Morten L. Kringelbach's "The Pleasure Center"

I started reading this book with very high hopes. But I was not rewarded. The material is up-to-date but it is too scattershot, too unfocused. I never got a satisfactory feeling that I was "mastering" anything. It was just "stuff".

Sadly this writer does not have a style that grabs you and holds your attention. If found my attention meandering as I read. The chapters ostensibly were focused on a topic but I never felt I learned anything. I paged through this book finding interesting nibbles here and there but no tasty meal. Nothing satisfying.

My suspicion is that his research isn't driven by theory. It is a collectors cupboard of curiosities. And that is exactly how this book reads. Little bits here and there, but no compelling narrative. Here is an example pulled from the chapter on madness:

Among the many brain regions found in neuroimaging studies, depression shows up most in a region called the subgenual cingulate cortex, which is intimately connected to the orbitofrontal cortex. This brain region has also been shown to be an important part of the brain's resting network, which is active even at reast. Studies in monkeys have shown that neurons in this brain region change their activity when the monkey is about to fall asleep. In addition, as shown in earlier chapters activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to the monitoring of the pleasantness and unpleasantness of stimuli. So dysregulation of the activity in these regions would seem likely to affect the subjective hedonic experience and perhaps even lead to anhedonia.

Based on these findings, the American neuroscientist Helen Mayberg used deep brain stimulation in the subgenual cingulate cortex for patients with treatement-reistant depression. Initially, the treatment resulted in sutained remission of depression in four of six patients. Given the strong placebo component in depression, it is too early to say to what extent this might help others.

You read through this expecting great insight, important fact fitted into some big picture, and it doesn't. It is just "stuff". Pages and pages of stuff.

I was disappointed with this book. I can't say that I learned much of anything useful. It isn't because there wasn't new "stuff" in the book. It was that the material was not presented in a way that made it meaningful, made it find a home in what I already knew or created a new framework for thinking about the brain and pleasure. Sadly, I closed this book and felt robbed of the pleasure that a good read should give you.