A clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, your friends fighting over the last potato chip–all these are forms of entertainment. From the Latin entretenere (“to hold inside”), it was associated with hospitality and later came to mean distracting or amusing people. Entertaiment is a vast area that encompasses theatrical entertainment as shows, visual entertainment such as paintings and movies, and audio entertainment such as music. But there are also many other kinds of entertainment, including games and sports. Many entertainers hit on themes that the brain was evolved to respond deeply to: social backstabbing, murder, etc. Entertaiment often stimulates the brain to realease seratonin and dopamine, which feels good considering how we were adapted to understand the world around us.
