On this episode of the Utilitarian Podcast I talk with Kent Berridge about the science of pain and pleasure. Kent Berridge is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan and the leader of the Berridge Lab for Affective Neuroscience & Biopsychology. His more than 200 academic publications have collectively been cited 69.000 times.

I ask Kent about the difference between wanting, liking and learning, whether all pleasures share a common brain basis, whether there is a pain-pleasure spectrum, how there can be wanting without liking, how we come to associate things with pleasure through learning, how advanced our understanding of pleasure and pain is and what the biggest opportunities for applications might be.