Until recently, it was generally assumed that if we wanted something, it was because we liked it. But science is now questioning that idea – and pointing the way to a possible cure for addiction.
Back in 1970 a shabby and shameful experiment was performed on a New Orleans psychiatric patient. We know him only as Patient B-19.
B-19 was unhappy. He had a drug problem and he’d been expelled from the military for homosexual tendencies. As part of his therapy and as an attempt to “cure” him of being gay, his psychiatrist, Robert Heath, hooked electrodes into his brain, attaching them to what – at the time – were thought to be the pleasure centres of the brain.
While the electrodes were attached, B-19 had the power to turn them on, by pressing a button. And press it he did, time after time after time – over 1,000 times a session.
“It made him feel very, very sexually aroused,” says Kent Berridge, professor of biopsychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan. B-19 felt a compulsion to masturbate. With the electrodes on, he found both men and women sexually attractive. And when the electrodes were removed, he strongly protested.
But Robert Heath noted something odd. When he asked B-19 to describe how the electrode made him feel, he expected him to use vocabulary like, “fantastic”, “amazing”, “wonderful”. But he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem to enjoy the experience at all.
So why did he keep pressing the button and why did he protest when the electrodes were removed?
Kent Berridge says we have to start by recognizing that although B-19 didn’t enjoy the sensations produced by the electrodes, he nonetheless wanted to turn the electrodes on.
But that sounds like a puzzle, a contradiction.
For many years psychologists and neuroscientists assumed that there was no real difference between liking something and wanting it. “Liking” and “wanting” sound like two words capturing the same phenomena. Surely, when I want a cup of coffee in the morning, it’s because I like coffee?