Unraveling the brain mechanisms involved in the experience of pleasure, happiness and various meaningful states could point to what flourishing truly means, and help people experience more of it.
Pleasure is a way of experiencing the sensory world. When you see, hear, smell or taste something that you deem as pleasurable, the information goes through the sensory cortices of your brain. But that’s not where pleasure is encoded.
Thanks to the engagement of various brain regions, it’s something that’s added later on as a hedonic gloss.
Thus, pleasure is not merely a sensation or a thought. Importantly, pleasure consists of cycles of wanting, liking and learning. A good life relies on a brain system that can go through this cycle of changes in an orderly fashion.
This quest has been the guiding motivation of Morten Kringelbach’s research.
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