Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant .... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear...

Thomas Marryat was born in London in the year 1730. He had a retentive memory and a great love for letters from an early age. He read and spoke Latin with ease, and it is said that he could read any Greek author, even Lycophron, at nine years old. Coming of a long line of Puritan ancestry, he was intended for the dissenting ministry, but literature, the muses and the pleasures of the town had g...

What is the role and value of pleasure in addiction? Foddy and Savulescu (1) have claimed that substance use is just pleasure-oriented behavior. They describe addiction as "strong appetites toward pleasure" and argue that addicts suffer in significant part because of strong social and moral disapproval of lives dominated by pleasure seeking. But such lives, they claim, can be autonomous and rat...

2.1 Series over a graded monoid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1.1 Graded monoid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1.2 Topology on K〈〈M〉〉 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Distance on K〈〈M〉〉 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and users seek. Using schema theory, this study articulates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both c...

This article proposes that supposedly farsighted (hyperopic) choices of virtue over vice evoke increasing regret over time. We demonstrate that greater temporal separation between a choice and its assessment enhances the regret (or anticipated regret) of virtuous decisions (e.g., choosing work over pleasure). We argue that this finding reflects the differential impact of time on the affective d...

Implantation of penile nodules under the foreskin aims at improving male and female sexual pleasures during intercourse. This case discusses the characteristics of the South American penile adornment 'Bouglou' as well as the risk factors for penile cancer in this region of Amazonia. This is a case report of a 48-year-old man whose penis presented a destructive gland/penile shaft lesion and thre...

Driven partially by technological innovation and partially by a lack of a critical vocabulary, there is a bias in the computer gaming world towards discussing games in terms of their level of realism. This thesis contends that this bias is inappropriate for accurately discussing a medium whose pleasures are more closely related to concepts of reactivity, flow and kinesthetics than visual aesthe...