We have often wished we could explain to the makers of the imminent sexual enhancement drugs why such drugs are likely to create bigger problems than they solve. Increasing desire in the short-term doesn't automatically increase satisfaction. Here's an article from Discovery News about research that explains why desire doesn't equate with pleasure - and how this leaves us vulnerable to addiction. (More commentary below the article.)

by Jennifer Viegas [Original article]

Most mammals, including humans, experience moments of overwhelming desire - be it for food, sex or other things - that can be followed by seemingly magical feelings of satisfaction and bliss if the desire is met. But scientists have found that, thanks to brain circuitry, we're often likely to be left wanting rather than satisfied.

According to a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience, wanting and liking are separate urges in the brain that are controlled by different circuits. When these urges occur in sync, the impact on the brain is very powerful.

But there's a catch. Mammal brains appear to have fewer mechanisms for pleasure than they do for desire.

"Our results suggest we all are inherently susceptible to wanting more than we'll actually enjoy, at least in certain situations," co-author Kent Berridge told Discovery News.

Berridge, a University of Michigan psychology researcher, added, "If separable brain circuits exist for liking and wanting, then a person who had selective activation of the wanting circuit would want more without liking more."

Such want/like dissociations can lead to addictions with drugs, sex, food, gambling and more, the researchers believe. Some people also appear to be prone to experiencing the out-of-sync phases.

For the study, Berridge and colleague Kyle Smith used a painless microinjection technique to deliver droplets of an opioid drug into a pleasure hotspot within the brains of rats. The drug caused the rats to want to eat three times their normal amount of food - in this case, sugar - while liking it twice as much as usual.

The scientists measured the "like" degree in rats by studying their facial expressions and behaviors while they ate. These included lip and paw licking.

The researchers then turned off a rat pleasure circuit by microinjecting an opioid suppressant into another part of the rodent’s brain. The rats reacted by still wanting sugar, but exhibited no extra signs of liking it.

Finally, the scientists used a technique called Fos mapping, which shows activated portions of the brain based on color changes due to proteins that affect certain neural circuits. This, and the other experiments, revealed the separate want and like "hedonic hotspots" in two areas deep within the brain.

Rats, humans and other mammals share these same regions and related circuitry, so rat desire can be comparable to human desire.

Morten Kringelbach, a senior research fellow in the Department of Physiology at the University of Oxford, observed that the study includes "a series of elegant experiments."

"These findings could potentially have wide-ranging implications for the treatment of hedonic disorders including obesity, eating disorders and drug addiction," said Kringelbach, who is also an honorary research associate at Oxford's Department of Psychiatry.
He added that the findings raise further questions about how the detected circuitry interacts with other parts of the brain. Both he and the other researchers hope future studies will further examine feelings of desire and pleasure, which, Kingelbach said, are "central to understanding the human condition."

Western medicine traditionally encourages the use of specialized pharmaceuticals for addressing specific desired effects or symptoms, even if such pharmaceuticals create unwanted side effects. Often those side effects are so severe that other specialists and their pharmaceuticals also treat the patient, and the chain of unwanted side effects, and additional pharmaceuticals may continue.

At the end of this process the patient is often worse off over all (due to the side effects of the cures) than he was when he sought relief for his initial symptom (or enhancement of his performance). In addition, he is often left ingesting various costly, toxic prescriptions. (To be cynical for a moment, we will add that the pharmaceutical companies are very much better off as a result of this approach to medicine.)

A recent example of this syndrome came via a friend. Her infant niece had a bladder infection. The urologist used antibiotics to heal it, and then prescribed antibiotics indefinitely to decrease the risk of recurrence. However, antibiotics are very hard on the child's digestive tract and natural immune system. When taken indefinitely, they indirectly pose major long-term health risks. These will likely create symptoms for which other hurried practitioners will later casually prescribe additional pharmaceuticals.

Wouldn't it be wiser to consider the patient's overall well-being and begin with a less detrimental method of warding off reinfection? Surely this era of medicine will someday be considered one of the most reckless in history.

Back to the issue of desire and pleasure. When sexologists report that more testosterone,¹ more sex, or sexual enhancement drugs fuel desire, the reward pathway of the human brain says, "Aha! I knew it. That's all I need to know to ensure my happiness." Unfortunately, it's not. Desire is not pleasure, and the single-minded pursuit of short-term pleasure is likely to leave us wanting, or craving (or irritable, needy, dissatisfied, or emotionally detached).

Intense pursuit of pleasure backfires. Scientists know that chronically high levels of dopamine have long-term effects on the brain. While dopamine is normally associated with feeling good, excess levels are associated with depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other psychiatric conditions. For example,²

Studies estimate that gay men have about twice the levels of depression than are found in Americans generally. Depression is strongly linked to high-risk behavior, including drug use, alcoholism, and risky sex.

Why the poor design that allows us to pursue our desires to the point of self-destructiveness? Because evolutionary forces have honed us to want more than we would enjoy. Evolution's (mindless) direction isn't toward our enjoyment or satisfaction; its effect is to preserve the behaviors that cause us to pass on genes. In other words, from evolution's perspective, pursuing our desires to the point where they make us miserable isn't a flaw in our design...because it gets the procreative job done.

Or at least it has thus far. Now, however, our capacity for indulging our desires is becoming increasingly lethal. Unlike our ancestors during millions of years, we now have access to the means to pursue our desires to the point where they become addictions.³ While it's hard to conceive of sex being a "harmful" addiction, one has only to speak to anyone trying to terminate a porn addiction to understand the truth.

Yet even if sex doesn't become a harmful addiction, the point is that its hungry pursuit may not lead to lasting pleasure thrills. As the article reproduced above points out, quite often the desire and pleasure cycles go out of synch (perhaps due to over-stimulation of the desire cycle), leaving partners discouraged, and, possibly, longing for their next affair. The ancient Chinese recognized both the addictiveness of sexual desire, and the way to increase overall pleasure and satisfaction by not over-indulging the desire mechanism of the brain during sex. Eventually the rest of us may be obliged to do the same.