I have recently found myself picking apart the mechanics of fundamental human processes: Decision-making, learning, adapting, dealing with change, etc. To mention nothing of the psychology involved, it certainly has been a multi-disciplinary approach. Fields ranging from Information Theory to physics have found their way into my process and analysis of this academic study: One that I hope will have practical applicability.
Where to start?
General wisdom through the ages has passed on the adage that people have a tendency to do two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Fueled by advancements in current technology this has been challenged. Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University has dug more into the “what do humans want?” question. If pleasure is a sensational emotion that only happens occasionally then, it stands to reason, that something more substantive must exist along the way. Take from this that the ideal place to be is somewhere between pleasure and pain: Satisfaction. Let’s first examine this by looking at the definition of pleasure with a simple “define:” search in Google.
“· a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience; "he was tingling with pleasure"
· joy: something or someone that provides pleasure; a source of happiness;”
Two definitions stand out, yes: The second pointing at joy, or a source of being happy. The first one points to the simple abstraction and how difficult it is to pin down the true meaning of pleasure. Of course, it’s a subjective term, but pleasure is always a positive thing—therefore finding a definition across a sampling of many individuals, many subjectivities, shouldn’t be impossible.
Next, satisfaction:
“· The human experience of being filled and enriched by their experience.”
And:
“ · act of fulfilling a desire or need or appetite”
Imagine moving up a hill: The hilltop represents the completion of the task, winning the prize for the effort that you’ve exerted. Although this supersedes satisfaction into pleasure, pleasure—especially in this context—is fleeting. There is also the downside that exposure to too much pleasure could desensitize its recipient to all but the most intense forms of it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is achieved as a feeling of atonement for the accomplishment of component tasks of a larger pleasure-bringing project. In the long run, the seeking of satisfaction is better than the seeking of pleasure.
As with all behavioral mechanisms—satisfaction-seeking and pleasure-seeking, for instance, there is a “spectrum” to be observed. On one side of the spectrum of satisfaction there is complacency. Complacency is the maladaptive form of satisfaction. Destructive pleasure-seeking is the maladaptive form of pleasure. We’ll re-visit this topic later.
When we are trying to remember something one way of increase retention levels is to couple the proposed memory with something pleasurable. I’ve heard this recommended as coupling things you want to remember with thoughts of sex; while this might work (especially as a pleasurable form of memory utilization) , it fails to get to the heart of the matter and how memory really functions. Research into how people store memories show that the brain doesn’t store discrete pieces of data—such as the way a hard drive stores data as “1’s” and “0’s”. Instead the human memory is contextual in nature: When a topic was brought up by a person you were having a conversation with, did it make you remember something else? People have different types of memories. Among these are procedural and episodic. As you would imagine, episodic memory deals with the types of memories from your personal experiences and your past. Procedural memory, then, is what I often refer to as “drill memory,” or the type of memory that you utilize when you are doing something that is a set series of steps like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, arming a landmine, or formatting a report.
I read somewhere that people will remember about a third of what they read, half of what they see, and all of what they feel. Why does the “remember something alongside sex” trick work so well? Sex, generally, makes a person feel good: Thoughts that are coupled with satisfying or pleasurable feelings are well-retained. That is not to say, however, that data coupled with painful feelings doesn’t get remembered: It’s just that painful memories can be more easily forgotten and replaced with bad memories or otherwise repressed.
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