So while I can honestly say that I don’t want Cheetos in my life, it’s clear to me that I like them. However, any time Cheetos are in a bowl in the same environment as me, whether that be at a party or conference luncheon, I will more often than not pop a few in my mouth and actually derive pleasure from the experience of eating the Cheetos – the crunch and taste and everything about them. I never buy Cheetos for myself when I go grocery shopping and I never explicitly seek them out in any other context because I am set on maintaining healthy eating habits. To give a personal example of the interplay between liking and wanting, among my many guilty pleasures is eating Cheetos. “Wanting” refers more to brain processes that underlie motivation to obtain a rewarding thing, and in conscious form, is directly linked to having a cognitive, declarative goal (1). Though there is a great deal of overlap in the colloquial meanings that the words “liking” and “wanting” evoke, in the context of this piece, “liking” specifically refers to brain processes that underlie perceiving something as pleasurable, whether consciously or not. can be hard to study without operationalizing the terms.
Rather, liking and wanting are processes that can co-exist and drive distinct behaviors.īefore I go on, let’s pause here and get into the neuropsychological definitions of these words, for differences in the brain circuitry underlying liking, reward processing, wanting etc. On the flip side, just because you want something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you like it. Think about it – just because you like something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll want it. Though the linear flow of the song lyrics may suggest that you like something, and then want it, in reality one does not have to precede the other. Yet the catchy phrase repeatedly featured in her most recent hit song “7 rings,” “ I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it,” implicitly highlights the relationship between liking and wanting, two psychological concepts which are surprisingly quite separable at the level of the brain. I would never have thought that an Ariana Grande song could lend itself to talking about an interesting avenue of neuroscience research.
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