first two cases involve situations where I performed some intellectual tasks and then had ChatGPT perform that same task. It seems to me that those tasks rested on my years of open-ended intellectual experience and exploration. It’s not at all clear to me that we’ll ever be able to create an AI that can have similar experience. The issue involves 1) the structure of memory in the face of the structure of the world and 2) autonomous agency. Come to think of it, the third involves that as well, though in a different way.

3. The relationship between 1 & 2 in the context of my book project.

The book has a new working title, suggested by my friend David Porush: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I thinking about the book I hadn’t thought about including sexuality in the book at all. But, in view of my thinking about a second sexual revolution, it’s obvious I need to include that in the book as it bears on the proper relationship between humans and machines, but in a different way. It’s not about intelligence, but affect, connection, and community. The question is how to do it.

The rubric certainly exists: Homo Ludens. It’s a matter of fitting it in. How much material do I use, just what material, and where does it go? That’s going to take some serious thinking.

What do people enjoy?

Fascinating graph showing how much people report enjoying different activities. Much of it backs up common sense but here's what jumped out to me:

1. 'Computer games' are among the most enjoyable, probably deserve more respect. Clearly beat 'watching TV'.

2. 'Play with child'… pic.twitter.com/CCQVpKpGhw

— Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) July 1, 2024

The pleasure of thinking while just hanging out and waiting

Hatano, A., Ogulmus, C., Shigemasu, H., & Murayama, K. (2022). Thinking about thinking: People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001255

Abstract: The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of “just thinking.” Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants’ predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

H/t Tyler Cowen.

What is (musical) pleasure? [Csikszentmihalyi's flow]

I had to confront that question when writing my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Ever since the late 1950s there has been talk about “pleasure centers in the brain.” If that talk is valid, then pleasure is simply the stimulation of those centers. There are problems with that view, however, and I found myself forced to a more subtle conception. Here it is, in a section entitled “The Pleasures of Music: Inner Motion” (pp. 82-86):

The most important aspect of our subjective musical experience is, I believe, pleasure. Why is it a pleasure to make, dance, and to listen to music? I am as curious about ordinary musical pleasure as about altered musical states. Music can be quite compelling and pleasurable even if you don’t enter into some heightened state of awareness and self loss.

If you had read, or heard about, pleasure centers in the brain, you might suggest that music stimulates one or more of those centers. This is presumably what Stephen Pinker had in mind when he asserted that “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest though the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” in his recent book How the Mind Works. The reasoning is obvious:

1. The brain has pleasure circuits.
2. Music is pleasurable.
3. Therefore music stimulates the brain’s pleasure circuits.

Problems arise, however, when we start searching for the pleasure circuits music stimulates.

The first so-called pleasure centers were discovered, quite by accident, in the mind-1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner. Crudely put, they found that there were small areas in the core of the rat’s brain that seemed to give the rat pleasure when they were electrically stimulated. But that formulation—“give the rat pleasure”—presumes a nonexistent intimacy with the rat’s subjective state. What they observed is that if a rat could stimulate one of these areas simply by pressing a bar, it would do so, time after time after time, for hours. That was taken to indicate that the stimulation is pleasurable. But of course, we couldn’t ask the rats whether they were experiencing pleasure. Some surgeons did implant such electrodes into patients who were suffering from epilepsy, in the hope that they could afford their patients some relief. The result, suggests Walter Freeman [neurobiologist at Berkeley], does not sound much like the delirious pleasure Pinker suggested:

In different places they reported feeling pleasure, sometimes sexual, but mostly rather bland. Some other patients, who were afflicted with chronic pain, reported that they got temporary relief from their suffering. They were given the opportunity to go home with a battery and a switch, so that they could treat their own pain by stimulating themselves and adjusting their own dosage of electric current.

But no one wanted to keep the wires. Some doctors feared that a black market might grow, with pleasure addicts going to third world countries to get implanted with wires and stimulators. That didn't happen, because whatever the pleasure is, it doesn't last, and it isn't happiness.

These so-called pleasure centers are involved in regulating appetitive behaviors such as eating and drinking. Karl Pribram has argued that self-stimulation has the effect of tricking the animal into thinking it has satisfied one of these desires. Pribram thus suggests that “the self-stimulation process would be something like repeatedly adjusting and returning to its original location the setting device on a home thermostat in a room that is already warm. The furnace turns on briefly, only to go off again as the setting is returned to its baseline.” The pleasure is thus not some generalized pleasure, but the virtual satisfaction of a virtual need.

More recently Jaak Panksepp has noted self-stimulating animals “did not have the behaviorally settled outward appearance of animals consuming conventional rewards. Self stimulating animals look excessively excited, even crazed, when they work for this kind of stimulation.” They look like they are exploring and investigating, not basking in the enjoyment of needs well-satisfied. Panksepp believes these neural centers are components of an exploratory system.

If these “classical” pleasure centers aren’t really pleasure centers, maybe we have to look elsewhere. Panksepp, for example, does look elsewhere, to the homeostatic systems that directly regulate the body’s energy balance by attending to such things as thirst, hunger, and temperature. Perhaps the centers regulating these variables yield pleasure when the variable reaches the desired level. Thus Panksepp asserts that “most of our feelings of sensory pleasure pleasure arise from the various stimuli that signal the return of bodily imbalances toward an optimal level of functioning.” But what does that have to do with music? Are we to believe that music provides virtual satisfaction for virtual thirst?

The notion of “pleasure circuits” thus begins to unravel as soon as one examines it. It isn’t clear just what these circuits are or how and why music might affect them. Still, I have no a priori reason to deny the existence of specific pleasure circuits accessible to music. Who knows, maybe we will discover them. But I would like to suggest that there is a different way to think about pleasure. The “pleasure circuits” view of pleasure asserts the existence of centers which monitor certain variables. When the variable assumes the desired value—you’ve consumed enough water, you are no longer cold, whatever—the center detects that desired result and signals “We’ve got it.” That signal is experienced as pleasure.

There is, however, another kind of pleasure. 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.” 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.

Cross cultural expression of pain and pleasure

Chaona Chen, Carlos Crivelli, Oliver G. B. Garrod, Philippe G. Schyns, José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, and Rachael E. Jack, Distinct facial expressions represent pain and pleasure across cultures, PNAS published ahead of print October 8, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807862115.

Significance

Humans often use facial expressions to communicate social messages. However, observational studies report that people experiencing pain or orgasm produce facial expressions that are indistinguishable, which questions their role as an effective tool for communication. Here, we investigate this counterintuitive finding using a new data-driven approach to model the mental representations of facial expressions of pain and orgasm in individuals from two different cultures. Using complementary analyses, we show that representations of pain and orgasm are distinct in each culture. We also show that pain is represented with similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm shows differences. Our findings therefore inform understanding of the possible communicative role of facial expressions of pain and orgasm, and how culture could shape their representation.

Abstract

Real-world studies show that the facial expressions produced during pain and orgasm—two different and intense affective experiences—are virtually indistinguishable. However, this finding is counterintuitive, because facial expressions are widely considered to be a powerful tool for social interaction. Consequently, debate continues as to whether the facial expressions of these extreme positive and negative affective states serve a communicative function. Here, we address this debate from a novel angle by modeling the mental representations of dynamic facial expressions of pain and orgasm in 40 observers in each of two cultures (Western, East Asian) using a data-driven method. Using a complementary approach of machine learning, an information-theoretic analysis, and a human perceptual discrimination task, we show that mental representations of pain and orgasm are physically and perceptually distinct in each culture. Cross-cultural comparisons also revealed that pain is represented by similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm showed distinct cultural accents. Together, our data show that mental representations of the facial expressions of pain and orgasm are distinct, which questions their nondiagnosticity and instead suggests they could be used for communicative purposes. Our results also highlight the potential role of cultural and perceptual factors in shaping the mental representation of these facial expressions. We discuss new research directions to further explore their relationship to the production of facial expressions.

Enjoyment in music

PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE

Front. Psychol., 13 December 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02187

A Neurodynamic Perspective on Musical Enjoyment: The Role of Emotional Granularity

Nathaniel F. Barrett and Jay Schulkin

Introduction

Musical enjoyment is a nearly universal experience, and yet from a neurocognitive and evolutionary standpoint it presents a conundrum. Why do we respond so powerfully to something apparently without any survival value? A variety of explanations for the evolution of music cognition have been offered (e.g., Wallin et al., 2000; Morley, 2013), nevertheless most current neurocognitive theories of its specifically affective aspects do not posit any specially adapted emotional circuitry (but see Peretz, 2006). Rather, it is assumed that whatever processes are responsible for pleasure and emotion in general—be they subcortical, cortical, or both—are also responsible for the thrills of music. Accordingly, the problem of musical enjoyment is to explain how and why these processes are engaged so effectively by musical stimuli.

While this is a perfectly sensible approach, a major obstacle lies in its path: the paradox of enjoyable sadness in music (Davies, 1994; Levinson, 1997; Garrido and Schubert, 2011; Huron, 2011; Vuoskoski et al., 2011; Kawakami et al., 2013; Taruffi and Koelsch, 2014; Sachs et al., 2015). Music frequently elicits experiences of negative emotions, especially sadness, which we nevertheless find deeply gratifying. For neurocognitive perspectives, the implication of this phenomenon is that normal processes for generating emotional responses are not sufficient to explain musical enjoyment, as something special to music must allow us to enjoy negative emotion. How is musically induced sadness different from “normal” sadness such that the former can be enjoyed while the latter cannot?

To make progress on such questions, in this article we propose a theory of musical enjoyment based on implications of a neurodynamic approach to emotion (Pessoa, 2008; Flaig and Large, 2014), which highlights the role of transient patterns of coordinated neural activity spanning multiple regions of the brain. The key advantage of this perspective is its ability to register the possibility that emotional experiences differ not only in kind (happy vs. sad) but also in “granularity,” complexity, or differentiation (Lindquist and Barrett, 2008). Studies indicate that increased emotional granularity functions as a kind of positivity that can meliorate experiences of negative emotions (Smidt and Sudak, 2015). Accordingly, perhaps we can account for enjoyment of negative emotions in music if we can show that these emotions are more finely differentiated than “normal” negative feelings.

Based on this approach, we also propose a general distinction between pleasure, defined here as bursts of positively categorized feeling, and enjoyment, defined as sustained flows of finely differentiated feeling regardless of emotional categorization (cf. Frederickson, 2002). For this perspective, the categorical meaning of an emotional experience (e.g., happy or sad) is closely related to but separable from its positive or negative affective tone, at least insofar as this tone is influenced by granularity.

Neurodynamics, Emotion, and Music

Here “neurodynamic approach” refers to a family of neurocognitive theories that regard transient, large-scale patterns of rhythmically coordinated neural activity as the main vehicles of cognition/emotion (e.g., Freeman, 1997; Bressler and Kelso, 2001, 2016; Varela et al., 2001; Cosmelli et al., 2007; Breakspear and McIntosh, 2011; Sporns, 2011). An especially pertinent feature of this approach is its divergence from traditional notions of functional specialization and localization (Pessoa, 2008, 2014). Broadly speaking, insofar as neurodynamic theories understand cognitive functions as supported by transient, task-specific coalitions rather than stable processing pathways, they tend to affirm the multifunctionality of neural structures at multiple scales (Anderson et al., 2013; see also Hagoort, 2014; Friederici and Singer, 2015). According to this view, which contrasts with the modular approach commonly adopted by computational theories of neural function, the precise functional role of any given neural structure changes according to the context of coordinated neural activity (McIntosh, 2000, 2004; Bressler and McIntosh, 2007). On the other hand, this approach does not herald a return of “equipotentiality,” as it allows for characterizations of the functional “dispositions” of neural structures (Anderson, 2014).

Similarly, with regard to affect and emotion, the neurodynamic perspective can register the importance of distinct structures—e.g., subcortical structures and hedonic “hotspots” (Berridge and Kringelbach, 2015). But it holds that the full range of emotional experience must be understood in terms of continually evolving patterns of globally coordinated neural activity. Thus, while localized structures may have consistent roles in the production of emotional responses, they do not by themselves constitute emotion nor can they be said to govern emotion in any simple way (Flaig and Large, 2014). The point is not just that emotion is the product of the continual interplay of cortical and subcortical dynamics (Panksepp, 2012). Rather the key implication of neurodynamics is that this interplay is constituted by transient patterns of coordinated activity whose dynamic features—especially complexity and continuity—are relevant to the categorization of emotion and affect (cf. Spivey, 2007 on dynamical categorization). Here, we are mainly interested in the possibility that neurodynamic categorizations of emotional content can range in complexity, corresponding to differences of emotional granularity in experience (analogous to the difference between simple and rich color palettes).

It should be noted that this approach encompasses both categorical theories of “basic emotions” (e.g., Panksepp, 1998, 2007) and dimensional theories of “core affect” (Russell, 2003; Barrett et al., 2007). What is essential for present purposes is the way in which the dynamic interplay between subcortical responses and the complex cortical elaboration of emotion (Reybrouck and Eerola, 2017) gives rise to both categorical distinctions (happy vs. sad) and differences of granularity (fine vs. coarse).

Neurodynamic approaches are well-established in the field of music cognition (for reviews see Large, 2010; Flaig and Large, 2014). Among the advantages of a neurodynamic approach is its capacity to register the relationship between bodily movement and music (e.g., Large et al., 2015). This relationship has been indicated by numerous studies of sensorimotor involvement in music perception (e.g., Chen et al., 2008) and must be taken into account by any theory of musical experience, as we briefly indicate below.

However, few attempts have been made to understand musical enjoyment from a neurodynamic perspective (see Chapin et al., 2010; Flaig and Large, 2014). A notable exception is William Benzon's groundbreaking treatise (Benzon, 2001), which anticipates the perspective offered here. One reason for this neglect is the challenge of empirical verification: like neurodynamic theories of consciousness (Seth et al., 2006), neurodynamic theories of musical experience are in need of high temporal-resolution data (e.g., from EEG or MEG) that show how relevant characteristics of neural dynamics change during musical experience (see Garrett et al., 2013). For the current proposal, the key challenge is to find and measure just those variations that correspond to differences of emotional granularity or complexity. Until such methods are developed, studies of emotional differentiation in musical experience must turn to the refinement of self-reporting methods (Juslin and Sloboda, 2010).

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