Este livro recém lançado nos Estados Unidos rende uma pauta boa para os jornais: "HOW PLEASURE WORKS -- The New Science of Why We Like What We Like", de Paul Bloom. O tema é interessante. O New York Times publicou uma resenha. Um trecho:
"He analyzes how our minds have evolved certain cognitive tricks that help us negotiate the physical and social world -- and how those tricks lead us to derive pleasure in some rather unexpected places.
'Many significant human pleasures are universal,' Bloom writes. 'But they are not biological adaptations. They are byproducts of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes.' Evolutionary psychologists like Bloom are fond of explaining perplexing psychological attributes this way. These traits emerged, the argument goes, as accidental accompaniments to other traits that help us survive and reproduce.
Our most puzzling sources of pleasure, according to this view, are side effects of our inborn 'essentialism,' the idea that 'things have an underlying reality or true nature . . . and it is this hidden nature that really matters.'
