The NYT has a review of Paul Bloom‘s book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like titled “The Psychology of Bliss.” Here is an excerpt from it:

Bloom’s ideas go against the traditional view of pleasure as purely sensory: that is, that we get pleasure from food because of how it tastes, from music because of how it sounds, from art because of how it looks. The sensory explanation is only partially true, he writes. “Pleasure is affected by deeper factors, including what the person thinks about the true essence of what he or she is getting pleasure from.” When we pay good money for tape measures that famous people have touched, or treasure our children’s clumsy kindergarten art, it is because we believe that something about the person’s essence exists in the object itself.

(Sufjan Stevens.)

Flowing Data has a post titled “A house that knows when you’re happy and sad” about the Happylife project that “monitors facial expressions and movements to estimate a family’s mood, displayed via four glowing orbs on the wall, one for each member.”

(Inside Google.)

(BuzzFeed.)

(Last Train Home.” Read the NYT review.)

APS has a post by Roddy Roediger titled “What Happened to Behaviorism.” Here is an excerpt:

Another way in which behaviorism lost is that many psychologists (especially cognitive psychologists) do not focus on the learning history of the organism. As John Wixted wrote to me in commenting on this column, “researchers have forgotten to explain why we behave as we do. Much of what we do is a function of the prior consequences of our actions. And we learn from those consequences. Cognitive models are often a surrogate of that learning history (they refer to a magic computer in the head without considering what is responsible for its computational abilities …). So, to the extent that cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience don’t care about the learning history of their subjects (and, for the most part, they don’t), behaviorism lost.”

(Find the image “Skinner Box” here.)

(“M IS FOR MEN” exhibition. James Graham.)

(Prince of Broadway. Read the NYT review.)