my book progress

For this book project the book I have chosen is “The Compass of Pleasure” by David J. Linden. This book covers many subjects but its main goal is to show the reader how pleasure is processed through the brain and how we react to feeling things that are pleasurable. This book gives you many things that a lot of people do because they like how it feels and talks about why we like them from a neurological standpoint. The subjects it covers that make people happy are fatty foods, sex, exercise, marijuana, generosity, alcohol, learning, and gambling. So far I’m about halfway through my book, and I find it extremely interesting. The book talks a lot about how there have been studies on rats and other animals, then it relates it back to us to explain how our brains work. For instance it explains how the brain of a drug addict becomes addict and once you are, how hard it is to stop, they studied rats that they made become addicted on a drug, to see which parts of the brain is active when they get a dose of a drug. It talks about how some drugs increase or decrease dopamine, which has been linked to feeling the emotion happiness. This book also talks about how society has a big influence on people doing drugs. It gives examples from the Romans to the Inca tribe in South American to present day America, to show that societies have always used drugs to alter their brain function, and how sometimes it’s for religious practice or used for medicine, and a drug can become a normal part of a culture. Sometimes this book can become hard to read because the author goes deep into the neuro-science of how the brain works, but I think the author does a good job dumbing it down for the average person to the point where you may not know exactly how the brain works but you get the big picture and you don’t feel like you have to stop reading because it’s to scientific for you.