The search for pleasure generators in the brain has revealed that sweetness and other sensory pleasures have different mechanisms for generating their liking versus wanting. The same principle seems to apply to other, higher pleasures. At the University of Michigan, affective neuroscience research on brain mechanisms of pleasure has built on the pioneering and ground-breaking early studies of James Olds, followed by Elliot Valenstein’s, and continues to make new findings. Recent findings include the discovery that pleasure ‘liking’ is generated by a surprisingly frail and tiny network of hedonic hotspots distributed across the brain. By contrast, ‘wanting' for pleasures has a much more robust and larger brain generating network. Finally, the same brain network that generates ‘wanting’ or desire can also flip modes to generate some active forms of fear. Such conclusions have implications for understanding everyday pleasure and desire, as well as understanding human disorders ranging from addiction to depression.