In Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns proposes that satisfaction lies not in simple hedonism, but in feeding our brains with challenging, novel experiences. Last week, I was exploring how to maintain enduring passion when you’re a serial enthusiast. I concluded that keeping things new was the secret. In his book, Berns provides the science behind that. A sense of satisfaction is generated by the brain chemical dopamine, previously considered by scientists as the neurotransmitter of pleasure, but now known to be released in anticipation of and in response to both pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Incidentally, dopamine is released by many psychoactive drugs including my personal favorite, caffeine.
Dopamine is more a molecule of motivation than happiness:
The most parsimonious explanation of dopamine’s function suggests that it commits your motor system–your body–to a particular action. If this idea is correct, then satisfaction comes less from the attainment of a goal and more in what you must do to get there.
How do you get more dopamine flowing in your brain? Novelty. A raft of brain imaging experiments has demonstrated that novel events, because they challenge you to act, are highly effective at releasing dopamine. A novel event can be almost anything–seeing a painting for the first time, learning a new word, having a pleasant, or an unpleasant, experience–but the key factor is surprise.
Fortunately, novelty doesn’t require that we ditch our spouse or partner, change jobs, or move to a new state, though I can attest to the exhilaration of state-to-state moves. You can bring new things into your life just by taking a mindful stance: pay closer attention to everyday experiences, refrain from prejudging using rigid concepts, and draw new distinctions even in the context of familiar activities. Berns’ research provides an empirical basis for understanding how mindfulness can make our lives more satisfying.
Given that this book covered research relevant to my current studies of mindfulness, you might think I’d recommend it without reservation. However, I found myself more often irritated than inspired when reading it. Though what I learned in this book was important, it was buried under too much self-indulgent and rambling storytelling. I didn’t need a page-long description of how attractive Berns finds Icelandic women. And I really didn’t want to know that he has suffered from sexual ennui in his marriage. While the relationship between sex and satisfaction bears investigating, I wasn’t interested in his own sexual crucible. As I read it, I thought to myself, “get a blog!”
How Many Words Should a Book Be?
Borrowing a technique from Steven Berlin Johnson, I took note of interesting information from the book using an information manager called DEVONthink so that I can later call up information on related research studies or details of the dopamine system for future writing projects. I distilled his book into 25 chunks of text, each 50 to 250 words in length. Assume each one was 200 words; even then, the total count would have been just 5000 words. Consider that a typical nonfiction book is about 80,000 words. What a waste of my time to have to wade through all the excess, especially because I found some of it quite annoying. Johnson considers this one of the main reasons his system works; he says “the signal-to-noise ratio is so high because I’ve eliminated 99% of the noise on my own.” But I don’t want to have to get rid of the noise myself. Isn’t that the job of the book editors? Unfortunately, it’s not, not in a world where you just can’t publish a 30- or 50-page booklet and expect it to sell printed at Borders or online at Amazon. Instead the editors pack in the writing equivalent of styrofoam peanuts to make a book an acceptable length.
It’s true that different people are going to find different signals in the same book. I suppose some readers might be interested in the beauty of Icelandic women and others might be interested in reading lengthy descriptions of an ultramarathon. But the purpose of the book was to propose a science of satisfaction based on current research findings. Why must nonacademic readers wade through so much garbage to get to the meat of the argument? A few illustrative anecdotes here and there are fine and help the reader truly grasp the material. But these should be secondary to the main information the book contains.
An Alternative: Booklets
Berns’ work would have been better presented as a medium-length paper: a booklet. We need more flexible ways of publishing and distributing information like this, mechanisms that allow information to be presented at just the length needed, and no longer. We have them already, but the book publishing industry and the readers of popular science remain mired in old ways of doing things. It’s either a book or a magazine article, but rarely anything in between.
I can see it starting to change, though. On occasion, when searching on Amazon for a book, I find a short paper available for downloading instead. O’Reilly has begun offering PDF Guides like Shelley Powers’ What Are Syndication Feeds for less than ten dollars each. I’d like to see popular science coverage in such format too, especially if it spares me stories that should be told on someone’s personal blog. I can imagine an online marketplace for popularized versions of academic research. It doesn’t mean that book-length works will go away: some subjects are worthy of 80,000 words or many more and some writers are capable of expanding on topics in ways that make those topics richer and easier to comprehend. Making booklets available means that readers could save money and time while getting more information-dense nonfiction. Berns’ book would have been more satisfying as an electronic booklet, and it would have also allowed me to easily transfer the quotes and research of specific interest to me into my information manager.
Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal claims that “in certain tech circles, books have come to be regarded as akin to radios with vacuum tubes, a technology soon to make an unlamented journey into history’s dustbin.” Scott Karp calls this along with bloggers’ responses the ideological polarization of 2.0 where “both sides are over-indulging in the extreme ideological polarization that renders ‘partisans’ incapable of seeing shades of gray or valid points on the other side.” I run around in a couple of loud-mouthed tech circles and I don’t know anyone who expects books to disappear entirely. Perhaps if Gomes blogged rather than writing for a newspaper we’d have some sense of which tech circles have been making such dire predictions for books, because he’d link to them. Gomes’ caricatured description risks obscuring the very real limitations of traditional books at the same time that it turns people off of new, more satisfying possibilities.
10 Comments
Books probably won’t disappear completely, but there is a change that’s already arrived. Booklets are a smart way to go (maybe even as a pre-publication for a larger work), as are the online versions you point out.
Have you see NXTbook Media? That could be another solution.
Thanks for your insight.
Mike - you’re right; booklets could interest people in longer publications.
I hadn’t seen NXTbook Media before… interesting. I wonder, however, whether such products are even needed. With PDFs, everyone can publish themselves in a portable format. However, PDFs aren’t optimized for work with digital book readers and there are other things you could do with something richer, like the Flash technology that NXTbooks are apparently based on.
And thanks for your comment! Perhaps you’ll be tracking this somehow, based on your recent blog post covering various ways of monitoring responses to comments you’ve made. I personally haven’t done a very good job of keeping track of comments I make on other sites.
Good discussion. It reminds me of the difference perspectives on motorcycles contained in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author, Pirsig, had a classical view and wanted to go below the surface and understand ideas contained in the motorcycle and how they worked. His friend had a romantic (worldview) and wanted to just experience the joy of a ride and was not too concerned with maintenance of his motorcycle or the science of internal combustion engines.
Maybe readers are like that. One, just a pragmatic interest in the basics of a subject. Others readers want to dig deep and understand the details.
Neither one of them wants needless verbiage, self-indulgent or otherwise. But both have a kind of interest that causes them to respond to one kind of book/booklet over another. We’re not all the same kind of learners.
And I doubt this is consistent or uniform in any one person from subject to subject.
Good posting and thanks for enlarging my thoughts and extending the conversation!
Good post! Having written a pair of books myself now, I’ve experienced first hand the issues of length - not to mention timeliness. I think there’s a real growing niche for creating booklets of shorter length, quicker turnaround, yet with professional editing and production. Something better put together than an off-the-cuff blog, yet with a much shorter development arc.
At least, I’d like to think so, and would like to do so.
Michael: you bring up a very good point, which is that everyone is different in their reactions to things. I suppose the author of the book I read may have been thinking of the typical reader as being male, and figured such a reader would have an interest in a long description of a blonde woman. To me, it was offputting.
And it’s true we’re not all the same kind of learners. I like to grasp things quickly and move on; other people might like to linger longer. We need more flexible information sources to meet different people’s needs.
Les - yeah, the timeliness thing… we are all still looking forward to your delicious book. I have yet to purchase a booklet of the sort I’m describing for download but I think I would be willing to do so, if it were the right topic and author. From an author’s point of view, it could be more satisfying to move quickly through a subject, treat it in the amount of time needed, and move on to the next.
Congratulations on your wedding and have a great honeymoon!
Have you read the book Future Shock? It’s a few decades old, but is still very relevant today and says a lot about the need for novelty and the growing transience of our society.
Basu - I read Future Shock a long time ago; maybe I should look at it again. Coincidentally, I just read another Toffler book, Revolutionary Wealth. That was good, but again, too long for my tastes.
Anne: thanks so much for this post (and the related ones you linked to)! I know I’m late to the party here (I’ve been travelling), but this post comes at a great time for me while struggling with my own book. With my previous tech books, they were start-to-finish learning books, basically replicating a course, and some were certification study guides where there just IS a specific set of topics–with a specific level of detail–and no way out of that. But now, for the first time, I find myself writing on a subject that’s wide open, no constraints, and I’m overwhelmed by the choices I have to make in everything from overall length to chapter length to level of detail to number of topics and on and on.
Your post has helped me make some of these decisions.
On the related topic you brought up about Serial Enthusiast, this is an interesting one I’d like to explore more. The last two years of my life have been spent studying/analyzing the things people are passionate about, and in my talks I always ask the audience to tell the people sitting near them one thing they’re passionate about. Aftwards, I always get a lot of people telling me how their passions have changed, and for many–how *frequently* they’ve changed.
You defined some good reasons for this… I could not agree more about the moving thing. By design, I have refused to live anywhere longer than 5 or 6 years. After that, I find myself becoming too comfortable, and I’m somewhat addicted to the thrill of starting from scratch in a completely new place, where everything from finding the best latte to picking a car mechanic is an adventure.
One reason why people lose/change passions is because they simply ran out of new challenges for that [whatever it is] OR because the amount of effort required to meet the next challenge would be too great, or not worth it. For so many things, the passion and expertise curve is almost exponential… take chess or rock climbing, for example–where each new “level” requires a near-doubling of the effort it took to reach the previous level. For a lot of things people are passionate about, there is novelty in attaining the next “level”, but once you hit the real (or motivational) wall to progress further, and you’re not really going anywhere else with it, then it’s time for a change.
I guess it mostly comes down to how much we value having the next level of expertise in this thing (if there even IS one), and whether it’s worth it (and a lot depends on our own ability to be patient). If not, then the novelty (dopamine) ceases for that thing.
Oops sorry to have left this long-ass comment–especially when part of your post was about honing things down… : )
But it is very satisfying post; honest.