The author aims to make sense of
human satisfaction through various
interviews and adventures with both
the scientific and nonscientific
communities.

He travels to Iceland to understand
why this country has the highest
satisfaction rate of any other people in the world.
He has dinner with a hedonistic
European chef who titilates more than
just his sense of taste. He interviews
a pair of ultramarathoners and follows
them through their masochistic 100 mile
adventure. At the end, the author
synthesizes main themes by reflecting
on his own marriage.

Overall, this is a sequence of interesting
anecdotes weaved through common medical
knowledge and some interesting scientific
studies. Many times I was left hanging
with more anecdote than science, so I
thought the book was a little lazy in
this regard. I eventually came to terms
with as the stories provide enough
satisfaction to get you through the book.

The title of this book is totally misleading. First of all Berns is no great writer. He inserts a lot of dialog that sounds faked. But the overall premise, that he's out looking for "True Fulfillment" is ridiculous; he is clearly not doing anything of the kind. What he is doing is repeating over and over and over his basic premise that novelty is what the brain requires. (This is because novelty stimulates the brain in particular ways that result in the release of dopamine, and this happens in a particular part of the brain called the striatum.) Then he goes on these long, boring investigations into the ways in which novelty is found in eating fine foods, sex, running, solving puzzles, etc. This book was BORING. The argument about novelty is not very convincing. He just does not justify the notion that the pursuit of novelty or novelty itself results in "true fulfillment." I mean, you can give all the examples of "novelty" you want, but if you haven't really bothered to show how fulfilling that is, do I care? True fulfillment? Hardly.