On the pleasures of the mind.

Abstract

Preprint of Chapter in D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. THE PRINTED VERSION WILL DIFFER SLIGHTLY. Pleasures of the mind are different from pleasures of the body. There are two types of pleasures of the body: tonic pleasures and relief pleasures. Pleasures of the body are given by the contact senses and by the distance senses (seeing and hearing). The distance senses provide a special category of pleasure. Pleasures of the mind are not emotions; they are collections of emotions distributed over time. Some distributions of emotions over time are particularly pleasurable, such as episodes in which the peak emotion is strong and the final emotion is positive. The idea that all pleasurable stimuli share some general characteristic should be supplanted by the idea that humans have evolved domain-specific responses of attraction to stimuli. The emotions that characterize pleasures of the mind arise when expectations are violated, causing autonomic nervous system arousal and thereby triggering a search for an interpretation. Thus pleasures of the mind occur when an individual has a definite set of expectations (usually tacit) and the wherewithal to interpret the violation (usually by placing it in a narrative framework). Pleasures of the mind differ in the objects of the emotions they comprise. There is probably a small number of categories of objects of emotions that we share with other mammals. I discuss two: the unknown (giving rise to curiosity) and skill (giving rise to virtuosity); two others being nurturing and sociality. There is also a uniquely human category of objects of emotion: suffering.