Desire & Liking - A distinction | Mufti Abu Layth

some Hussein said I saw you at a alam Rock restaurant eating a lamb chop like a posh boy rather well one must indulge you know I was speaking about this earlier on today with I was speaking about desire people are going to think yeah what's muy on about now you see in Psychology you can there is a distinction between liking something and

Desiring it and I don't just mean a um a phenomenological difference I mean there are biological differences So and I've spoken of this in the past about there you know it's the dopaminergic drives within the brain the pathways that represent dis desire but liking something is different it's it's a whole you know it's stimulation of different aspects of the brain so a lot of these things can go handin hand

so you can um but sometimes they don't need to so sometimes you can like something but not have a desire for it and you also see this sometimes when uh things go wrong as well um I don't know whether it's necessarily A but you do get with certain people they may have suffered something an injury or they've suffered had some damage and then they may um lose a sexual they may lose their sexual appetite so there's cases where this happens but if they did engage in sex

they still enjoy it it's not that they don't enjoy it but that's where Sometimes some damage has happened to them but even generally you will find and there's been experiments where um let's say rats or mice have um they've had certain regions activated in their brain to um every time they receive a shock an electric shock it would trigger those dopam energic kind of Pathways now they would then have such a desire to keep even though they

do not want the shock it's not that they want the shock but they would do that till they exhaust themselves and this this field explains the psychology of addiction how it works because when you um when when the desire for something is really powerful but the reward the liking of it is also Amplified it can lead to in many people addictions it doesn't have to lead to addictions but it can in certain people so right so okay so the what I was discussing was you see I don't have

a a I don't have much of a desire um for things like food as dumb as that sounds obviously I have the instinctual response so obviously if I'm hungry I want to eat and I have the liking see liking is not the same as Desiring so I will like certain foods so if I eat them I like them and if I had a choice I would choose the ones that I like but I don't have a desire like I'm like let's say I'm not hungry I I don't I'm not driven for food

at all like I mean zero like literally so I've I don't understand you know like people let's say invitations for food they literally mean zero to me like it doesn't um incentivize me in the slightest so we were having this discussion today about this I know that that's probably really weird because it makes sense to be incentivized for food because of the whole evolutionary thing but um H so I wonder I wonder if if if other people I like that or is that just me I

don't h something gone wrong in my childhood I was thinking you know what it might have been was um I was discussing this earlier on I was thinking it may have but it may completely not but when we were kids we were told that oh you're not allowed to um like if you go out you're not allowed to eat food at people's homes or you're not you know if people offer you something you can't take it and if they let's say you go to a relative's house or you go somewhere if they give you food and say oh have this you can't have

it because it's it's a sign that you you know they see upbringings right oh it it it means that oh your parents don't feed you so there's this thing that it's this is obviously old school now but so as kids not that we used to go that much but if we did we weren't allowed to kind of like eat the food that other people would give us when we were guests so I was thinking maybe did it have a link with that or was it just biological anyway in my brain or I don't know but anyway there you go sharing

something totally weird about myself um so yeah so I wonder how that is with other people but it's just food really nothing I think the other other departments have over oversteep but I feel yeah so I wonder how that is with other people but anyway moving back to