Brace yourself for some emotion ‘nerding’ – albiet a brief bit of it!
I found this quite fascinating. It’s one of those things that’s obvious but unless you take time to focus on it, you don’t tend to notice it or how it impacts.
In the book Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow, he describes the tenacity and determination of a scientist called Kent Berridge to prove that the system in our body that identifies that we like something, is different from the system in our body that makes us want something. It took many years and a lot of experiments tampering with different parts of rats’ brains and a very niche skill of being able to ‘read’ the emotions of rats via how much they licked their lips!
What I eventually (there was a lot of rat talk!) found fascinating about this was how it translates into behaviour. If liking is experiencing pleasure and wanting is motivation to find more of something and the two are separate, it can mean we can want things we don’t like and like things we are not necessarily driven to seek more of.
When I shared this with my (long-suffering!) husband he immediately came up with an example. He said that he had ‘walked by some beautiful blossoms that smelled amazing’ yesterday. They were so beautiful, he was quite struck with awe. However, he pointed out, he didn’t have an urge to repeatedly go back to them like he might a packet of biscuits! There might be many things we like but that our reward or motivation system doesn’t necessarily drive us to as much as might be good for us such as walks in the countryside, a cycle ride, meditation, relaxing etc.!
And to want something that we don’t (particularly) like is the realm of much of modern persuasion: advertising, social media, the way food is laid out in a supermarket, the combination of fat, salt and sugar in a doughnut that persuasively lures our bodies to crave it! Our anticipation can be toyed with so our urges become huge! We can be persuaded to buy something because it looked great in the shiny advert and the glossy packaging, to quite quickly realise that we didn’t necessarily really like what we just bought (or maybe more to the real point – need it!) It certainly wasn’t essential for our survival (might even work against it in the case of lots of doughnuts!). The manipulation of our reward system is on overdrive these days as we are bombarded with unnaturally super-appealing and intense stimuli! And it’s no wonder we can become addicted to so many things.
So with this is mind, I am going to watch my compulsions of desire alongside more consciously considering the things I truly get pleasure from. I guess this will make me more mindful of genuine enjoyment. I will try to more consciously manage my reward (dopamine) system and promote my interaction with the things I simply like.
So, phone, custard creams and YouTube put away, I’m off to sniff the blossom!
