NotitiesThe Molecule of More
Daniel Z Lieberman
"The Molecule of More" explores the role of dopamine in human behavior, emphasizing its impact on desire, creativity, and addiction. It contrasts dopamine-driven anticipation with the satisfaction derived from present-oriented neurotransmitters, highlighting the challenges of transitioning from passionate love to companionate love and the implications for mental health and relationships.
Those down chemicals—call them the Here & Nows—allow you to experience what’s in front of you. They enable you to savor and enjoy, or perhaps to fight or run away, right now. The up chemical is different. It makes you desire what you don’t yet have, and drives you to seek new things. It rewards you when you obey it, and makes you suffer when you don’t. It is the source of creativity and, further along the spectrum, madness; it is the key to addiction and the path to recovery; it is the bit of biology that makes an ambitious executive sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, that makes successful actors and entrepreneurs and artists keep working long after they have all the money and fame they ever dreamed of; and that makes a satisfied husband or wife risk everything for the thrill of someone else. It is the source of the undeniable itch that drives scientists to find explanations and philosophers to find order, reason, and meaning. It is why we look into the sky for redemption and God; it is why heaven is above and earth is below. It is fuel for the motor of our dreams; it is the source of our despair when we fail. It is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. It is also why we are never happy for very long. (Page 15)
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Dopamine, they discovered, isn’t about pleasure at all. Dopamine delivers a feeling much more influential. Understanding dopamine turns out to be the key to explaining and even predicting behavior across a spectacular range of human endeavors: creating art, literature, and music; seeking success; discovering new worlds and new laws of nature; thinking about God—and falling in love. (Page 22)
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dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation. (Page 24)
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Why does love fade? Our brains are programmed to crave the unexpected and thus to look to the future, where every exciting possibility begins. But when anything, including love, becomes familiar, that excitement slips away, and new things draw our attention. (Page 25)
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The scientists who studied this phenomenon named the buzz we get from novelty reward prediction error, and it means just what the name says. We constantly make predictions about what’s coming next, from what time we can leave work, to how much money we expect to find when we check our balance at the ATM. When what happens is better than what we expect, it is literally an error in our forecast of the future: Maybe we get to leave work early, or we find a hundred dollars more in checking than we expected. That happy error is what launches dopamine into action. It’s not the extra time or the extra money themselves. It’s the thrill of the unexpected good news. (Page 25)
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Dopaminergic excitement (that is, the thrill of anticipation) doesn’t last forever, because eventually the future becomes the present. The thrilling mystery of the unknown becomes the boring familiarity of the everyday, at which point dopamine’s job is done, and the letdown sets in. The coffee and croissants were so good, you made that bakery your regular breakfast stop. But after a few weeks, “the best coffee and croissant in the city” became the same old breakfast. But it wasn’t the coffee and the croissant that changed; it was your expectation. (Page 26)
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Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things. (Page 29)
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The novelty that triggers dopamine doesn’t go on forever. When it comes to love, the loss of passionate romance will always happen eventually, and then comes a choice. We can transition to a love that’s fed by a day-to-day appreciation of that other person in the here and now, or we can end the relationship and go in search of another roller coaster ride. (Page 34)
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Love that lasts shifts the emphasis from anticipation to experience; from the fantasy of anything being possible to engagement with reality and all its imperfections. The transition is difficult, and when the world presents an easy way out of a difficult task, we tend to take it. That’s why, when the dopamine firing of early romance ends, many relationships end, too. (Page 34)
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From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. (Page 37)
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Dopamine has no standard for good, and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new, never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is “More.” (Page 37)
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Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules, or the H& Ns. Most people have heard of the H& Ns. They include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these chemicals give us pleasure from sensation and emotion. In fact, one of the endocannabinoid molecules is called anandamide, named after a Sanskrit word that means joy, bliss, and delight. (Page 37)
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Dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs is an important ingredient in bringing about change, which is what a new relationship is all about. H& N companionate love, on the other hand, is characterized by deep and enduring satisfaction with the present reality, and an aversion to change, at least with regard to one’s relationship with one’s partner. In fact, though dopamine and H& N circuits can work together, under most circumstances they counter each other. When H& N circuits are activated, we are prompted to experience the real world around us, and dopamine is suppressed; when dopamine circuits are activated, we move into a future of possibilities, and H& Ns are suppressed. (Page 38)
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It’s just that his personality is primarily dopaminergic: he enjoys anticipation and planning more than doing. (Page 39)
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Vasopressin acted like a “good-husband hormone.” (Page 40)
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But just as some people have difficulty moving from passionate love to companionate love, it can be also be difficult for dopamine-driven people to let the H& Ns take over during sex. (Page 43)
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Dopamine can always send us chasing phantoms. (Page 43)
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It is ironic that brain circuits that give us the energy and motivation we need to get ourselves into bed with a desirable partner subsequently get in the way of our enjoying the fun. Part of it may involve the intensity of the experience. Sex for the first time is more intense than sex for the hundredth time—especially sex for the hundredth time with the same partner. But the climax of the experience, orgasm, is almost always intense enough to move even the most detached dreamer into the immediate world of H& N. (Page 44)
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Waiting prolongs the most exciting phase of love. The bittersweet feelings of distance and denial are the business end of a chemical reaction. (Page 45)
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Dopamine tends to shut down once fantasy becomes reality, and dopamine is the driving chemical of romantic love. (Page 45)
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Dopamine responded not to reward, but to reward prediction error: the actual reward minus the expected reward. (Page 46)
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We enjoy the familiar not for what it could become, but for what it is. (Page 47)
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But when it comes to love, dopamine is a place to begin, not to finish. It can never be satisfied. Dopamine can only say, “More.” (Page 47)
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dopamine overwhelms reason to create consuming desire for the most destructive behaviors imaginable. (Page 50)
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When faced with a range of options, we choose the one that leads to the most happiness. Except we don’t. Our brains aren’t wired that way. (Page 52)
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Wanting, or desire, flows from an evolutionarily old part of the brain deep inside the skull called the ventral tegmental area. It is rich in dopamine; in fact, it is one of the two main dopamine-producing regions. Like most brain cells, the cells that grow there have long tails that wind through the brain until they reach a place called the nucleus accumbens. When these long-tailed cells are activated, they release dopamine into the nucleus accumbens, driving the feeling we know as motivation. The scientific term for this circuit is the mesolimbic pathway, although it’s easier to simply call it the dopamine desire circuit (Page 53)
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For a biological organism, the most important goal related to the future is to be alive when it comes. As a result, the dopamine system is more or less obsessed with keeping us alive. (Page 55)
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The sensation of wanting is not a choice you make. It is a reaction to the things you encounter. (Page 55)
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When something useful to our continued existence appears, we don’t have to think about it. Dopamine makes us want it, right now. It doesn’t matter if we’re going to like it, or if we even need it at the moment. Dopamine doesn’t care. Dopamine is like the little old lady who always buys toilet paper. It doesn’t matter if she has a thousand rolls stacked in the pantry. Her attitude is you can never have too much toilet paper. So it is with dopamine, but instead of toilet paper, dopamine urges you to possess and accumulate anything that might help keep you alive. (Page 57)
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Dopamine circuits don’t process experience in the real world, only imaginary future possibilities. For many people it’s a letdown. They’re so attached to dopaminergic stimulation that they flee the present and take refuge in the comfortable world of their own imagination. (Page 58)
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The future isn’t real. It’s made up of a bundle of possibilities that exist only in our minds. Those possibilities tend to be idealized—we usually don’t imagine a mediocre outcome. (Page 58)
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The desire circuit often breaks its promises—which is bound to happen, because it plays no role in generating feelings of satisfaction. It is in no position to make dreams come true. The desire circuit is, so to speak, just a salesman. (Page 59)
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Wanting and liking are produced by two different systems in the brain, so we often don’t like the things we want. (Page 60)
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Like a guided missile, addictive drugs hit the desire circuit with an intense chemical blast. No natural behavior can match that. Not food, not sex, not anything. (Page 62)
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When an expected reward fails to materialize, the dopamine system shuts down. In scientific terms, when the dopamine system is at rest, it fires at a leisurely three to five times per second. When it’s excited, it zooms up to twenty to thirty times per second. When an expected reward fails to materialize, the dopamine firing rate drops to zero, and that feels terrible. (Page 71)
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Don’t mess with dopamine. It hits back hard. (Page 72)
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Many of the decisions that addicts make, particularly the harmful decisions, are impulsive. Impulsive behavior occurs when too much value is placed on immediate pleasure and not enough on long-term consequences. (Page 73)
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Addiction arises from the chemical cultivation of desire. (Page 74)
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Addiction is not a sign of weak character or a lack of willpower. It occurs when the desire circuits get thrown into a pathological state by overstimulation. (Page 75)
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The circuit that opposes the desire circuit might be called the dopamine control circuit. (Page 85)
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Systems that contain opposing forces are easier to control. (Page 86)
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How does a single chemical do both things? Think of rocket fuel that powers the main engines of a spaceship. The same fuel that pushes the rocket forward can be redirected to drive directional thrusters to steer the ship, as well as retrorockets to slow it down. (Page 91)
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Control dopamine carries us beyond the primitive I want of desire dopamine. It gives us tools to comprehend, analyze, and model the world around us, so we can extrapolate possibilities, compare and contrast them, then craft ways to achieve our goals. It is an extended and complex execution of the evolutionary imperative: to secure as many resources as possible. In contrast, desire dopamine is the kid in the back seat shouting for his parents to “Look! Look!” every time he sees a McDonald’s, a toy store, or a puppy on the sidewalk. Control dopamine is the parent at the wheel, hearing each request and considering whether it’s worth stopping for—and deciding what to do if he pulls over. Control dopamine takes the excitement and motivation provided by desire dopamine, evaluates options, selects tools, and plots a strategy to get what it wants. (Page 93)
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Dopamine encourages us to maximize our resources by rewarding us when we do so—the act of doing something well, of making our future a better, safer place, gives us a little dopamine “buzz.” (Page 94)
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To bring an idea to fruition we must struggle with the uncompromising realities of the physical world. (Page 96)
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Manipulate hunger, or some other sensory experience, and you affect the value of the reward earned through work. But it’s dopamine that makes the work possible at all: no dopamine, no effort. (Page 98)
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The ability to put forth effort is dopaminergic. The quality of that effort can be influenced by any number of other factors, but without dopamine, there is no effort at all. (Page 99)
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A bacon-flavored Bioserve treat may be all it takes to motivate a rat, but humans are more complicated. We need to believe we can succeed before we are able to succeed. This influences tenacity. We have greater tenacity when we encounter early success. (Page 99)
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How does a confident expectation of success cause others to give way, even when it seems like it’s not in their interest to do so? It’s usually because of things that are happening outside of their conscious awareness. (Page 102)
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A relationship that is formed for the purpose of accomplishing a goal is called agentic, and it is orchestrated by dopamine. The other person acts as an extension of you, an agent who assists you in achieving your goal. (Page 108)
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Affiliative relationships, on the other hand, are for the purpose of enjoying social interactions. The simple pleasure of being with another person, experienced in the here and now, is associated with H& N neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphin, and endocannabinoids. (Page 108)
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Dopamine doesn’t come equipped with a conscience. Rather, it is a source of cunning fed by desire. When it’s revved up, it suppresses feelings of guilt, which is an H& N emotion. It is capable of inspiring honorable effort, but also deceit and even violence in pursuit of the things it wants. Dopamine pursues more, not morality; to dopamine, force and fraud are nothing more than tools. (Page 118)
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the dopamine surge triggered by winning leaves us wanting more. (Page 120)
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But true success doesn’t come from cheating. If you make a mistake, people will forgive you, but if you act dishonestly, it will stick with you for a long time. (Page 121)
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Violence is sometimes the result of dysfunction or pathology. But most of the time, violence is a choice—a coercive and calculated way to get the thing you want. Force, often expressed as violence, is the ultimate tool of domination, but is it dopaminergic? Violence comes in two flavors: planned violence inflicted for a purpose, and spontaneous violence set off by passion. Violence for a purpose, designed to get something the perpetrator desires, might be as prosaic as mugging someone on the street, or as earth-shattering as launching a global war. The emphasis in each case is on effective strategy, planned in advance, sometimes in excruciating detail, and always aimed at gaining resources or control. This is dopamine-driven aggression, and it tends to have a low emotional content. It is cold violence. (Page 123)
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Aggression driven by passion is a lashing out at provocation. This is not a calculated action orchestrated by the dopamine control circuit—just the opposite. When passion drives aggression in response to provocation, dopamine is suppressed by the H& N circuits, (Page 123)
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In complex situations, people who have what we call “a cool head,” people who are more dopaminergic, are able to suppress this response, and make more deliberate choices that often work better. (Page 126)
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When bold action is required in the midst of chaos, the one who can stay calm, take stock of available resources, and quickly develop a plan of action is the one who will pull through. (Page 126)
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Conventional wisdom would attribute his survival at sea to “running on adrenaline.” In fact, the opposite was true. He wasn’t running on adrenaline; he was running on dopamine. During the intense moments when he saved the boat, dopamine was in control and adrenaline (called norepinephrine when it is inside the brain) was suppressed. (Page 128)
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It’s almost as if there were two separate minds evaluating the situation. One mind is rational, making decisions based on reason alone. The other is empathic, unable to kill a man, regardless of the big-picture outcome. One seeks to dominate the situation by imposing control to maximize the number of lives saved; the other does not. Whether a person chooses one outcome or the other partly depends on activity within the dopamine circuits. (Page 132)
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The neurotransmitter dopamine is the source of desire (via the desire circuit) and tenacity (via the control circuit); the passion that points the way and the willpower that gets us there. Usually the two work together, but when desire fixates on things that will bring us harm in the long run—a third piece of cake, an extramarital affair, or an IV injection of heroin—dopaminergic willpower turns around, and does battle with its companion circuit. Willpower isn’t the only tool control dopamine has in its arsenal when it needs to oppose desire. It can also use planning, strategy, and abstraction, such as the ability to imagine the long-term consequences of alternate choices. But when we need to resist harmful urges, willpower is the tool we reach for first. As it turns out, that might not be such a good idea. Willpower can help an alcoholic say no to a drink once, but it’s probably not going to work if he has to say no over and over again for months or years. Willpower is like a muscle. It becomes fatigued with use, and after a fairly short period of time, it gives out. (Page 133)
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The participants who had been allowed to eat cookies worked on the problem for about 19 minutes. The ones who had been only allowed to eat radishes, those who had to exert self-control to counteract their desire for cookies, persisted at the task for only 8 minutes—less than half the time—before they gave up. The researchers concluded, “Resisting temptation seems to have produced a psychic cost, in the sense that afterward participants were more inclined to give up easily in the face of frustration.” (Page 135)
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Willpower is a limited resource. (Page 135)
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Even though it’s possible to strengthen willpower, it’s still not the answer to long-term, enduring change. (Page 137)
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None of these desires is able to provoke dopamine release the way drugs do, but desire not only gives us motivation to act; it also gives us patience to endure. (Page 138)
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MET therapists build up motivation by encouraging their patients to talk about their healthy desires. There’s an old saying: “We don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we say.” (Page 138)
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MET is a little manipulative. When the patient makes a statement the therapist likes, referred to as a pro-change statement, such as, “Sometimes I have trouble getting to work on time after a night of heavy drinking,” the therapist responds with positive reinforcement, or a request to “tell me more about that.” On the other hand, if the patient makes an anti-change statement, such as, “I work hard all day, and I deserve to relax in the evening with a few martinis,” the therapist doesn’t argue, because that would provoke more anti-change statements as the debate goes back and forth. Instead, she simply changes the subject. Patients usually don’t notice what’s going on, so the technique slips past their conscious defenses, and they spend the majority of the therapy hour making pro-change statements. (Page 138)
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It’s better to be smart than strong. Instead of trying to attack an addiction head on through willpower, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) uses the planning ability of control dopamine to defeat the raw power of desire dopamine. (Page 139)
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ADDICTION:  IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK Addictions are hard to treat, harder than many other psychiatric illnesses. With other illnesses, such as depression, patients want to get better—there’s no question about it. But if a person is addicted to a drug, he’s not so sure. He may share the sentiment expressed by Saint Augustine while he was carrying on an affair with a young woman. He prayed, Lord, give me chastity, but not yet. (Page 140)
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The social part of our brain makes connections with other people using H& N neurotransmitters. There are few things in this world as powerful as relationships. (Page 143)
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The H& N experience of guilt is a powerful motivator (Page 143)
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The dopamine system as a whole evolved to maximize future resources. In addition to desire and motivation, which get the ball rolling, we also possess a more sophisticated circuit that gives us the ability to think long term, make plans, and use abstract concepts such as math, reason, and logic. Looking into the longer-term future also gives us the tenacity we need to overcome challenges and accomplish things that take a long time, things like getting an education or flying to the moon. It also gives us the ability to tame the hedonistic urges of the desire circuit, suppressing immediate gratification to achieve something better. The control circuit suppresses H& N emotion, allowing us to think in a cold, rational way that’s often required when hard decisions need to be made, such as sacrificing the well-being of one person for the benefit of others. The control circuit can be crafty. Sometimes it charges straight ahead and dominates a situation through the power of confidence. Other times it leads to submissive behaviors that induce others to cooperate with us, multiplying our ability to get things done and reach our goals. Dopamine yields not just desire but also domination. It gives us the ability to bend the environment and even other people to our will. But dopamine can do more than give us dominion over the world: it can create entirely new worlds, worlds that may be so astonishing, they could have been created only by a genius—or a madman. (Page 144)
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Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.—William Plomer, writer (Page 149)
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The creative mind is the most potent force on earth. No oil well, gold mine, or thousand-acre farm can compete with the wealth-producing possibilities of a creative idea. Creativity is the brain at its best. Mental illness is the opposite. It reflects a brain struggling to manage even the most ordinary challenges of everyday life. Yet madness and genius, the worst and the best the brain can do, both depend on dopamine. Because of this basic chemical connection, madness and genius are more closely connected to each other than either is to the way ordinary brains work. (Page 150)
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Schizophrenia1 is a form of psychosis notable for the presence of hallucinations and delusions. Hallucinations can cause a person to see things that aren’t really there, feel their touch, even smell them. The most common type of hallucination is the auditory hallucination—hearing voices. (Page 152)
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Another component of psychosis is delusions. These are fixed beliefs that are inconsistent with the generally accepted view of reality, such as “Aliens have implanted a computer chip in my brain.” Delusions are held with absolute certainty, a level of certainty that is rarely experienced with nondelusional ideas. (Page 152)
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Things are salient if they have the potential to affect your future. Things are salient if they trigger desire dopamine. They broadcast the message, Wake up. Pay attention. Get excited. This is important. (Page 154)
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What happens, though, if the salience function of the brain malfunctions—if it goes off even when there is nothing happening that is actually important to you? Imagine you’re watching the news. The anchorman is talking about a government spying program, and suddenly your salience circuit fires for no reason at all. You might then believe that this story on the news has something to do with you. Too much salience, or any salience at all at the wrong time, can create delusions. The triggering event rises from obscurity to importance. (Page 155)
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Even people who have never been psychotic might learn to attach salience to things that appear unimportant to others, such as black cats or the number 13.2 (Page 155)
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We inhibit our ability to notice things that are unimportant so we don’t have to waste our attention on them. (Page 158)
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If you live next to a fire station, even the sounds of sirens will be inhibited after your dopamine circuits realize that nothing ever happens when they start to wail. (Page 158)
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We see milder forms of low latent inhibition in the creative arts. Here’s a simple example from the children’s classic, The House at Pooh Corner. Winnie-the-Pooh, who is a poet, recites some verse to his small friend Piglet about Tigger, a boisterous new arrival to the Hundred Acre Wood. Piglet is a timid animal, and he points out how big Tigger is. Pooh thinks about what Piglet said, then adds a final stanza to his poem. But whatever his weight in pounds, shillings, and ounces, He always seems bigger Because of his bounces. “And that’s the whole poem,” he said. “Do you like it, Piglet?” “All except the shillings,” said Piglet. “I don’t think they ought to be there.” “They wanted to come in after the pounds,” explained Pooh, “so I let them. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come.” (Page 160)
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There may be chaos inside our heads that requires taming by the more logical parts of the brain, but there is also treasure. Whether or not you find that “shillings” improves Pooh’s poem, one of the cardinal rules of creative writing is to turn off your inner censor when creating the first draft. If you’re lucky, things will tumble out from your unconscious that will resonate in the unconscious of your readers, and your story will strike deep. (Page 160)
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Like people with mental illness, creative people such as artists, poets, scientists, and mathematicians will, at times, experience their thoughts running free. Creative thinking requires people to let go of the conventional interpretations of the world in order to see things in a brand-new way. In other words, they must break apart their preconceived models of reality. But what is a model, and why do we build them? (Page 162)
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A WORLD BEYOND THE SENSES Material things, objects in the H& N peripersonal space, can be experienced with all five senses. As an object moves away from us, from the peripersonal H& N to the extrapersonal dopamine, our ability to perceive it drops off one sensory modality at a time. First taste goes, then touch. As the thing moves farther away we lose our ability to smell it, hear it, and finally to see it. That’s when things get interesting. How do we perceive something that is so far away that we can’t even see it? We use our imagination. (Page 162)
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Models contain only the elements of the environment that the model builder believes are essential. Other details are discarded. That makes the world easier to comprehend and, later, to imagine a variety of ways it might be manipulated for maximum benefit. (Page 163)
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This process is called mental time travel. Using imagination, we project ourselves into various possible futures, mentally experience them, then decide how we’re going to get the most out of what we see—how we’re going to maximize our resources, whether it’s a roomy seat, a cheap ticket, or a fast ride. Mental time travel is a powerful tool of the dopamine system. It allows us to experience a possible, though presently unreal, future as if we were there. Mental time travel depends on models because we make predictions regarding situations we haven’t yet experienced. (Page 164)
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Note: Constant
Mental time travel is in constant use because it’s the mechanism for making every conscious choice in life. (Page 164)
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As we gain experience with the world, we develop better and better models, and this is the basis of wisdom. (Page 167)
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Models are powerful tools, but they have disadvantages. They can lock us in to a particular way of thinking, causing us to miss out on opportunities to improve our world. (Page 168)
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It’s dopamine that builds models, and dopamine that breaks them apart. Both require us to think about things that don’t currently exist, but might in the future. (Page 168)
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Brain scans of people with schizophrenia show changes in that same area, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Maybe it’s because when we are being creative, we behave a little bit like a person with schizophrenia. We stop inhibiting aspects of reality that we had previously written off as unimportant, and we attach salience to things we once thought were irrelevant. (Page 169)
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Dreams are similar to abstract thought in that they work with material taken from the external world, but they arrange the material in ways that are unconstrained by physical reality. (Page 172)
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Dreams are highly visual. In her book The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—and How You Can Too, Dr. Barrett explains that just as Kekulé discovered the structure of benzene in a dreamlike state, ordinary people can use dreams to solve practical problems, too. (Page 176)
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DREAM INCUBATION: HOW TO  SOLVE PROBLEMS IN YOUR SLEEP Choose a problem that’s important to you, one that you have a strong desire to solve. The greater the desire, the more likely it is that the problem will show up in a dream. Think about the problem before you go to bed. If possible, put it in the form of a visual image. If it’s a problem with a relationship, imagine the person it involves. If you’re looking for inspiration, imagine a blank piece of paper. If you’re struggling with some sort of project, imagine an object that represents the project. Hold the image in your mind, so it’s the last thing you think of before you fall asleep. (Page 178)
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The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine. The poet composing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the physicist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the ability to look beyond the world of the senses into a deeper, more profound world of abstract ideas. (Page 180)
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The better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more likely you are to be an artist. (Page 180)
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Sometimes having lots of dopamine is a liability. High levels of dopamine suppress H& N functioning, so brilliant people are often poor at human relationships. We need H& N empathy to understand what’s going on in other people’s minds, an essential skill for social interaction. (Page 181)
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Now we see a third possibility: the creative genius—whether painter, poet, or physicist—who has so much trouble with human relationships that he may appear to be slightly autistic. 4 In addition, the dopaminergic genius is so focused on his internal world of ideas that he wears different-color socks, forgets to comb his hair, and generally neglects anything having to do with the real world of the here and now. (Page 182)
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Highly intelligent, highly successful, and highly creative people—typically, highly dopaminergic people—often express a strange sentiment: they are passionate about people but have little patience for them as individuals: (Page 183)
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Highly dopaminergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory experience. (Page 184)
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An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of over 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to belong to a national society of actors, dancers, musicians, visual artists, or writers. (Page 184)
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Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hidden messages in the Bible, and wrote over a million words on religion and the occult. He pursued the medieval art of alchemy, obsessively searching for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alchemists believed had magical properties and could even help humans achieve immortality. At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic and spent a year in an insane asylum. (Page 185)
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Dopamine gives us the power to create. It allows us to imagine the unreal and connect the seemingly unrelated. It allows us to build mental models of the world that transcend mere physical description, moving beyond sensory impressions to uncover the deeper meaning of what we experience. Then, like a child knocking over a tower of blocks, dopamine demolishes its own models so that we can start fresh and find new meaning in what was once familiar. But that power comes at a cost. The hyperactive dopamine systems of creative geniuses put them at risk of mental illness. Sometimes the world of the unreal breaks through its natural bounds, creating paranoia, delusions, and the feverish excitement of manic behavior. In addition, heightened dopaminergic activity may overwhelm H& N systems, hampering one’s ability to form human relationships and navigate the day-to-day world of reality. For some, it doesn’t matter. The joy of creation is the most intense joy they know, whether they are artists, scientists, prophets, or entrepreneurs. Whatever their calling, they never stop working. What they care about most is their passion for creation, discovery, or enlightenment. They never relax, never stop to enjoy the good things they have. Instead, they’re obsessed with building a future that never arrives. Because when the future becomes the present, enjoying it requires activation of “touchy-feely” H& N chemicals, and that’s something highly dopaminergic people dislike and avoid. They serve the public well. But no matter how rich, famous, or successful they become, they’re almost never happy, certainly never satisfied. Evolutionary forces that promote the survival of the species produce these special people. Nature drives them to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of bringing into the world new ideas and innovations that benefit the rest of us. (Page 185)
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In contrast to the arrow of progressivism, conservatism is better represented by a circle. (Page 195)
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ways. Most experts agree that an IQ test is not a measure of general intelligence. It more specifically measures the ability to make generalizations from incomplete data and to figure out new information using abstract rules. (Page 199)
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However, there are other ways to define intelligence, such as the ability to make good day-to-day decisions. For this type of mental activity emotions (H& N) are essential. (Page 199)
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Being in touch with our emotions and processing emotional information skillfully are crucial for almost every decision we make. Intellectual prowess is not enough. Everyone is familiar with the scientific genius or brilliant writer who is like a helpless child in real life because he lacks “common sense”—the ability to make good decisions. (Page 200)
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While conservatives on average may lack some of the virtuoso talents of the dopaminergic left, they are more likely to enjoy the advantages of a strong H& N system. These include empathy and altruism—particularly in the form of charitable giving—and the ability to establish long-term, monogamous relationships. (Page 203)
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dopaminergic people are more interested in action at a distance and planning, while people with high H& N levels tend to focus on things close at hand. (Page 203)
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There is even evidence that helping others slows down aging at the cellular level. Researchers in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University suggest that the benefits of altruism may derive from “deeper and more positive social integration, distraction from personal problems and the anxiety of self-preoccupation, enhanced meaning and purpose in life, and a more active lifestyle.” These are benefits that can’t be achieved by merely paying taxes. (Page 205)
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Dopaminergic people want the poor to receive more help, while H& N people want to provide personal help on a one-to-one basis. (Page 205)
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The preference for close, personal contact that leads conservatives to take a more hands-on approach to helping the poor also makes them more likely to establish long-term, monogamous relationships. (Page 206)
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If you’re highly dopaminergic—as writers, artists, and musicians tend to be—the most important part of sex probably occurs prior to the main event. It’s the conquest. When an imagined object of desire turns into a real person, when hope is replaced with possession, the role of dopamine comes to an end. The thrill is gone, and orgasm is anticlimactic. (Page 207)
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On the left there are the hippies who value sustainability and often frown on technology, preferring to live a life that’s deeply connected to the earth. They favor the experience of the here and now over the pursuit of what they do not have. They are the conservatives of the left, rejecting the progressive arrow in favor of the conservative circle. This complexity reminds us that when studying social trends, it’s important to be careful and to maintain an open mind. (Page 209)
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