Pleasure Quirks
- Melissa Hughes
- Jul 20, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
What do you do that makes you feel pleasure?
Real pleasure...
Enjoying your favorite meal?
Toes in the sand, cold drink in the hand?
Your favorite music?
Sex?
It turns out pleasure is complicated.
We are wired to navigate life by making decisions that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Humans are pleasure seekers, but pleasure, reward and happiness are complicated. Unfortunately, we’re kind of clueless to how and why rewards and pleasure make us happy.
The brain regions tied to reward and pleasure circuitry are difficult to accurately describe, partly, because we can trigger feelings of pleasure in many different ways. Sex, chocolate, exercise, accomplishment, drugs, and service to others – there are countless sources of pleasure depending upon the person and the situation.
It turns out that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll can all affect you in the same way: By flooding your brain with the pleasure chemical dopamine.
The three primary functions of rewards are their capacity to:
1. generate associative learning (i.e., classical conditioning, reinforcement);
2. motivate us toward or away from a particular outcome;
3. elicit positively-valenced emotions, particularly pleasure.
The Science Behind Pleasure Quirks
If you’ve ever noticed that sometimes wanting something feels better than actually having it… you’re not imagining it. That is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do. Pleasure quirks explain how we often get dopamine wrong
Dopamine is often introduced as one of the brain’s “pleasure chemicals.”
It isn’t. Not really.
Dopamine is less about pleasure and more about desire, learning, and forward motion. It is the neural signal that leans you toward the future and says:
That mattered. Remember it. Go find it again.
Pleasure, it turns out, is not built for permanence. It is built to keep us in pursuit.
Every rewarding experience is shaped by three quiet forces: anticipation, uncertainty, and choice.
Miss one, and the experience dulls.Engage all three, and the brain comes alive.
But first, let’s clear up one of the most persistent myths about dopamine.
Most people believe dopamine floods the brain when we receive the reward.
In reality, dopamine neurons fire most intensely when we anticipate the reward.
The brain is not optimized for the moment of having.
It is optimized for the moment just before.
This process — known as reward prediction — is how the brain learns patterns:
If I do this… something good happens.
Yet the brain is also extraordinarily efficient. Once a reward becomes predictable, some of its neurological sparkle fades. Have your favorite milkshake every day and it becomes routine. Save it for Fridays, however, and the quiet pleasure of expectation begins building days in advance. By the time Friday arrives, the brain has already enjoyed the reward.
Anticipation is the brain’s way of letting us experience the future before it arrives. The preview is part of the pleasure.
The Chase
From a neurological perspective, pleasure rises with anticipation, peaks just before the reward, and begins to taper shortly after it is received.
This is not a flaw in the system.
It is survival.
If satisfaction lasted indefinitely, motivation would disappear. Our ancestors would have stopped seeking food, connection, safety — all the things necessary for staying alive.
So the brain keeps us oriented toward what comes next. We are wired less for arrival than for pursuit.
As psychologist David Nettle observed:
“Happiness functions not so much as an actual reward but as an imagined goal that gives us direction and purpose.”
Or said differently: The brain is not designed for sustained contentment — it is designed for continued seeking.
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky illustrated this beautifully while studying dopamine activity in monkeys. When a light signaled that food was coming, the largest dopamine spike occurred not when the reward arrived, but when the monkey saw the signal predicting it.
Expectation was more stimulating than possession.
Researchers call this phenomenon the utility of anticipation — the reality that imagining a future reward can sometimes be more pleasurable than the reward itself.
Think about planning a vacation.
The browsing.
The imagining.
The mental rehearsal of who you will be when you get there.
Long before departure, your brain has already taken the trip.
The Chance
Here is where the brain reveals one of its most fascinating quirks: While we crave certainty in life, the brain is energized by surprise. When Sapolsky adjusted his experiment so the reward appeared only half the time instead of always, dopamine activity didn’t drop.
It surged.
Because the brain is exquisitely responsive to what neuroscientists call a prediction error, their is a gap between expectation and reality. Unexpected rewards create a powerful learning signal. They heighten attention, amplify emotion, and make experiences more memorable.
Greg Berns demonstrated this in an fMRI study where participants received small bursts of juice. When the reward was random, activity in the nucleus accumbens (a central hub in the brain’s reward circuitry) rose significantly compared to when the pattern was predictable.
Certainty calms the brain.
Surprise awakens it.
The brain pays attention to what it cannot fully predict.
It is why a close game feels electric… why unexpected kindness carries disproportionate emotional weight… and why the possibility of a surprise reward can be more motivating than a guaranteed one. Variable rewards don’t just capture attention. They sustain it. There is a reason people sit at slot machines for hours waiting for the big win.
The Choice
The brain values choice because choice signals control — and control lowers threat.
But more choice does not always produce more satisfaction. Sometimes it produces friction.
In their landmark study, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that shoppers were initially drawn to a display of 24 gourmet jams — yet they were ten times more likely to purchase when only six options were available. Too many choices increase cognitive load. And when mental effort rises, the brain quietly begins calculating:
Is this worth the energy?
The brain is always managing resources. Yet, the paradox is that we are deeply rewarded by effort as long as the challenge is attainable. Neuroimaging consistently shows stronger activation in reward circuitry when people succeed at moderately difficult tasks compared to easy ones.
Too simple, and we disengage. Too difficult, and stress chemistry takes over.
But the sweet spot lives right in the middle — the psychological “Goldilocks zone.”
Not too easy.Not too hard.Just demanding enough to pull us forward.
Satisfaction rarely comes from what is handed to us. It comes from what we are stretched just enough to reach.
So yes… the brain is wired to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
But the path to pleasure is wonderfully, and sometimes maddeningly, quirky.
It is an intricate dance between the chase, the chance, and the choice.
A system designed not for static happiness, but for continual becoming.
We are not wired for arrival. We are wired for the beautiful, restless act of becoming.
This brings us back to where this series began. Pleasure operates through that very same predictive system. The brain is always asking: What might happen next… and should I move toward it?
Understanding how the brain processes pleasure is deeply practical. Because once you see how powerfully anticipation, surprise, and agency shape experience, you begin to recognize that many of the moments that feel like happiness are actually born in expectation.
And suddenly, you notice something profound:
Much of the joy in life is not found in the having.
It is found in the looking forward.
Want to see how this reward circuitry shows up in everyday life?
Start here → Your Brain on Chocolate.
