How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

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Paul Bloom
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Yale psychologist Paul Bloom presents a striking new vision of the pleasures of everyday life. The thought of sex with a virgin is intensely arousing for many men. The average American spends over four hours a day watching television. Abstract art can sell for millions of dollars. Young children enj...

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom presents a striking new vision of the pleasures of everyday life.

The thought of sex with a virgin is intensely arousing for many men. The average American spends over four hours a day watching television. Abstract art can sell for millions of dollars. Young children enjoy playing with imaginary friends and can be comforted by security blankets. People slow their cars to look at gory accidents, and go to movies that make them cry.

In this fascinating and witty account, Paul Bloom examines the science behind these curious desires, attractions, and tastes, covering everything from the animal instincts of sex and food to the uniquely human taste for art, music, and stories. Drawing on insights from child development, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, How Pleasure Works shows how certain universal habits of the human mind explain what we like and why we like it.

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Number of Pages: 304

ISBN: 0393066320

ISBN-13: 9780393066326

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Chris Boutté 1y
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Paul Bloom is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of the first books that I read by him, so I wanted to give it another read. This book is phenomenal and as usual, it blends philosophy, science, and psychology to make the reader think and question what we think we know abo...

Paul Bloom is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of the first books that I read by him, so I wanted to give it another read. This book is phenomenal and as usual, it blends philosophy, science, and psychology to make the reader think and question what we think we know about human nature. What I really love about this book is that Bloom picks different things that give us pleasure, presents theories from various people or conventional wisdom, and then he asks questions and points out how these theories don’t explain different aspects of pleasure. Bloom was the first one to introduce me to essentialism and so much more with this book. This book is more than worth the read, and I’ll most likely read it again in the coming years.

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