EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial Read Online Free PDF Page B

pain reduction, both patients also experienced an enhanced desire for sex, including erotic feelings. One of these patients self-stimulated so often that she forgot to wash, change clothes, and adhere to family commitments. Though it is unclear why damping down pain resulted in ramping up the desire for sex — as opposed to other rewarding experiences such as eating food — it is clear that certain brain areas control how much we want particular rewarding experiences. This work also suggests that specific brain regions figure prominently in the pathway to addiction, uncontrollable cravings that are toxic to self and others. This work suggests that brain areas associated with desire can run out of control. We need to understand this process as it is a critical step in the path to causing gratuitous cruelty.
    To understand how the brain motivates us to
want
some things but not others, how it creates the experience of
liking
, and how it enables us to want things we like by
learning
about the world, we turn to experiments on nonhuman animals, brain scans of healthy humans, the mechanics of mind-altering drugs, conscious and unconscious influences on our choices, and the forces that lead individuals to develop uncontrollable urges to eat, drink, snort, shoot up, and gamble 11 . This is the evidence that scientists have gathered to explain the nature of wanting, liking, and learning.
    In both humans and other animals, we can understand how the wanting system works by measuring what individuals approach when given a choice, as well as how much effort they are willing to exert while approaching and gaining access to a particular object or experience. For example, in studies that explore whether captive animals have sufficient housing conditions, an experimenter presents a choice of rooms, one consisting of the typical housing environment and the others with additional goods believed to be of interest. To enter a given room requires opening a door. To determine how much an individual really wants what is in another room, the experimenter makes it extremely difficult to open each door by adding a tight spring. In studies of captive hens and mongoose, individuals exerted considerable effort to open some doors but not others: hens rammed into doors opening onto a chipped wood floor, whereas mongoose did the same for a swimming pool of water. These are items they want, but are deprived of in captivity. Humans deprived of basic rights — food, water, living space — exert similar efforts to obtain these goods. Effort exerted is a measure of wanting, whether in hens, mongoose, or humans.
    What about liking? It may seem that there are no clear objective ways to measure liking because it is a subjective experience. My likes are my own. You can’t possibly know how intensely I like French cheese or reading George Eliot novels or teaching children who want to learn. And if you can’t know what it is like for me to like things, then we can’t possibly know what it is like for a hen or mongoose to like things. There are, however, ways of measuring liking and disliking that are reliable, objective, and consistent across species. In many animals, including human babies who can’t speak and human adults who have lost this capacity due to brain injury, there are distinctive behaviors that are consistently linked to positive experiences and others linked to negative ones. For example, in mice, monkeys, and human babies, tasting something sweet like sugar causes a lot of lip licking, whereas tasting something bitter such as quinine causes mouth gaping, nose twitching, and arm flailing. These similarities suggest that evolution has been conservative, preserving the same means of expressing likes and dislikes in different species. These similarities have enabled scientists to understand how the brain systems involved in wanting and liking can change together or separately, even though they can’t help us understand the harder problem of what,