Paul Bloom: The Origins of Pleasure,

L02 gap-filling test for 1A5, 2R and 1L1 at KU (2011/10/20) prepared by Kow Kuroda

The script below was taken fromTED(http://www.ted.com) and modified by the tester to make it more faithful to the actual speech.

Paul Bloom:

The Origins of Pleasure

As a third example, consider 1. consumer products. So one reason why you might like something is its utility. You can put shoes on your feet; you, you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn’t do anything at all for you. But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. The golf clubs were 2. owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for sev- eral hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there’s a thriving market in the partially eaten 3. food of beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. Accord- ing to uh an unconfirmed report, a Saudi mil- lionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference sev- eral years ago. (Applause)

Now this 4. attraction to objects doesn’t just work for celebrity objects. Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that’s literally irreplaceable, in that it has value be-

cause of its history — maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child’s baby shoes — um, so that if it was lost, you 5. couldn’t get it back. You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn’t get the same object back.

With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we’ve looked to see 6. what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who um, who they adored, a living person they adored. So one answer was George Clooney. Then we asked them, “How much 7. would you pay for George Clooney’s sweater?” And the answer is a fair amount— more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn’t 8. adore . Then we asked other groups of subjects— we gave them different restrictions and uh different conditions. So for instance, we told some peo- ple, “ 9. Look , you can buy the sweater, but you can’t tell anybody you own it, and you can’t resell it.” That 10. drops the value of it, suggesting that that’s one reason why we like it. But what really causes an effect is you tell people, “Look, you could resell it, you could 1

boast about it, but before it gets to you, it’s 11. thoroughly washed.” That causes a huge drop in the value. As my wife put it, “You’ve washed away the Clooney cooties.” (Laugh- ter)

So let’s go back to art. I would love a Cha- gall. I love the work of Chagall. If people wanna get me something at the end of the 12. conference , you could buy me a Chagall.

But I don’t wanna a duplicate, even if I can’t tell the difference. That’s not because, or it’s not simply because, I’m a snob and wanna boast about having an original. Rather, it’s because I want something that has a specific 13. history . In the case of artwork, the his- tory is special indeed. The philosopher De- nis Dutton in his wonderful book The Art In- stinct makes the case that, “The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation.”

And that could explain the difference between an 14. original and a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a different history. The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn’t.

I think this approach can explain differ- ences in— in people’s taste in art. This is a work by Jackson Pollock. Who 15. here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? Okay.

Who here, it does nothing for them? They just don’t like it. I’m not gonna make a 16. claim about— about who’s right, but I will make an empirical claim about people’s intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you’ll tend more so than the people who don’t like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of

time and energy and creative energy.

I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there’s a young American artist 17. who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars— in large part because she’s a very young artist. This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. The interesting thing point about Marla Olmstead is her fam- ily made a mistake of 18. inviting the tele- vision program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. And they then reported that her father was coaching her. 19. When this came out on television, the value of her

20. art dropped to nothing. It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed.

I’ve been focusing now on the visual arts, but I wanna give two examples from mu- sic. This is Joshua Bell, a very famous 21. violinist . And the Washington Post re- porter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, 22. if they didn’t know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dol- lar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. And here’s a brief 23. clip of this. (Violin Music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made $32. Not bad. It’s also not good. Ap- parently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you’re listening to 24. Joshua Bell. He actually made $20 more than that, but he didn’t count it. Um, because 2

this woman comes up— you see at the end of the video— she comes up. She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. So she’s 25. stunned that he’s standing in a subway station. So she’s struck with pity. She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20. (Laughter) (Applause)

The second example from music is 26. from John Cage’s modernist composi- tion, “4⁰33⁰⁰.” As many of you know, this is a composition where, uh, the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds—

that period of 27. silence . And people have different views on this, but what I wanna point out is you can buy this from iTunes.

(Laughter) For a dollar ninety-nine, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence. (Laughter)

Now, I’ve been talking so far about plea- sure, but what I wanna suggest is that every- thing I’ve said applies as well to 28. pain . And how you think about what you’re ex- periencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely experi- ment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Weg- ner. What they did was they hooked up Har- vard undergraduates to an electric shock ma- chine. And they gave them a series of painful 29. electric shocks. So it was a series of five painful shocks. Half of them are told that they’re being given the shocks by some- body in another room, but the person in the other room doesn’t know they’re giving them shocks. There’s no malevolence, they’re just pressing a 30. button . The first shock is

recorded as very painful. The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. The third drops, the fourth, the fifth—

so that they’re just the pain— gets less. In the other condition, they’re told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose—

knows they’re shocking them. The first shock hurts like 31. hell . The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. It hurts more if you believe some- body is doing it to you on purpose.

The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circum- stances can transform into pleasure. Hu- mans have this extraordinarily interesting 32. property that will often seek out low- level doses of pain in controlled circum- stances and take pleasure from it— as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

And I’ll end with 33. that . Thank you.

(Applause)

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アンケート

授業の方設計するために，以下の二つの点 に関して意見を述べてください．解答用紙 の裏に記入して下さい．

(1) ^質問1:問題の量は適切でしたか？

1. あまりに多すぎた 2. ちょっと多すぎた 3. ^{ちょうどよかった} 4. ちょっと少な過ぎた 5. あまりに少な過ぎた

(2) ^質問 2: 聴き取る箇所の難易度は適切で したか?

1. 難しいところが多すぎた 2. 難しいところが少しあった 3. ちょうどよかった

4. 簡単なところが少しあった 5. 簡単なところが多すぎた

他に意見があれば書いてくれてよいです．

今後の授業に生かします(^{何を書いても成績} には影響しません)．

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