The Business of Pleasure and Pain

The neuroanatomical linkage that emerges from a normal part of business experience-the reaction to success and also to failure (especially if that failure happens to someone else)-is the focus of this column. I am sometimes asked to speak to groups of business executives, mostly to discuss a possible connection between neuroscience and business practices. These meetings are always challenging for me, because I don’t think brain science has much to do with the world of business. My own opinion is that the field of neuroscience is simply not mature enough to tell business executives how to manage their subordinates or how to lure customers into buying their products. “I have nothing real to say to you,” I usually start, “We don’t even understand how humans know how to put their socks on in the morning.”

There are usually some murmurs in the crowd at this point, but since I still have 45 to 60 minutes to burn, I continue, “My perspective isn’t hopeless, though. In fact, almost all of the brain’s neural circuitry can be easily explained-especially if you are looking at people’s interior motivations.” Then I continue with what turns into a Darwinian lecture: “People will do whatever they think will ultimately benefit them. And people will do whatever they can to avoid pain. Almost everything we know about how the brain generates behavior can be couched as combinatorial activations of these 2 broad sets of purpose-driven circuits-seeking pleasure, avoiding pain.”

The human brain as a mass of biological tissue is most clearly understood as a survival organ-the world’s most sophisticated. Given this performance envelope, a great deal of theoretical common ground exists between what we know about the brain and the needs of business. Even though not much of the brain has been mapped, my corporate audiences and I usually end up with lots to say to each other.

This month’s column is all about mapping a specific parcel of this common ground between pleasure and pain and gives a suggestion for a specific investigative direction. We will explore how a subset of these circuits supports the social experience of pleasure and pain.

There is a powerful bridge between pleasure and pain and their social equivalents; indeed, to the brain, they are nearly identical. Recent findings confirm that the same reward circuits are activated during sex and also while delighting in someone else’s misfortune (schadenfreude).¹ Similarly, both physical pain and envy over another person’s success activate these circuits.

The biology of pleasure and pain

We start with a basic review of canonical circuits normally associated with pleasure and pain, and then discuss interesting data from a collaboration of scientists in Japan and the United Kingdom. Much of the brain’s pleasure circuitry has been studied through the lens of reward reception and the establishment of addictive behavior. Invariably, this involves the neurotransmitter dopamine and a number of neural circuits that have been isolated and characterized in surprising detail.

Three networks are briefly reviewed. The first circuit involves the interaction of dopamine in neurons within the ventral tegmental area, especially in response to external rewards (eg, sexual activity, drugs, food) (Figure). Associated with these circuits, the second network comprises neurons embedded in the nucleus accumbens, within the ventral striatum. The nucleus accumbens has been shown to play a vital role in the learning of reward and the regulation of pleasurable states. The third circuit involves the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in association with the amygdala. These 3 networks are also vital parts of the dopaminergic system and are thought to mediate reward processing and the emotional responses involved in the ex-perience of pleasure.

Association never means causation. If you could somehow temporarily deactivate the ventral striatum, would schadenfreude suddenly disappear?

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