Why do we find Satisfying things so Satisfying? (Neuroscience and Pleasure)

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1 year ago
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Books:
Jeffrey Schwartz's "Brain Lock" - https://amzn.to/2VP0dKI
Jaak Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience" - https://amzn.to/3f3fv5U
Anjan Chatterjee's "The Aesthetic Brain" - https://amzn.to/3bTQGre
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow" - https://amzn.to/2WaIfkH
Gregory Bern's "Satisfaction!" - https://amzn.to/2SmmfSL

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I actually started out working on this video with the aim to understand why "oddly satisfying" videos are satisfying. I figured the first step with that was to figure out why anything is satisfying. Since we call a lot of things satisfying, this was harder than I expected. When things are in perfect sync it's satisfying, when things are in perfect order is satisfying, it's satisfying when you are arranging your new living room and then the short square table you have fits perfectly between your two sofas and the surface of the table is flush with both sofa's arm rests. (Fun fact: in Japanese, you just say "feels good" (kimochi ii) for things like this) Unsurprisingly, there's not much research on the concept of "satisfying."

Then I started looking into why we find things pleasurable. Jaak Panksepp says that things that are pleasurable are biologically useful . So it was even more curious that things seemingly irrelevant to keeping us alive should make us feel good.

This video is the result of cobbling a bit of logic with information from books on Satisfaction, neuroscience, 'what the brain finds beautiful' as well as various research papers on the brain. I hope it's satisfying.

(If editing videos didn't take so gotham long, this video would be about an hour)

I still plan on making a "why oddly satisfying videos are satisfying" video at some point. I'd rather not dig through tiktok for asmr and slime videos just yet so it'll be a little while before that's done
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Link to PDF of Script with Links to sources: https://www.patreon.com/posts/36551819

Warm Thanks to Eliana Vassena (her paper "Overlapping Neural Systems Represent Cognitive Effort and Reward Anticipation" appears at 5:18) she took the time to answer various questions I had about her papers and research.

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