by JULIET WATERS

“What do humans want?” Dr. Gregory Berns asks in the first chapter of The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, his personal and scientific quest to pin down the relationship between this feeling and the brain. “Forget about the usual suspects like sex, money and status. Is there something more basic, a drive that trumps pleasure or pain or happiness—that, if understood, would provide the key to a lifetime of satisfying experiences?”

Apparently there is. Satisfaction, he argues, may be as easy as getting the right mix of dopamine and cortisol happening in our brains. Except that it’s not that easy. The only way to get that mix is by confronting in regular doses those things in life we often avoid: pain, stress and change. It’s a convincing premise, made a little more interesting than the average popular science book by Berns’s anecdotes about travelling to Iceland (which, studies show, is the country where the most satisfied people in the world live), following ultra marathoners through the desert, visiting SM clubs with his wife and salvaging his marriage by risking intimacy.

If serotonin has been the superstar neurotransmitter of the last couple of decades, dopamine is the ingenue. Unlike serotonin, the effect of which is more like a content, Zen-like mood, dopamine is the neurotransmitter stimulated when we fall in love, do cocaine or pursue intense physical activity. Blow out the dopamine centre in your brain, and you will lose control over your motor system and derail your ability to identify what you wish to do and how you will do it. It’s the neurotransmitter that gives us our sense of purpose. The loss of dopamine is also widely regarded as the main culprit in Parkinson’s disease.

It’s an interesting theory, and if nothing else, anyone who reads this book will benefit from at least thinking about what constitutes satisfaction, even if one might not always agree with Berns. Just as interesting, perhaps, is the theory that the single-minded pursuit of happiness, security, stability and predictability is inevitably going to lead to a life filled with a vague and chronic feeling of dissatisfaction.

What Berns leaves unexplored, however, is whether or not the single-minded pursuit of satisfaction is either possible or even desirable. Few people would want to spend their entire life infatuated, high, working out, travelling, and confronting challenge. A life this satisfying also sounds like a recipe for burnout. If there’s a possibility, or even a necessity for balancing our dopamine highs with some serotonin plateaus, Berns doesn’t seem interested.

There’s also the possibility that not all humans are satisfied with the same things, and would we necessarily want to live in a world where they did? Some people seem to be more satisfied with contentment than others. Berns briefly mentions the theory of the “novelty” gene, a gene that accounts for those people who are natural risk takers and stress addicts. If such a gene exists, he obviously has it, and it tends to lead him to make huge generalizations that might not resonate with everyone. “The most fulfilled people I meet don’t sit still.” I guess he’s never met the Dalai Lama, or the writer Annie Dillard, who once made the important distinction between a good day and a good life. As she once wrote, “Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.” Obviously a statement that resonates with some people more than others.

Whether you’re working on a cure for cancer, or writing a book about Satisfaction, some of the most satisfying accomplishments involve a lot of sitting still. Perhaps satisfaction is all in the brain, but Berns hasn’t confronted the possibility that it may also be all in the mind.

Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Berns, Henry Holt, hc, 285pp, $31.95