rictus, which can vary from self-satisfied to borderline psychopathic. Nonetheless, they are on to something. Even a fake smile can make us feel a bit better, because the feedback from the facial muscles tells the brain that something good must be happening. The feel-good factor is reinforced if the smile evokes friendly responses from other people. The idea that emotions reflect some sort of mental map of the body’s internal state is further supported by brain-scanning studies, which show that pleasure and other emotions are accompanied by activity in parts of the brain that are known to be involved in monitoring the body’s internal state.3
At first sight, then, it might appear as though we have cracked the scientific puzzle of pleasure at an awkwardly early stage in this book. According to the simple theory just outlined, activities that are generally good for us are pleasurable and that is why we keep doing them. Pleasure is the brain’s universal currency, which it uses to compare different behavioural options. We plump for the activity that is likely to produce the most pleasure or the least displeasure, having unconsciously taken account of our current biological needs. If this explanation seems too simple, that is because it is too simple.
A moment’s thought will reveal some obvious gaps in this crude model of pleasure. For a start, we clearly are not just slaves to instant gratification. Much of what we and other animals do is guided by our expectations about future rewards, rather than the immediate consequences of our actions. We frequently choose to do things that are unpleasant or even painful in the short term in order to pursue broader or longer-term goals. Getting out of bed and going to work in the morning is a common example. Giving birth and having cosmetic surgery are others. When everything else is equal, we prefer pleasurable activities over unpleasant ones. In the real world, however, everything else seldom is equal. Our behaviour is shaped by context, expectations and a host of other factors.
Even young children can choose to forgo immediate pleasure in order to obtain a larger reward later. This ability, which is known as delay of gratification, is correlated with happiness and intelligence. One long-term study found that the four-year-old children who performed best in a laboratory test of their ability to delay gratification subsequently developed into more socially competent adolescents who did better at school and coped better with stress. Other apes also have the capacity to delay gratification. Chimpanzees were able to demonstrate it in an experiment in which they were given morsels of chocolate. Twenty chocolates were placed, one by one, in front of the chimpanzee over the course of a few minutes. The animal could eat the accumulated chocolates at any stage, but as soon as it ate any it would receive no more. If, on the other hand, it contained its desire, it was allowed to eat all twenty pieces at the end. Chimpanzees adore chocolate, as any highly intelligent being would. Nonetheless, they proved quite capable of resisting the lure of immediate gratification in order to win a bigger chocolaty reward later.
Much of what we might think of as pleasure is actually the anticipation of pleasure or the desire for something we believe will be pleasurable. Charles Darwin highlighted this distinction in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. He noted that humans and other animals often express feelings of pleasure in the form of movements and sounds – as, for example, when young children laugh, clap their hands and jump for joy. However, Darwin observed that:
It is chiefly the anticipation of a pleasure, and not its actual enjoyment, which leads to purposeless and extravagant movements of the body, and to the utterance of various sounds. We see this in our children when they expect any great pleasure or treat; and dogs, which have been bounding about at the sight of a plate of food, when they get it do not show their delight by any outward sign, not even by wagging their tails.
Freud also recognised that there is more to human motivation than the simple principle of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in the here and now. In a later work entitled Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he wrote: ‘The most that can be said is that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure.’ Recognising the anticipatory nature of human motivation, Freud described it as ‘hedonism of the future’.
Another embarrassing flaw in the simple pleasure principle is that many of us spend surprisingly little of our time doing the things that actually give us the most pleasure. This is why most people feel significantly better if they deliberately make themselves spend more time doing pleasant things. Several psychological studies have demonstrated that instructing people to adopt a conscious strategy of engaging more in pleasant activities really does lift their mood, even if they were not depressed to begin with. ‘Pleasant activities training’, as it is called, is demonstrably more effective at raising mood than physical fitness training or daily sessions of introspection. Now, you might regard the revelation that doing nice things makes people feel better as a statement of the blindingly obvious. What is less obvious, however, is why most of us do not already behave in this way. If our behaviour really were driven by the simple pleasure principle of doing what feels good now, our lives should already be crammed full with pleasurable activities. The fact that this is not generally the case is further proof that the truth is more complex.
The simple pleasure principle is clearly not sufficient to explain the intricate reality of human and animal behaviour. We will see later that much of what we do is driven not by pleasure but by desire. Meanwhile, let us take a closer look at the trio responsible for so much of human pleasure: sex, drugs and chocolate.
It is truly amazing just how much you can put up with when you are getting regular sex.
NIGEL SLATER, Toast (2004)
Sex may be blissful, but biologists are still not sure why it evolved in the first place. It is, after all, a strange way for animals to reproduce themselves, if you think about it. In their efforts to understand the evolution of sexual behaviour, biologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the role of pleasure. This may be because, in the natural world, sex is mostly about procreation rather than fun. Even among the big-brained mammals, most females are interested in sex only when they are fertile, around the time of ovulation. They may copulate frequently and energetically during these fertile phases, but sex is unlikely to be the main source of pleasure in their lives. Much the same must be true of many male mammals, for whom the sexual act can be remarkably brief. Rabbits and rams, for example, usually ejaculate within a few seconds of starting intercourse.
We humans belong to a small coterie of species in which sexual behaviour is not biologically shackled to reproduction. Our willingness or desire for sex has little to do with female fertility. We may have sex more or less throughout the menstrual cycle and carry on doing it during pregnancy and after menopause. Most human sexual activity takes place when reproduction is impossible, and in that sense it is largely recreational. Dolphins share this unusual characteristic with us, as they too continue to have sex throughout the female’s reproductive cycle. Dolphins are also enthusiastic practitioners of masturbation, as we shall see in chapter 10. However, our main rival for the title of sexiest beast on the planet is the bonobo (Pan paniscus), a species of African ape that looks very similar to the chimpanzee.
Bonobos are our closest biological relatives. They live in the dense and inaccessible rainforests of the central Congo basin, which makes it difficult for biologists to study them in the wild. One of their many attractive characteristics, besides being very intelligent and highly sociable, is that they have a lot of recreational sex. Several times a day is normal, under the right conditions. Like us, they
