The Compass of Pleasure
How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good

"So am I as the rich whose blessèd key Can bring him to his sweet up-lockèd treasure, The which he will not every hour survey, For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure." Plato’s Compass In The Republic and elsewhere, Socrates (or Plato, let us not get into technicalities here) repeatedly......more

Insightful discussions on pleasure, addiction, and societal implications can be found here. The level of scientific language may put off the typical layperson. Reads like an abstract of a scientific paper in some sections, with too much repetition of phrases of substances involved, which is an attem......more

This book is an excellent book, but not for the faint of heart. It is basically a conversation with a neurophysiologist about how pleasure works, and the author has no problem delving into the jargon, acronyms, and experimental design of neuroscience to get an accurate description across. If you're......more

I should have been a neuroscientist. I love this stuff so much! Linden does a great job here of explaining without either oversimplifying or obfuscating. I learned a lot about the pleasure circuitry of the brain. Perhaps my favorite bit was near the end, where Linden takes on Kurzweil's singularity......more

I really enjoyed this one. I find books about the brain and why we do what we do fascinating. This book also mentioned addiction which is another subject that is fascinating to me. This book does a really good job in explain both.......more