How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom

(Norton, 280 pages, $26.95)

No book about “sex, food, art, and fun” needs to be as smart as this one is, said Mary Carmichael in Newsweek.com. But Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has plunged into the subject of human pleasure with gusto, and he’s emerged with a powerful and entertaining book based on the proposition that no human pleasure is truly simple. The pleasure of a good wine is also affected by what we’re told about its price. The pleasure of a good story is affected by whether we believe we’re reading fact or fiction. The pleasure of sex is affected by “who we think our sexual partner really is.” Bloom’s writing itself is a joy: He’s the kind of thinker who can leap from the Bhagavad Gita to Buffy the Vampire Slayer “without ever sounding like he’s trying too hard.”

Many of his most fascinating ideas spring from “a reasonably new movement” in psychology known as essentialism, said Peter D. Kramer in Slate.com. From infancy, it seems humans see everyone and everything in their world as possessing a hidden, essential nature. The pleasure ­centers in our brains thus light up particularly brightly when we view a Vermeer that we trust to be genuine or eat a cookie that’s labeled “homemade.” Recognizing this innate tendency actually marks a huge step forward in the study of happiness: A lot of other experts have told us that, when chasing pleasure, we’re mere slaves to instincts honed eons ago, when there were survival advantages to having a wandering eye or a taste for sweets.

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Bloom’s theories also get us closer to understanding art—“the supreme human achievement,” said Bryan Appleyard in the London Sunday Times. He points out that people have probably always spent a staggering amount of their leisure time “participating in activities that they know are not real”—whether that has meant daydreaming, painting in caves, or watching TV. This is puzzling, unless you recognize that we probably do so because we’re seeking essences. Simply put, we can’t help it; that’s “who we are.”