Thus The Wall Street Journal today. Talking about ourselves triggers the same sort of pleasure as food, sex, or money, claims Diana Tamir, a neuroscientist from Harvard who conducted the experiments together with her colleague, Jason Mitchell. “Self-disclosure is extra rewarding,” she is cited. “People are even willing to forego money in order to talk about themselves.” Wow. Acts of self-disclosure, such as telling of secrets, are accompanied by spurts of activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, sex, or money. Gosh. At long last I have a scientific explanation of the reason my writing gives me so much palpable pleasure. And why I have been committed to my bulging Residua for nearly forty years. Self-disclosure is the secret.

Addendum (May 5, 2016)

Over the years, my main problem with self-disclosure is that it involves so many others. In my case, they are mostly women and their men. And they can be rather cross when their secrets are disclosed together with my own. Which is why quite a few of my pieces of writing are not in the public domain to this day. I keep a meticulous record of all such pieces, and I occasionally decide to put some of them onto the World Wide Web, but many of them will have to wait for quite a while, and perhaps even until we are all dead. For better or worse, nearly all of my secrets are of the most frivolous variety—infidelity. And self-disclosure on my part is thus especially rewarding. At any rate, the neuroscientist from Harvard is definitely unto something that is central to my magnum opus. As years go by, self-disclosure is turning into my most cherished guide.