I recently went dancing with my wife at an upstairs ballroom, and was pleased to discover that “club music,” what I once called “Euro-disco” and don’t particularly like, is happily and compulsively danceable. My wife will dance to anything, and normally has to wait for the right song, or has to buy me a shot of some spirit, to get me out on the floor. I was surprised at first that most of the early dance crowd was women, who my wife informs me often go out to dance when their

We do need to talk some more about the prefrontal cortex, and the neuropsychology of Plato’s charioteer, who must hold the reins and guide the horses of our otherwise unruly emotional life. Call it the “ego,” if you must, but it is really about the self-regulation that makes us, in Kant’s terms, something other than slaves to our impulses. We’ve seen that in our understanding that the deeper nuclei that govern the “reward” system (which produce the relevant neurotransmitter d

There was a wonderful advertisement a couple of decades ago for some brand of ketchup, which showed someone holding a ketchup bottle, waiting as one must, for the ketchup to slowly start emerging from the bottle. The background music was Carly Simon’s wonderful song “Anticipation.” It says a lot about the nature of pleasure, more than half of which isn’t so much about actual consummation, but about the anticipation thereof. We can anticipate desired ends, desired pleasures, f

I once met a bunch of skydivers at a pizza parlor in Ocean City, Maryland. They amazed me because they were all in the grip of some elation. I found out that they had spent the day doing a big skydiving event, so one would naturally think that after landing, one would be feeling pretty good. I actually asked if I could buy one of their caps, nice baseball caps that just said “Elsinore.” They were too proud of the caps to let them go, and they were some kind of marker for thes