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Why do we find Satisfying things so Satisfying?

Why we do find certain things satisfying? And why do we find certain things unsatisfying? Let’s take a look a disorder in the Brain’s satisfaction circuit. People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder constantly struggle with getting things to feel correct or finished. Nicholas Cage’s OCD character in the movie Matchstick Men clearly has a neat house, but some small carpet fuzz out of place sends him into a cleaning frenzy.

But how does he know when he’s finished cleaning? Some people might be satisfied with at least having all the dishes washed, but clearly his standards are higher. One of the things with OCD patients is they have “task stopping” criteria that don’t make much sense to other people. What’s the stopping criteria for shutting a door?

Well if it’s closed, stop shutting it. For this person, the stopping criteria is one, two, three shuts. Handwashing is a common compulsion in OCD and most will wash over and over again until it feels right.

Take a moment with me to try out this psychological test. Watch this puzzle closely. Depending on how perceptive you are, you will know what the puzzle is before it’s completed. We’ll finish this later. Getting back to OCD, there’s an old idea called the Zeigarnik effect that says people are far more likely to remember unfinished tasks than completed tasks probably because it bugs the hell out of them.

Based on tons of brain scan data, Dr. Jeffrey Shchwartz has found that there are three parts of the brain involved in OCD. One of them identifies when something is not how it should be - something is wrong, something is out of place, something is incomplete.

This then sends a signal to another part of the brain that gives you this vague uneasy uncomfortable feeling. Then, another part of your brain called the caudate nucleus responds once you have done something that sufficiently solves the issue.

And in OCD patients, this part of the brain is much smaller which indicates that this part of the brain hardly gets activated. There’s a condition called “hypothalamic obesity” where people’s brains do not get the “satisfied” signal and they eat and eat, chasing that feeling of satisfaction.

One part of OCD seems to be that the person doesn’t get the signal from their brain that they have sufficiently washed their hands, cleaned their room or whatever it might be, so they keep going and going chasing satisfaction and hoping to get rid of that feeling of unease that this part of the brain is generating.

OK so completion of tasks is a component in that feeling of “satisfying.” Maybe that’s not so shocking as the literary definition of “satisfy” is basically “to complete something.” But Let me clarify that yes, completing tasks appears to actually feel good, to actually be rewarding to the brain as evidenced by this study looking at the brain activation in people completing a maze task.

So why should completing things feel good? Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp says in his book Affective Neuroscience that “… pleasure indicates something is biologically useful.” He has a nice diagram outlining how your brain monitors the status of your body then generates feelings like I’m thirsty, I’m cold, I’m thirsty, or I’m hungry.

Then you seek a way to resolve these issues and resolving these issues feels good. …you’ve probably heard of opioid receptors - the pleasure receptors in the brain. These play a role in the pleasure you get from everything from eating food, to taking a hot bath, to getting a hug.

These feelings of pleasure though, need to lead to some kind of stop signal otherwise you’d eat until you puked or you’d make your bath hotter and hotter until it burned. For example the mu-opioid system, which provides a sense of pleasure has a role in getting us to stop eating.

Maybe for tasks that don’t necessarily help your biology, like say tidying your desk or finishing your to do list, your brain uses a stop signal similar to the one used biologically programmed tasks like “eat food” or “prevent yourself from freezing” or “drink water.”

That is, in general, pleasure may be a piece of “feedback” telling you something was completed and it was completed correctly. But let’s look at this as a sliding scale. Yes you can correctly complete the task of hitting a target, but the most correct way of hitting the target is hitting it right in the center and this is …difficult.

“not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” What’s interesting about how the brain processes difficulty is that evaluating a reward, and anticipating the difficulty of the task necessary to get that reward are performed by the same parts of the brain.

So, could these overlapping functions suggest that the brain has a tendency to perceive some things as more rewarding simply because they are difficult? “So he’s not inviting you to his party because he likes you.” “Exactly.”

Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee describes in his book “The Aesthetic Brain” how a 2009 study found that the brains of architecture students responded differently to pictures of buildings than people without such expertise.

First, there was more activity in the hippocampus - the area of the brain associated with memories. What’s interesting is two parts of the brain associated with reward were more activated.

Suggesting that just by having expertise, these people could derive more pleasure from looking at the same pictures. In fact, your ability to enjoy certain things, depends on your understanding of its difficulty.

This doesn’t look particularly interesting, but these guys are very excited because they know it’s very hard to do what this guy is doing. Obviously the difficulty of things like this is immediately apparent.

Contrary to the idea that rewards and fear of punishment are the most important motivators in people and animals, Harlow and Meyer found in the 1950’s that monkeys can be very motivated simply from the pleasure of solving a challenging task.

Here’s a quote from one of their studies: “two well-fed and well-watered monkeys worked repeatedly at un-assembling a six-device puzzle for ten continuous hours even though they were quite free of painful stimulation and quite well fed and well watered.” Maybe otters juggle rocks simply because it’s challenging.

Here’s an interesting finding from a paper on Social Anxiety Disorder- SAD. People with SAD were more likely than people without the disorder to experience a high level of satisfaction from successful social interactions.

That doesn’t seem to make much sense. You may have heard of the concept of “Flow,” popularized by the book titled Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is this incredibly enjoyable, rewarding, or satisfying state that appears when someone is undertaking a challenging task - This flow state could appear when you’re focused long enough on anything from sports to doing math, to video games or writing.

Essentially when the brain is put in a situation where it is continuously challenged close to the limit of your skill, you enter the flow state and you are in the Zone - a big cascade of neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin, endorphins are released - these make you feel good and they are performance enhancing.

So this paper from earlier found that people with Social Anxiety Disorder were more likely to experience this enjoyable state of flow during successful social interactions probably because social interactions are a challenge for these people with SAD. Dr. Gregory Berns, says in his book titled “Satisfaction!”

that based on how dopamine works in the brain, “satisfaction comes less from the attainment of a goal and more in what you must do to get there.” Fnally running 10 kilometers when you couldn’t run more than 2km last month is of course more satisfying than if you ran 10k’s on a daily basis.

Maybe people continue to run ultra marathons because they will always be hard. OK so when you realize you completed something correctly, that feels good, but how do you know that what you did was correct? Let’s take a look at satisfying sounds. Why do we find certain sounds satisfying? What about this sound?

Not too satisfying, yet certain people seem to like that same noise if it’s coming from a cracked back. These back cracking videos get millions of views with louder cracks being more satisfying. Here’s an auditory illusion called the McGurk effect.

Take a look at this guy. “Ba ba ba.Ba ba ba.” “Fa fa fa. Fa fa fa.” Clearly he’s saying Ba Ba Ba then Fa Fa Fa. Actually he’s just saying “Ba” the whole time - The second time around the video is replaced with the video of him saying Fa.

Your brain just can’t help processing the video as an important piece of context for interpreting the audio. So the point is, the reason these sounds are satisfying is because they are piece of clear feedback that something was done correctly… and they are interpreted as such because they are combined with the context of you seeing something being done correctly.

Either that or this is an example of Pavlovian conditioning You hear this sound every time you hit the dart board, so you enjoy that sound as feedback that you successfully hit the dartboard. And what’s great about sounds is that they are practically instantaneous. Several experiments looking at addiction have hooked rodents’ brains up to a self stimulation device where they can press a lever and directly stimulate the pleasure center of their brain.

Imagine a mild hit of a drug directly to their brain every time they press the lever. Of course these rodents get addicted to this machine, pressing the lever in favor of food or sleep. However, Even a delay of one second drastically impairs the rats ability to become a lever pressing addict. Clicker training is a method for training dogs or other animals.

The problem with traditional training is you can’t cram a treat in the dogs mouth the instant they put their paw up to shake or whatever it might be that you want them to do. So with clicker training, you use a device to make a clicking noise the instant they do the behavior you want then you follow up with a treat.

Now I’d bet that that clicking noise is satisfying for the dog. Sure we generally prefer certain sounds over others - “That’s the sound.” Why we like music is a very complex topic, but when it comes to feedback, clearer sounds are generally more satisfying. Preferring a clear sound might have something to do again with the pleasure receptors - opioid receptors and them responding to easily identifiable noises.

We actually have opioid receptors in the auditory cortex of the brain. A study on chinchillas found that you can enhance their ability to pick up noises by giving them a drug that stimulates opioid receptors.

There are even opioid receptors in the visual areas of the brain. And, these opioid receptors are most dense in the part of the brain that interprets the image. Dr. Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel say “visual stimuli that contain a great deal of interpretable information should activate many opioid receptors … and so provide the greatest pleasure.” So, what does that mean?

Well let’s get back to our puzzle. Maybe you’re a little satisfied that I finally completed the puzzle, but it’s probably not very satisfying if you can’t identify who this guy is. By the way, if you happened to have seen Princess Mononoke and then happened to pause the video here, you may have enjoyed recognizing that this is the blurry cover of the puzzle. “Nice.”

Here’s another example, what do you think of these? Think for a moment about how interesting these pictures are to you. Now what if I told you this is four elephants sniffing an orange This is a bird catching a very strong worm This is the Arthur making a fist meme and, This is a bee.

Now that you know the significance of these images, they’re probably a little more interesting than when they were just random doodles. On that note, it’s not a surprise that most brands’ logos are easily recognizable images rather than intricate and beautiful paintings.

So the brain seemsto prefer what it can recognize or interpret or understand. I’m sure you’re familiar with the satisfying “Aha!” moment when you finally solve a puzzle and successfully interpret it completely. My point with all this is that we are constantly seeking the significance of things and we also seek the significance of our behaviors and seek out feedback that helps us interpret the impact of our actions.

Of course video game designers understand all this very well. For example this old game River City Robertson from 1989 lets you know if someone blocks your attack or if your hit landed successfully. The much more recent shooting game Carlton’s Duty has a very complex sound environment but the same concept.

The Super Smash Bradley series has various noises for when you miss an attack, when a weak attack lands, a strong attack lands, and a much bigger noise when you defeat someone.

Video games capitalize on all kinds of strategies to enhance the satisfaction you get from completing goals, they give you feedback when you do things correctly and they usually give you distinct feedback for when you pull off more difficult maneuvers.

Okay so we like it when we Complete things, particularly difficult things, and we find feedback satisfying and we derive pleasure from recognizing things. “Oh it’s a donkey.” It’s fun to break a simple concept like satisfaction down, but can we actually make use of this information in our daily lives?