Let me begin by telling the main idea:

Pleasure arises in your brain

It may begin with a taste on your tongue or a sound in your ear, but it is inside your brain that the pleasure is sensed. To check this, suppose you are asleep when I put a drop of sweet fruit juice on your tongue. Unless the action wakes you, you feel no pleasure --- to sense pleasure you need a conscious brain.

And the pleasure-sensor can be set off by two things matching.

An example is rhyme: “The cat in a hat” is a livelier title than “The cat on a rug.” And a pair of shoes that match give an effect that we don’t get from two odd shoes --- an effect that, though small, is real.

The main idea is that this pleasure from matching pervades our lives. The air we breathe is little-noticed but essential, and pleasure from matching is the same. We get it in such a constant stream that it goes unnoticed, but everything we do that is different from chimpanzees has pleasure from matching as a part. Of all the differences that make us human, getting pleasure from matching may be the most essential; we would not be human without it and it shapes each life from birth to death, from beginning to end.

            “Nonsense!” you say, “I get pleasure from going to a party, watching a ball-game, swimming …”

            Of course! To enjoy yourself is to be animated, jolly, with zest; it isn’t brainwork. My point is that even without doing brainwork, still the pleasure you get comes from your brain, not from your eyes or your fingers. Your brain is constantly delivering pleasure and to know something about the process might be a benefit ...

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... Chris asks, “Why don’t you think a bit more before you start talking?”

Pat replies, “But how do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”

There is a measure of sense in Pat’s reply: after I have said a few words, I judge, Did that come out right, did I say what I wanted to say? And certainly, people sometimes correct themselves, along the lines of “I did not say that quite right; what I meant to say is …”

My point is that saying even a few words is like starting a poem or a work of art: one has in oneself at least a partial idea of what the outcome should be like, and the outcome either does or does not match up ...

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For now, let’s see how far we have come.

            I have listed 35 aspects of daily life and suggested that they all have one feature, matching, in common.

            I have suggested that this is more than a curiosity, it is an effect that influences a person’s whole life. To understand better where one stands today and where one is headed, including one’s relations with other people and how to be more genuinely helpful, one would do well to understand this feature.

            The suggestions are not outlandish. They have been mentioned inconspicuously by at least three other people (N. Humphrey, J. McCrone and J. Fost) and have almost been enunciated in the big-time neuroscience journals.

            The suggestions are compatible with as much as is known about physical brains. The mechanism I have just described is grossly oversimplified, just a cartoon, and may be quite wrong but our feelings tell us that some such mechanism must be there; we just have to find it.