2,500 Years, One Good Study
Buddhism locates suffering in craving, not in thinking. A laboratory in Michigan may have found that craving does not have to hurt
Key takeaways
- Kent Berridge's laboratory finds that wanting is a positive pull that can run at full strength while liking stays flat and with no discomfort anywhere in the mechanism. Rats whose wanting system is ablated still show unchanged pleasure responses to sugar.
- The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta names the origin of dukkha as taṇhā, thirst, in three varieties. Thinking is not among them. The text that does blame the mental process, the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta on papañca, is a different and more junior one.
- Killingsworth and Gilbert sampled 2,250 adults by iPhone in 2010. Minds wandered in 46.9 per cent of samples, and people thinking about pleasant topics were no happier than people attending to what they were doing.
- Epicurus defined pleasure as the absence of pain around 300 BCE. Epictetus wrote that people are disturbed by their views of things around 125 CE. Albert Ellis built a therapy on that line from the mid-1950s, citing it in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy in 1962.
- Britton and colleagues interviewed 96 participants after eight weeks of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. A single open-ended question found 26 of the 80 people who had experienced side effects.
In Kent Berridge's laboratory, rats whose dopaminergic wanting system has been ablated go on liking sugar. Put it in their mouths and the facial response is unchanged, the same rhythmic tongue protrusions a rat has always made for something sweet. They simply stop going to get it. Run the experiment the other way, sensitise the wanting system, and the pursuit intensifies while the pleasure does not.
Berridge calls the pursuing system incentive salience, and the part that matters here is what is absent from it. It is a pull, not a push. Nothing in the mechanism hurts. If that generalises, it puts a hole in the oldest psychological hypothesis still in continuous use, because the hypothesis says that wanting is a form of suffering and that this is where suffering starts.
2019
The modern secular version of that hypothesis belongs to Nir Eyal. Indistractable argues, explicitly via Epicurus, that all motivation is the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting, and that distraction is therefore relief-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking. Time management, on that account, is emotional work misfiled as scheduling.
| Where suffering starts | What wanting is | |
|---|---|---|
| The Pali texts | taṇhā, thirst | A thirst, and thirst is unpleasant by definition |
| Eyal, via Epicurus | The pain of wanting | A discomfort you are trying to end |
| Berridge | Not addressed | A pull, with nothing necessarily painful behind it |
Neither body of work engages the other. Both get cited approvingly, often in the same paragraph, by people who have not noticed the collision. And if Berridge has it right, some large fraction of human wanting is not suffering, and a diagnosis treating craving as inherently painful is describing a subset while claiming the whole.
Whether that is fatal depends entirely on what the original diagnosis actually said, and the popular version of it is not reliable.
c. 500 BCE
Around 500 BCE, give or take a century that scholars are still arguing over, a man gave a sermon in a deer park near Varanasi. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta names the origin of dukkha as taṇhā, thirst, in three varieties: thirst for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence, thirst for non-existence. Thinking is absent from the list. Wanting is the whole of it.
There is a text that blames the mental process itself, and it is a different text. In the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta the Buddha describes papañca, which Ñāṇananda rendered in 1971 as conceptual proliferation: what a person conceives they differentiate, and what they differentiate then multiplies back on them. That is much closer to the sentence people now repeat. It is also secondary in the tradition, and the commentaries tie it back to craving, conceit and false view rather than treating it as the root.
So the popular version fuses two doctrines and promotes the junior one. Which means Berridge is aimed exactly at the load-bearing wall. Craving really is the claim.
2010
Whether the claim survives is a separate question from what it says, and it has been tested properly once.
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built a web application that pinged people on their iPhones at random moments and asked three questions. How do you feel, what are you doing, and are you thinking about something other than what you are doing. The database behind it holds nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5,000 people in 83 countries; the analysed sample is 2,250 adults, and it is the closest thing anyone has to a measurement.
Minds wandered in 46.9 per cent of samples, and in at least 30 per cent of samples during every activity except sex. People were less happy when their minds wandered, during every activity including the least enjoyable ones. What people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing, accounting for 10.8 per cent of the within-person variance in happiness where the activity itself accounted for 4.6 per cent.
Minds also wandered to pleasant topics more often than to unpleasant ones, and people thinking about pleasant topics were no happier than people attending to what they were doing, no lift the study could detect, and the tiny movement it did record pointed very slightly the wrong way and could easily have turned up by chance. The wellness version of the doctrine reduces to a claim about worry. What Killingsworth and Gilbert measured was leaving, and leaving is nearer to what the sutta means by thirst for existence.
The causal reading is thinner than the headline. Their time-lag analysis shows mind wandering in one sample predicting unhappiness in the next while the reverse does not hold, but the effect measured across that gap is a small fraction of the one they measure in the same moment, less than a seventh of its size. The direction is indicated, not nailed. Paul Seli and colleagues argued in 2018 that the 46.9 per cent figure is an artefact of forcing a yes-or-no judgment about an inner state that does not divide cleanly. The brain-science side of an idle mind is explained in an article on [what the default mode network does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-the-default-mode-network-does).
c. 300 BCE, and again in 1955
None of which has stopped the doctrine working in practice, by an entirely separate route.
Epicurus made the absence of pain the definition of pleasure. That moves the problem out of the world and into the person standing in it. Epictetus compressed the same instinct into a line that outlived nearly everything else he wrote, and Albert Ellis took the line literally, putting it to work from the mid-1950s and citing it in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy in 1962, treating an aphorism as clinical instruction. Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy, a decade or so later and still the backbone of most cognitive behavioural therapy, runs on the same structure. The thought precedes the feeling, the thought can be examined, and the examination is where the leverage lives.
CBT works. That is about as settled as clinical psychology gets, and it establishes something weaker than the doctrine it descends from. A thermostat can be adjusted without being the reason the room is cold.
2021
Willoughby Britton and colleagues ran the trial the field had been avoiding. Ninety-six people completed one of three variants of an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy programme, and an independent assessor interviewed every one of them using a 44-item instrument designed to ask about difficulty in detail.
The result that matters most is about method. A single open-ended question, of the sort trials normally rely on, identified 26 of the 80 participants who had experienced a side effect. Asking politely whether anything had gone wrong missed nearly 70 per cent of the cases.
Ask properly and the numbers arrive. Fifty-eight per cent of the sample reported at least one adverse effect with a negative valence. Thirty-seven per cent reported one with a negative impact on functioning. Six to fourteen per cent reported lasting bad effects, the range depending on whether lasting means more than a day, a week or a month, and those were associated with signs of dysregulated arousal.
Britton reads her own data generously. Transient distress in meditation looks normative rather than alarming, participants evidently judged it tolerable, and similar rates turn up across psychotherapy. She also discloses that she founded a nonprofit supporting people harmed by meditation. It is both a reason to read her carefully and the reason the instrument exists at all.
2026
Madhav Goyal's 2014 review of 47 trials puts mindfulness-based programmes at a small to moderate benefit for anxiety at eight weeks and a slightly smaller one for depression, with no evidence of any advantage over other active treatments. Something in the room is working. Nothing in that number says what.
Finding out would take dismantling designs, controls matched on everything except the target, and a measure of craving that does not consist of asking the mind under suspicion to file a report on itself. Every instrument currently available is exactly that questionnaire.
This is usually treated as an academic problem and it is not one. Two thousand years of practice, and a global industry sitting on top of it, rest on the proposition that the mechanism is craving. If it is, the practice is treating a cause and the doctrine has earned its longevity. If Berridge is closer, then some of what the practice quietens was never the disease, and a very large number of people are doing a well-evidenced relaxation exercise with a metaphysics attached that the evidence does not reach. Those are two different products. Nobody currently sells them differently.
Sources
Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11). The first sermon; the Second Noble Truth names the origin of dukkha as taṇhā in three varieties.
Madhupiṇḍika Sutta (MN 18). The discourse on papañca, conceptual proliferation.
Ñāṇananda, Bhikkhu (1971). Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought. Buddhist Publication Society. Source of the standard English rendering of papañca.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus. Pleasure defined as the absence of pain.
Epictetus, Enchiridion, the saying that people are troubled by their judgements of events more than by the events themselves.
Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart. Cites Epictetus. The approach itself dates from the mid-1950s; the two dates are routinely fused.
Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind." Science, 330(6006), 932.
Seli, P., Beaty, R. E., Cheyne, J. A., Smilek, D., Oakman, J. & Schacter, D. L. (2018). "How pervasive is mind wandering, really?" Consciousness and Cognition, 66, 74-78.
Robinson, T. E. & Berridge, K. C. Incentive-sensitisation work on the wanting/liking dissociation. See the vault note Wanting vs Liking for the citation trail.
Eyal, N. (2019). Indistractable. BenBella. The motivation theory is taken from Epicurus explicitly.
Britton, W. B., Lindahl, J. R., Cooper, D. J., Canby, N. K. & Palitsky, R. (2021). "Defining and Measuring Meditation-Related Adverse Effects in Mindfulness-Based Programs." Clinical Psychological Science, 9(6), 1185-1204.
Goyal, M. et al. (2014). "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis." JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357-368.
Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). "Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(4), 569-582.