Why we do find certain things satisfying?
And why do we find certain things unsatisfying?
Let’s take a look a disorder in the Brain’s satisfaction circuit.
People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder constantly struggle with getting things to
feel correct or finished.
Nicholas Cage’s OCD character in the movie Matchstick Men clearly has a neat house, but
some small carpet fuzz out of place sends him into a cleaning frenzy.
But how does he know when he’s finished cleaning?
Some people might be satisfied with at least having all the dishes washed, but clearly
his standards are higher.
One of the things with OCD patients is they have “task stopping” criteria that don’t
make much sense to other people.
What’s the stopping criteria for shutting a door?
Well if it’s closed, stop shutting it.
For this person, the stopping criteria is one, two, three shuts.
Handwashing is a common compulsion in OCD and most will wash over and over again until
it feels right.
Take a moment with me to try out this psychological test.
Watch this puzzle closely.
Depending on how perceptive you are, you will know what the puzzle is before it’s completed.
We’ll finish this later.
Getting back to OCD, there’s an old idea called the Zeigarnik effect that says people
are far more likely to remember unfinished tasks than completed tasks probably because
it bugs the hell out of them.
Based on tons of brain scan data, Dr. Jeffrey Shchwartz has found that there are three parts
of the brain involved in OCD.
One of them identifies when something is not how it should be - something is wrong, something
is out of place, something is incomplete.
This then sends a signal to another part of the brain that gives you this vague uneasy
uncomfortable feeling.
Then, another part of your brain called the caudate nucleus responds once you have done
something that sufficiently solves the issue.
And in OCD patients, this part of the brain is much smaller which indicates that this
part of the brain hardly gets activated.
There’s a condition called “hypothalamic obesity” where people’s brains do not
get the “satisfied” signal and they eat and eat, chasing that feeling of satisfaction.
One part of OCD seems to be that the person doesn’t get the signal from their brain
that they have sufficiently washed their hands, cleaned their room or
whatever it might be, so they keep going and going chasing satisfaction and hoping to get
rid of that feeling of unease that this part of the brain is generating.
OK so completion of tasks is a component in that feeling of “satisfying.”
Maybe that’s not so shocking as the literary definition of “satisfy” is basically “to
complete something.”
But Let me clarify that yes, completing tasks appears to actually feel good, to actually
be rewarding to the brain as evidenced by this study looking at the brain activation
in people completing a maze task.
So why should completing things feel good?
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp says in his book Affective Neuroscience that “… pleasure
indicates something is biologically useful.”
He has a nice diagram outlining how your brain monitors the status of your body then generates
feelings like I’m thirsty, I’m cold, I’m thirsty, or
I’m hungry.
Then you seek a way to resolve these issues and resolving these issues feels good.
...you’ve probably heard of opioid receptors - the pleasure
receptors in the brain.
These play a role in the pleasure you get from everything from eating food, to taking
a hot bath, to getting a hug.
These feelings of pleasure though, need to lead to some kind of stop signal otherwise
you’d eat until you puked or you’d make your bath hotter and hotter until it burned.
For example the mu-opioid system, which provides a sense of pleasure has a role in getting
us to stop eating.
Maybe for tasks that don’t necessarily help your biology, like say tidying your desk or
finishing your to do list, your brain uses a stop signal similar to the one used biologically
programmed tasks like “eat food” or “prevent yourself from freezing” or “drink water.”
That is, in general, pleasure may be a piece of “feedback” telling you something was
completed and it was completed correctly.
But let’s look at this as a sliding scale.
Yes you can correctly complete the task of hitting a
target, but the most correct way of hitting the target is hitting it right in the center
and this is …difficult.
"not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
What’s interesting about how the brain processes difficulty is that evaluating a reward, and
anticipating the difficulty of the task necessary to get that reward are performed by the same
parts of the brain.
So, could these overlapping functions suggest that the brain has a tendency to perceive
some things as more rewarding simply because they are difficult?
"So he's not inviting you to his party because he likes you."
"Exactly."
Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee describes in his book “The Aesthetic Brain” how a 2009
study found that the brains of architecture students
responded differently to pictures of buildings than
people without such expertise.
First, there was more activity in the hippocampus - the area of the brain associated with memories.
What’s interesting is two parts of the brain associated
with reward were more activated.
Suggesting that just by having expertise, these people could
derive more pleasure from looking at the same pictures.
In fact, your ability to enjoy certain things, depends on your understanding of its difficulty.
This doesn’t look particularly interesting, but these guys are very excited because they
know it’s very hard to do what this guy is doing.
Obviously the difficulty of things like this is immediately apparent.
Contrary to the idea that rewards and fear of punishment are the most important motivators
in people and animals, Harlow and Meyer found in the 1950’s that monkeys can be very motivated
simply from the pleasure of solving a challenging task.
Here’s a quote from one of their studies: “two well-fed and well-watered monkeys worked
repeatedly at un-assembling a six-device puzzle for ten continuous hours even though they
were quite free of painful stimulation and quite well fed and well watered.”
Maybe otters juggle rocks simply because it’s challenging.
Here’s an interesting finding from a paper on Social Anxiety Disorder- SAD.
People with SAD were more likely than people without the disorder to experience a high
level of satisfaction from successful social interactions.
That doesn’t seem to make much sense.
You may have heard of the concept of “Flow,” popularized by the book titled Flow by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi.
Flow is this incredibly enjoyable, rewarding, or satisfying state that appears when someone
is undertaking a challenging task - This flow state could appear when you’re focused long
enough on anything from sports to doing math, to video games or writing.
Essentially when the brain is put in a situation where it is continuously challenged close
to the limit of your skill, you enter the flow state and you are in the Zone - a big
cascade of neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin, endorphins
are released - these make you feel good and they
are performance enhancing.
So this paper from earlier found that people with Social Anxiety Disorder were more likely
to experience this enjoyable state of flow during successful social interactions probably
because social interactions are a challenge for these people with SAD.
Dr. Gregory Berns, says in his book titled “Satisfaction!” that based on how dopamine
works in the brain, “satisfaction comes less from the attainment of a goal and more
in what you must do to get there.”
Fnally running 10 kilometers when you couldn’t run more than 2km last month
is of course more satisfying than if you ran 10k’s on a daily basis.
Maybe people continue to run ultra marathons because they will always be hard.
OK so when you realize you completed something correctly, that feels good, but how do you
know that what you did was correct?
Let’s take a look at satisfying sounds.
Why do we find certain sounds satisfying?
What about this sound?
Not too satisfying, yet certain people seem to like that
same noise if it’s coming from a cracked back.
These back cracking videos get millions of views with louder cracks being more satisfying.
Here’s an auditory illusion called the McGurk effect.
Take a look at this guy.
"Ba ba ba.Ba ba ba."
"Fa fa fa.
Fa fa fa."
Clearly he’s saying Ba Ba Ba then Fa Fa Fa.
Actually he’s just saying "Ba" the whole time -
The second time around the video is replaced with the video of him saying Fa.
Your brain just can't help processing the video as an important piece of context for
interpreting the audio.
So the point is, the reason these sounds are satisfying is because they are piece of clear
feedback that something was done correctly… and they are interpreted as such because they
are combined with the context of you seeing something being done correctly.
Either that or this is an example of Pavlovian conditioning You hear this sound every time
you hit the dart board, so you enjoy that sound as feedback that you successfully hit
the dartboard.
And what's great about sounds is that they are practically instantaneous.
Several experiments looking at addiction have hooked rodents’ brains up to a self stimulation
device where they can press a lever and directly
stimulate the pleasure center of their brain.
Imagine a mild hit of a drug directly to their brain every time they press the lever.
Of course these rodents get addicted to this machine, pressing
the lever in favor of food or sleep.
However, Even a delay of one second drastically impairs the
rats ability to become a lever pressing addict.
Clicker training is a method for training dogs or other animals.
The problem with traditional training is you can’t cram a treat in the
dogs mouth the instant they put their paw up to shake or
whatever it might be that you want them to do.
So with clicker training, you use a device to
make a clicking noise the instant they do the behavior you want then you follow up with
a treat.
Now I’d bet that that clicking noise is satisfying for the dog.
Sure we generally prefer certain sounds over others - "That's the sound."
Why we like music is a very complex topic, but when it comes to feedback, clearer sounds
are generally more satisfying.
Preferring a clear sound might have something to do again with the pleasure receptors - opioid
receptors and them responding to easily identifiable noises.
We actually have opioid receptors in the auditory cortex of the brain.
A study on chinchillas found that you can enhance their ability to pick up noises by
giving them a drug that stimulates opioid receptors.
There are even opioid receptors in the visual areas of the brain.
And, these opioid receptors are most dense in the part of the brain that
interprets the image.
Dr. Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel say “visual stimuli that contain
a great deal of interpretable information should
activate many opioid receptors … and so provide the greatest pleasure.”
So, what does that mean?
Well let’s get back to our puzzle.
Maybe you’re a little satisfied that I finally completed the puzzle, but it’s probably
not very satisfying if you can’t identify who this
guy is.
By the way, if you happened to have seen Princess Mononoke and then happened to pause
the video here, you may have enjoyed recognizing that this is the blurry cover
of the puzzle.
"Nice."
Here’s another example, what do you think of these?
Think for a moment about how interesting these pictures are to you.
Now what if I told you this is four elephants sniffing an orange
This is a bird catching a very strong worm
This is the Arthur making a fist meme and, This is a bee.
Now that you know the significance of these images, they’re probably a little more interesting
than when they were just random doodles.
On that note, it’s not a surprise that most brands’
logos are easily recognizable images rather than intricate and beautiful paintings.
So the brain seemsto prefer what it can recognize or interpret or understand.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the satisfying “Aha!” moment when you finally
solve a puzzle and successfully interpret it completely.
My point with all this is that we are constantly seeking the significance of things and we
also seek the significance of our behaviors and
seek out feedback that helps us interpret the
impact of our actions.
Of course video game designers understand all this very well.
For example this old game River City Robertson from 1989 lets you know if someone blocks
your attack or if your hit landed successfully.
The much more recent shooting game Carlton’s Duty has a very complex sound environment
but the same concept.
The Super Smash Bradley series has various noises for when you miss an attack, when a
weak attack lands, a strong attack lands, and a much bigger noise when you defeat someone.
Video games capitalize on all kinds of strategies to enhance the satisfaction you get from completing
goals, they give you feedback when you do things correctly
and they usually give you distinct feedback for when you pull off more difficult maneuvers.
Okay so we like it when we Complete things, particularly difficult things, and we find
feedback satisfying and we derive pleasure from recognizing
things.
"Oh it's a donkey."
It’s fun to break a simple concept like satisfaction down, but can we actually make
use of this information in our daily lives?
Well, that’s what I’ll be talking about next
time, so make sure and subscribe to the channel and click on the bell so
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