A man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.. . It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Alas, Sherlock Holmes is only fictional. Few people in the real world have information-gathering systems as disciplined or as finely tuned as his. Instead, for most of us, just about
Something similar happens in our eternal quest for control. Study after study has shown that a sense of control makes people feel happy. One classic study, for example, put people in a position of listening to a series of sudden and unpredictable noises, played at excruciatingly random intervals. Some subjects were led to believe that they could do something about it — press a button to stop the noise — but others were told that they were powerless. The empowered subjects were less stressed and more happy — even though they hardly ever actually pressed the button. (Elevator 'door close' buttons work on a similar principle.) Again, there would be adaptive sense in a narrowly focused system: organisms that sought out environments in which they had a measure of control would outcompete those that left themselves entirely at the mercy of stronger forces. (Better, for example, to wade in a slowly moving stream than a full-on waterfall.) But in modern life, we trick the machinery that rewards us for a sense of accomplishment, spending hours and hours perfecting golf swings or learning how to create a perfect piece of pottery — without discernibly increasing the number or quality of our offspring.
More generally, modern life is full of what evolutionary psychologists call 'hypernormal stimuli,' stimuli so 'perfect' they don't exist in the ordinary world: the anatomically impossible measurements of Barbie, the airbrushed sheen of a model's face, the fast, sensation-filled jump cuts of MTV, and the artificial synthesized drum beats of the nightclub. Such stimuli deliver a purer kick than anything could in the ancestral world. Video games are a perfect case in point; we enjoy them because of the sense of control they afford; we like them to the extent that we can succeed in the challenges they pose — and we cease to enjoy them the minute we lose that sense of a control. A game that doesn't seem fair doesn't seem fun, precisely because it doesn't yield a sense of mastery. Each new level of challenge is designed to intensify that kick. Video games aren't just about control; they are the distillation of control: hypernormal variations on the naturally rewarding process of skill learning, designed to deliver as frequently as possible the kick associated with mastery. If video games (produced by an industry racking up billions of dollars in sales each year) strike some people as more fun than life itself, genes be damned, it is precisely because the games have been designed to exploit the intrinsic imprecision of our mechanism for detecting pleasure.
In the final analysis, pleasure is an eclectic thing. We love information, physical contact, social contact, good food, fine wine, time with our pets, music, theater, dancing, fiction, skiing, skateboarding, and video games; sometimes we pay people money to get us drunk and make us laugh. The list is virtually endless. Some evolutionary psychologists have tried to ascribe adaptive benefits to many of these phenomena, as in Geoffrey Miller's suggestion that music evolved for the purpose of courtship. (Another popular hypothesis is that music evolved for the purpose of singing lullabies.) Miller's flagship example is Jimi Hendrix:
This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination. His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts, did him no survival favours. But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.
But none of these hypotheses is especially convincing. The sexual selection theory, for instance, predicts that males ought to have more musical talent than females, but even if teenage boys have been known to spend untold hours jamming in pursuit of the world's heaviest metal, there's no compelling evidence that males actually have greater musical talent.* There are thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) of happily married women who devote their lives
*A11 this is with respect to humans. The bird world is a different story; there, males do most of the singing, and the connection to courtship is more direct.
to playing, composing, and recording music. What's more, there's no particular reason to think that the alleged seducees (women, in Miller's account) derive any less pleasure from making music than do the alleged seducers, or that an appreciation of music is in any way tied to fertility. No doubt music
Instead, many modern pleasures may emerge from the broadly tuned pleasure systems that we inherited from our ancestors. Although music as such — used for purposes of recreation, not mere identification (the way songbirds and cetaceans employ musical sounds) — is unique to humans, many or most of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie music are not. Just as much of language is built on brain circuits that are considerably ancient, there is good reason to think that music relies largely (though perhaps not entirely) on devices that we inherited from our premusical ancestors. Rhythmic production appears in rudimentary form in at least some apes (King Kong isn't alone in beating his chest), and the ability to differentiate pitch is even more widespread. Goldfish and pigeons have been trained to distinguish musical styles. Music likely also taps into the sort of pleasure we (and most apes) derive from social intimacy, the enjoyment we get from accurate predictions (as in the anticipation of rhythmic timing) and their juxtaposition with the unexpected,* and something rather more mundane, the 'mere familiarity
* Music that is either purely predictable or completely unpredictable is generally considered unpleasant — tedious when it's too predictable, discordant when it's too unpredictable. Composers like John Cage have, of course played, with that balance, but few people derive the same pleasure from Cage's quasi-random ('aleatoric') compositions that they do from music with a more traditional balance between the predictable and the surprising — a fact that holds true in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. (The art of improvisation is to invent what in hindsight seems surprising yet inevitable.)
effect' (mentioned earlier, in the context of belief). And in playing musical instruments (and in singing), we get a sense of mastery and control. When we listen to the blues, we do so, at least in part, so we won't feel alone; even the most angst-ridden teenager gets some pleasure in knowing that his or her pain is shared.
Forms of entertainment like music, movies, and video games might be thought of as what Steven Pinker calls 'pleasure technologies' — cultural inventions that maximize the responses of our reward system. We enjoy such things not because they propagate our genes or because they conveyed specific advantages to our ancestors, but because they have been
The bottom line is this: our pleasure center consists not of some set of mechanisms perfectly tuned to promote
