TED演讲 Origins of pleasure by Paul Bloom 稿子
康复学-爱国卫生工作计划
The Origins of Pleasure
(by Paul Bloom)
I'm going to talk today about the
pleasures of everyday life. But I want to begin
with a story of an unusual and terrible man.
This is Hermann Goering. Goering was
Hitler's
second in command in World War II, his designated
successor. And like Hitler,
Goering fancied
himself a collector of art. He went through
Europe, through World
War II, stealing,
extorting and occasionally buying various
paintings for his collection.
And what he
really wanted was something by Vermeer. Hitler had
two of them, and he
didn't have any. So he
finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer
named Han van
Meegeren, who sold him a
wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now
be 10
million dollars. And it was his favorite
artwork ever.
World War II came to an end,
and Goering was captured, tried at
Nuremberg
and ultimately sentenced to death. Then the Allied
forces went through
his collections and found
the paintings and went after the people who sold
it to him.
And at some point the Dutch police
came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren.
Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of
treason, which is itself punishable by
death.
Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren
confessed. But he didn't
confess to treason.
He said,
myself; I'm a forger.
a canvas and
some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better
than I sold that
disgusting Nazi. I also need
alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I
can
work.
the charges of treason were
dropped. He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a
year
sentence and died a hero to the Dutch
people. There's a lot more to be said about van
Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering,
who's pictured here being interrogated
at
Nuremberg.
Now Goering was, by all accounts,
a terrible man. Even for a Nazi, he was a
terrible man. His American interrogators
described him as an amicable psychopath.
But
you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had
when he was told that his favorite
painting
was actually a forgery. According to his
biographer,
first time he had discovered there
was evil in the world.
himself soon afterwards.
He had discovered after all that the painting he
thought was
this was actually that. It looked
the same, but it had a different origin, it was a
different artwork.
It wasn't just him who
was in for a shock. Once van Meegeren was on
trial, he
couldn't stop talking. And he
boasted about all the great masterpieces that he
himself
had painted that were attributed to
other artists. In particular, Supper at
Emmaus
would come [from] all over the world
to see it -- was actually a forgery. It was not
that painting, but that painting. And when
that was discovered, it lost all its value and
was taken away from the museum.
1
Why does this matter? I'm a
psychologists -- why do origins matter so much?
Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of
where something comes from?
Well there's an
answer that many people would give. Many
sociologists like Veblen
and Wolfe would argue
that the reason why we take origins so seriously
is because
we're snobs, because we're focused
on status. Among other things, if you want to
show off how rich you are, how powerful you
are, it's always better to own an original
than a forgery because there's always going to
be fewer originals than forgeries. I
don't
doubt that that plays some role, but what I want
to convince you of today is that
there's
something else going on. I want to convince you
that humans are, to some
extent, natural born
essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't
just respond to
things as we see them, or feel
them, or hear them. Rather, our response is
conditioned
on our beliefs, about what they
really are, what they came from, what they're made
of,
what their hidden nature is. I want to
suggest that this is true, not just for how we
think about things, but how we react to
things.
So I want to suggest that pleasure is
deep -- and that this isn't true just for higher
level pleasures like art, but even the most
seemingly simple pleasures are affected by
our
beliefs about hidden essences. So take food. Would
you eat this? Well, a good
answer is,
Some
of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork.
Few of you would eat it if it's a rat
or a
human. Some of you would eat it only if it's a
strangely colored piece of tofu.
That's not so
surprising.
But what's more interesting is how
it tastes to you will depend critically on what
you think you're eating. So one demonstration
of this was done with young children.
How do
you make children not just be more likely to eat
carrots and drink milk, but to
get more
pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk --
to think they taste better?
It's simple, you
tell them they're from McDonald's. They believe
McDonald's food is
tastier, and it leads them
to experience it as tastier.
How do you get
adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple:
pour it from an
expensive bottle. There are
now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing
that if
you believe you're drinking the
expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. This was
recently done with a neuroscientific twist.
They get people into a fMRI scanner, and
while
they're lying there, through a tube, they get to
sip wine. In front of them on a
screen is
information about the wine. Everybody, of course,
drinks exactly the same
wine. But if you
believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of
the brain associated
with pleasure and reward
light up like a Christmas tree. It's not just that
you say it's
more pleasurable, you say you
like it more, you really experience it in a
different way.
Or take sex. These are stimuli
I've used in some of my studies. And if you
simply show people these pictures, they'll say
these are fairly attractive people. But
how
attractive you find them, how romantically moved
you are by them, rests
critically on who you
think you're looking at. You probably think the
picture on the
left is male, the one on the
right is female. If that belief turns out to be
mistaken, it
2
will make a
difference. (Laughter) It will make a difference
if they turn out to be
much younger or much
older than you think they are. It will make a
difference if you
were to discover that the
person you're looking at with lust is actually a
disguised
version of your son or daughter,
your mother or father. Knowing somebody's your kin
typically kills the interest. Maybe one of the
most heartening findings from the
psychology
of pleasure is there's more to looking good than
your physical appearance.
If you like
somebody, they look better to you. This is why
spouses in happy marriages
tend to think that
their husband or wife looks much better than
anyone else thinks that
they do.
So
Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a
specific delusion. Sufferers
of Capgras
syndrome believe that the people they love most in
the world have been
replaced by perfect
duplicates. Now often, a result of Capgras
syndrome is tragic.
People have murdered those
that they loved, believing that they were
murdering an
imposter. But there's at least
one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy
ending.
This was recorded in 1931. described a
woman with Capgras syndrome
who complained
about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate
lover.
was before she got Capgras syndrome.
After she got it,
she has discovered that he
possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome
and
course, it was the same man, but she was
seeing him in different
ways.
As a third
example, consider consumer products. So one reason
why you
might like something is its utility.
You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf
with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum
doesn't do anything at all for you. But
each
of these three objects has value above and beyond
what it can do for you based
on its history.
The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and
sold for
three-quarters of a million dollars
at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop
star Britney Spears and sold for several
hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there's a
thriving market in the partially eaten food of
beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes
are
perhaps the most valuable of all. According to an
unconfirmed report, a Saudi
millionaire
offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes.
They were the ones
thrown at George Bush at an
Iraqi press conference several years ago.
Now
this attraction to objects doesn't just work for
celebrity objects. Each one
of us, most
people, have something in our life that's
literally irreplaceable, in that it
has value
because of its history -- maybe your wedding ring,
maybe your child's baby
shoes -- so that if it
was lost, you couldn't get it back. You could get
something that
looked like it or felt like it,
but you couldn't get the same object back. With my
colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck,
we've looked to see what sort of
factors, what
sort of history, matters for the objects that
people like. So in one of our
experiments, we
asked people to name a famous person who they
adored, a living
person they adored.
3
So one answer was George
Clooney. Then we asked them,
you pay for
George Clooney's sweater?
you would pay for a
brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody
who you
didn't adore. Then we asked other
groups of subjects -- we gave them different
restrictions and different conditions. So for
instance, we told some people,
can buy the
sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it,
and you can't resell it.
That drops the value
of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we
like it. But what
really causes an effect is
you tell people,
about it, but before it gets
to you, it's thoroughly washed.
the value. As
my wife put it,
So let's go back to art. I
would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall.
But I
don't want a duplicate, even if I can't
tell the difference. That's not because, or it's
not
simply because, I'm a snob and want to
boast about having an original. Rather, it's
because I want something that has a specific
history. In the case of artwork, the
history
is special indeed. The philosopher Denis Dutton in
his wonderful book
Art Instinct
about the
human performance underlying its that could
explain the
difference between an original and
a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a
different history. The original is typically
the product of a creative act, the forgery
isn't. I think this approach can explain
differences in people's taste in art.
This is
a work by Jackson Pollock. Who here likes the work
of Jackson Pollock?
Okay. Who here, it does
nothing for them? They just don't like it. I'm not
going to
make a claim about who's right, but I
will make an empirical claim about people's
intuitions, which is that, if you like the
work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so
than the people who don't like it to believe
that these works are difficult to create, that
they require a lot of time and energy and
creative energy. I use Jackson Pollock on
purpose as an example because there's a young
American artist who paints very much
in the
style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth
many tens of thousands of
dollars -- in large
part because she's a very young artist.
This
is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when
she was three years
old. The interesting thing
about Marla Olmstead is her family made the
mistake of
inviting the television program 60
Minutes II into their house to film her painting.
And they then reported that her father was
coaching her. When this came out on
television, the value of her art dropped to
nothing. It was the same art, physically, but
the history had changed.
I've been
focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to
give two examples
from music. This is Joshua
Bell, a very famous violinist. And the Washington
Post
reporter Gene Weingarten decided to
enlist him for an audacious experiment. The
question is: How much would people like Joshua
Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if
they didn't
know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got
Joshua Bell to take his
million dollar violin
down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand
in the
4
corner and see how
much money he would make. And here's a brief clip
of this.
(Violin music) After being there for
three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars.
Not bad. It's also not good. Apparently to
really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you
have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell.
He actually made 20 dollars more than
that,
but he didn't count it. Because this woman comes
up -- you see at the end of the
video -- she
comes up. She had heard him at the Library of
Congress a few weeks
before at this
extravagant black-tie affair. So she's stunned
that he's standing in a
subway station. So
she's struck with pity. She reaches into her purse
and hands him a
20.
The second example
from music is from John Cage's modernist
composition,
As many of you know, this is the
composition where the pianist sits at a
bench,
opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for
four minutes and 33 seconds
-- that period of
silence. And people have different views on this.
But what I want to
point out is you can buy
this from iTunes. (Laughter) For a dollar 99, you
can listen to
that silence, which is different
than other forms of silence.
Now I've been
talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to
suggest is that
everything I've said applies
as well to pain. And how you think about what
you're
experiencing, your beliefs about the
essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely
experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan
Wegner. What they did was they hooked
up
Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock
machine. And they gave them a series
of
painful electric shocks. So it was a series of
five painful shocks. Half of them are
told
that they're being given the shocks by somebody in
another room, but the person
in the other room
doesn't know they're giving them shocks. There's
no malevolence,
they're just pressing a
button. The first shock is recorded as very
painful. The second
shock feels less painful,
because you get a bit used to it. The third drops,
the fourth,
the fifth. The pain gets less. In
the other condition, they're told that the person
in the
next room is shocking them on purpose
-- knows they're shocking them. The first
shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts
just as much, and the third and the
fourth and
the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody
is doing it to you on
purpose.
The most
extreme example of this is that in some cases,
pain under the right
circumstances can
transform into pleasure. Humans have this
extraordinarily
interesting property that will
often seek out low-level doses of pain in
controlled
circumstances and take pleasure
from it -- as in the eating of hot chili peppers
and
roller coaster rides. The point was nicely
summarized by the poet John Milton who
wrote,
heaven.
And I'll end with that. Thank
you.(Applause)
5
The
Origins of Pleasure
(by Paul Bloom)
I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of
everyday life. But I want to begin
with a
story of an unusual and terrible man. This is
Hermann Goering. Goering was
Hitler's second
in command in World War II, his designated
successor. And like Hitler,
Goering fancied
himself a collector of art. He went through
Europe, through World
War II, stealing,
extorting and occasionally buying various
paintings for his collection.
And what he
really wanted was something by Vermeer. Hitler had
two of them, and he
didn't have any. So he
finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer
named Han van
Meegeren, who sold him a
wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now
be 10
million dollars. And it was his favorite
artwork ever.
World War II came to an end,
and Goering was captured, tried at
Nuremberg
and ultimately sentenced to death. Then the Allied
forces went through
his collections and found
the paintings and went after the people who sold
it to him.
And at some point the Dutch police
came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren.
Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of
treason, which is itself punishable by
death.
Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren
confessed. But he didn't
confess to treason.
He said,
myself; I'm a forger.
a canvas and
some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better
than I sold that
disgusting Nazi. I also need
alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I
can
work.
the charges of treason were
dropped. He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a
year
sentence and died a hero to the Dutch
people. There's a lot more to be said about van
Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering,
who's pictured here being interrogated
at
Nuremberg.
Now Goering was, by all accounts,
a terrible man. Even for a Nazi, he was a
terrible man. His American interrogators
described him as an amicable psychopath.
But
you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had
when he was told that his favorite
painting
was actually a forgery. According to his
biographer,
first time he had discovered there
was evil in the world.
himself soon afterwards.
He had discovered after all that the painting he
thought was
this was actually that. It looked
the same, but it had a different origin, it was a
different artwork.
It wasn't just him who
was in for a shock. Once van Meegeren was on
trial, he
couldn't stop talking. And he
boasted about all the great masterpieces that he
himself
had painted that were attributed to
other artists. In particular, Supper at
Emmaus
would come [from] all over the world
to see it -- was actually a forgery. It was not
that painting, but that painting. And when
that was discovered, it lost all its value and
was taken away from the museum.
1
Why does this matter? I'm a
psychologists -- why do origins matter so much?
Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of
where something comes from?
Well there's an
answer that many people would give. Many
sociologists like Veblen
and Wolfe would argue
that the reason why we take origins so seriously
is because
we're snobs, because we're focused
on status. Among other things, if you want to
show off how rich you are, how powerful you
are, it's always better to own an original
than a forgery because there's always going to
be fewer originals than forgeries. I
don't
doubt that that plays some role, but what I want
to convince you of today is that
there's
something else going on. I want to convince you
that humans are, to some
extent, natural born
essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't
just respond to
things as we see them, or feel
them, or hear them. Rather, our response is
conditioned
on our beliefs, about what they
really are, what they came from, what they're made
of,
what their hidden nature is. I want to
suggest that this is true, not just for how we
think about things, but how we react to
things.
So I want to suggest that pleasure is
deep -- and that this isn't true just for higher
level pleasures like art, but even the most
seemingly simple pleasures are affected by
our
beliefs about hidden essences. So take food. Would
you eat this? Well, a good
answer is,
Some
of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork.
Few of you would eat it if it's a rat
or a
human. Some of you would eat it only if it's a
strangely colored piece of tofu.
That's not so
surprising.
But what's more interesting is how
it tastes to you will depend critically on what
you think you're eating. So one demonstration
of this was done with young children.
How do
you make children not just be more likely to eat
carrots and drink milk, but to
get more
pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk --
to think they taste better?
It's simple, you
tell them they're from McDonald's. They believe
McDonald's food is
tastier, and it leads them
to experience it as tastier.
How do you get
adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple:
pour it from an
expensive bottle. There are
now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing
that if
you believe you're drinking the
expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. This was
recently done with a neuroscientific twist.
They get people into a fMRI scanner, and
while
they're lying there, through a tube, they get to
sip wine. In front of them on a
screen is
information about the wine. Everybody, of course,
drinks exactly the same
wine. But if you
believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of
the brain associated
with pleasure and reward
light up like a Christmas tree. It's not just that
you say it's
more pleasurable, you say you
like it more, you really experience it in a
different way.
Or take sex. These are stimuli
I've used in some of my studies. And if you
simply show people these pictures, they'll say
these are fairly attractive people. But
how
attractive you find them, how romantically moved
you are by them, rests
critically on who you
think you're looking at. You probably think the
picture on the
left is male, the one on the
right is female. If that belief turns out to be
mistaken, it
2
will make a
difference. (Laughter) It will make a difference
if they turn out to be
much younger or much
older than you think they are. It will make a
difference if you
were to discover that the
person you're looking at with lust is actually a
disguised
version of your son or daughter,
your mother or father. Knowing somebody's your kin
typically kills the interest. Maybe one of the
most heartening findings from the
psychology
of pleasure is there's more to looking good than
your physical appearance.
If you like
somebody, they look better to you. This is why
spouses in happy marriages
tend to think that
their husband or wife looks much better than
anyone else thinks that
they do.
So
Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a
specific delusion. Sufferers
of Capgras
syndrome believe that the people they love most in
the world have been
replaced by perfect
duplicates. Now often, a result of Capgras
syndrome is tragic.
People have murdered those
that they loved, believing that they were
murdering an
imposter. But there's at least
one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy
ending.
This was recorded in 1931. described a
woman with Capgras syndrome
who complained
about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate
lover.
was before she got Capgras syndrome.
After she got it,
she has discovered that he
possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome
and
course, it was the same man, but she was
seeing him in different
ways.
As a third
example, consider consumer products. So one reason
why you
might like something is its utility.
You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf
with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum
doesn't do anything at all for you. But
each
of these three objects has value above and beyond
what it can do for you based
on its history.
The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and
sold for
three-quarters of a million dollars
at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop
star Britney Spears and sold for several
hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there's a
thriving market in the partially eaten food of
beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes
are
perhaps the most valuable of all. According to an
unconfirmed report, a Saudi
millionaire
offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes.
They were the ones
thrown at George Bush at an
Iraqi press conference several years ago.
Now
this attraction to objects doesn't just work for
celebrity objects. Each one
of us, most
people, have something in our life that's
literally irreplaceable, in that it
has value
because of its history -- maybe your wedding ring,
maybe your child's baby
shoes -- so that if it
was lost, you couldn't get it back. You could get
something that
looked like it or felt like it,
but you couldn't get the same object back. With my
colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck,
we've looked to see what sort of
factors, what
sort of history, matters for the objects that
people like. So in one of our
experiments, we
asked people to name a famous person who they
adored, a living
person they adored.
3
So one answer was George
Clooney. Then we asked them,
you pay for
George Clooney's sweater?
you would pay for a
brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody
who you
didn't adore. Then we asked other
groups of subjects -- we gave them different
restrictions and different conditions. So for
instance, we told some people,
can buy the
sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it,
and you can't resell it.
That drops the value
of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we
like it. But what
really causes an effect is
you tell people,
about it, but before it gets
to you, it's thoroughly washed.
the value. As
my wife put it,
So let's go back to art. I
would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall.
But I
don't want a duplicate, even if I can't
tell the difference. That's not because, or it's
not
simply because, I'm a snob and want to
boast about having an original. Rather, it's
because I want something that has a specific
history. In the case of artwork, the
history
is special indeed. The philosopher Denis Dutton in
his wonderful book
Art Instinct
about the
human performance underlying its that could
explain the
difference between an original and
a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a
different history. The original is typically
the product of a creative act, the forgery
isn't. I think this approach can explain
differences in people's taste in art.
This is
a work by Jackson Pollock. Who here likes the work
of Jackson Pollock?
Okay. Who here, it does
nothing for them? They just don't like it. I'm not
going to
make a claim about who's right, but I
will make an empirical claim about people's
intuitions, which is that, if you like the
work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so
than the people who don't like it to believe
that these works are difficult to create, that
they require a lot of time and energy and
creative energy. I use Jackson Pollock on
purpose as an example because there's a young
American artist who paints very much
in the
style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth
many tens of thousands of
dollars -- in large
part because she's a very young artist.
This
is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when
she was three years
old. The interesting thing
about Marla Olmstead is her family made the
mistake of
inviting the television program 60
Minutes II into their house to film her painting.
And they then reported that her father was
coaching her. When this came out on
television, the value of her art dropped to
nothing. It was the same art, physically, but
the history had changed.
I've been
focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to
give two examples
from music. This is Joshua
Bell, a very famous violinist. And the Washington
Post
reporter Gene Weingarten decided to
enlist him for an audacious experiment. The
question is: How much would people like Joshua
Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if
they didn't
know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got
Joshua Bell to take his
million dollar violin
down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand
in the
4
corner and see how
much money he would make. And here's a brief clip
of this.
(Violin music) After being there for
three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars.
Not bad. It's also not good. Apparently to
really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you
have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell.
He actually made 20 dollars more than
that,
but he didn't count it. Because this woman comes
up -- you see at the end of the
video -- she
comes up. She had heard him at the Library of
Congress a few weeks
before at this
extravagant black-tie affair. So she's stunned
that he's standing in a
subway station. So
she's struck with pity. She reaches into her purse
and hands him a
20.
The second example
from music is from John Cage's modernist
composition,
As many of you know, this is the
composition where the pianist sits at a
bench,
opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for
four minutes and 33 seconds
-- that period of
silence. And people have different views on this.
But what I want to
point out is you can buy
this from iTunes. (Laughter) For a dollar 99, you
can listen to
that silence, which is different
than other forms of silence.
Now I've been
talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to
suggest is that
everything I've said applies
as well to pain. And how you think about what
you're
experiencing, your beliefs about the
essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely
experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan
Wegner. What they did was they hooked
up
Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock
machine. And they gave them a series
of
painful electric shocks. So it was a series of
five painful shocks. Half of them are
told
that they're being given the shocks by somebody in
another room, but the person
in the other room
doesn't know they're giving them shocks. There's
no malevolence,
they're just pressing a
button. The first shock is recorded as very
painful. The second
shock feels less painful,
because you get a bit used to it. The third drops,
the fourth,
the fifth. The pain gets less. In
the other condition, they're told that the person
in the
next room is shocking them on purpose
-- knows they're shocking them. The first
shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts
just as much, and the third and the
fourth and
the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody
is doing it to you on
purpose.
The most
extreme example of this is that in some cases,
pain under the right
circumstances can
transform into pleasure. Humans have this
extraordinarily
interesting property that will
often seek out low-level doses of pain in
controlled
circumstances and take pleasure
from it -- as in the eating of hot chili peppers
and
roller coaster rides. The point was nicely
summarized by the poet John Milton who
wrote,
heaven.
And I'll end with that. Thank
you.(Applause)
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