The happiness does not depend on obtaining pleasure in an exacerbated and frequent way. If so, be happy it would only require us to orgasm every 5 minutes, eat delicious food or compulsively smoke, all of which are actions that release chemicals linked to pleasure and happiness.
Caitlin Worthington
But it is not that simple. Pleasure is a dynamic that, like any way of experiencing life, is corrupted if it becomes permanent or tries to accumulate. No living being can be in the same state indefinitely.: we need variability for things to make sense, and even more so, to preserve life.
This can be explained from an evolutionary approach or, if you like, from the most subtle act of survival: feeding. Eating is an action on which we depend and in which most do not think all the time, but only at that moment in which the brain gradually activates the feeling of hunger.
When it’s time to satisfy your hunger, it’s certainly something delicious; but, precisely, it would not be so delicious if we were not hungry.
Food ceases to be a pleasure for those who are addicted to it, because what activates the compulsion for food is not a normal mechanism of the brain, but one derived from affective disorders. Therefore, eating disorders and other addictions lead to depression and isolation, which in turn triggers a desperate search for pleasure.
Courtney Brooke
That’s why, Morten Kringelbachneuroscientist and professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, explained in an interview for Aeon the correlation – at the brain level – of the two definitions that Aristotle gave to pleasure, since these are still valid.
Pleasure, according to the Aristotelian definition, can simply be «pleasure» (hedonia) or be «human flourishing» (eudaimonia).
At the neural level, pleasure for pleasure would be the hedonia: imperfections in the mechanisms of the brain, which make it susceptible to addictions and fixations. The eudaimonia it would rather correspond to a properly functioning brain.
But what makes the brain work well and not fall into the vicious circle of addictions?
Kringelbach’s conclusion is that the keys to a brain free of addictions and depression lie in human contact, that is, in sharing with others pleasures such as sex, food or other vital recreations – which at an evolutionary level is essential for the permanence of the species. And just as important – and just as natural – is to vary those pleasures, because otherwise an unusual fixation arises for a single form of pleasureand that’s when the brain starts to fail.
Understanding this can be vital for us to begin to heal our affected psyches, not only with drugs or therapies, but with a thorough understanding of what causes them. That is why there is no better symbiosis than that of philosophy and neuroscience, if we want to re-evolve our consciousness.
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