How the brain controls pleasures – unlocking brain secrets

Self-help by discovering how the human brain drives us to seek pleasure and avoid pain

Through analysing parts of the brain, the author Dr Gillman meticulously takes us on an important journey of brain discovery. In this detailed, ground-breaking book with over 400 references, he reveals how the brain functions and controls pleasures. This fascinating book together with unique diagrams uses Dr Gillman’s key biological discovery of the ‘pain pleasure continuum’ to unlock brain secrets.

Based on the latest findings from modern neuroscience, professional and lay people alike will discover how the human brain motivates us to seek pleasure and avoid pain and how it interprets pleasures arising from eating, drinking, sex and music etc. This arms us with the ability to self-help by predicting and understanding the behaviour of ourselves, family, friends and even our enemies.

Understand how the brain functions in normal and abnormal pleasure states – helping you to quit smoking, alcohol and other additive drugs

This book contains invaluable information within the context of a positive, upbeat message about how the brain functions in normal and abnormal pleasure states like addictions.

You will discover how neurotransmitters (chemical messengers), found in parts of the brain, are involved in pleasure perception and happiness, for example, the endorphins, endocannabinoids, oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. You will learn how the endorphins were the first neurotransmitter system shown to be involved in the 'pain pleasure continuum' and how dopamine is known as the ‘wanting’ neurotransmitter. The reader will begin to understand how love and sexual pleasure all depend on the endorphins, dopamine and the neuropeptide oxytocin. The book simplifies, for laymen and academics, how the various neurotransmitters are involved in pleasure. Once understood, this scientific knowledge is converted into practical self-help life tips.

The book sets out how recent scientific research explain underlying normal neural processes that produce subjective feelings of pleasure and satisfaction and contribute to our understanding of addiction, eating disorders (e.g. anorexia, bulimia, obesity) and sexual dysfunction. Knowledge of these integrated neurotransmitters can assist in dealing with substance abuse.

Improve your sex-life, marriage, and weight issues by understanding the need to seek pleasure – which is key to human evolution and survival

This book is a major step forward in helping to understand the consequences of our persistent pursuit of pleasure and the balancing human need to try to avoid pain.

Seeking pleasure is a key to our human evolution and survival. Our responses to all aspects of the pleasure side of the ‘pain-pleasure continuum’ are influenced and balanced by our learned and instinctive responses to pain. Understanding how this ‘continuum' functions provides essential clues to tackling many of the issues facing our societies today.

This book is a comprehensive, clear workshop manual on our complex pleasure brain, which can be applied to practical day to day life.

Better appreciate beautiful things such as music and art

Dr Gillman explores in detail how our instinctive pursuit of pleasure – which has been essential to our survival and evolution, poses challenges within the context of the norms and mores of contemporary societies.
Dr Mark Gillman, eminent brain scientist and addiction-expert, has lectured over 250 times on pleasure and pain to lay and academic audiences alike. Amid his many scientific and medical publications are seminal discoveries of the first biological link between pain and pleasure. He has advised governments in the USA, China, Africa and Europe on brain function.