The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity--and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Lieberman, Daniel Z.; Long, Michael E. (2%)

It was the beginning of the end for dopamine as the pleasure molecule. Dopamine, they discovered, isn’t about pleasure at all. Dopamine delivers a feeling much more influential.
From that, a new hypothesis arose: dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.
Our brains are programmed to crave the unexpected and thus to look to the future, where every exciting possibility begins.
Pettigrew found that the brain manages the external world by dividing it into separate regions, the peripersonal and the extrapersonal—basically, near and far.
And finding love takes a different set of skills than making love stay. Love must shift from an extrapersonal experience to a peripersonal one—from pursuit to possession; from something we anticipate to something we have to take care of.
only things that are out of reach can be glamorous; only things that are unreal. Glamour is a lie.
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).
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,
The philosopher Aristotle played this same game, but with a more serious purpose. He looked at all the things we do for the sake of something else and wondered if there was an end to it all. Why do you go to work, really? Why do you need to make money? Why do you have to pay bills? Why do you want the electricity to stay on? Where does it end? Is there anything we seek for itself only, not because it leads to something else? Aristotle decided there was. He decided there was a single thing that lay at the end of every string of Whys, and its name was Happiness.
When faced with a range of options, we choose the one that leads to the most happiness. Except we don’t.
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 (
Although craving never stops as long as an addict keeps using drugs, the brain gradually loses its ability to deliver the high—the desire circuit simply reacts less and less, so much so that they might as well replace the drug with salt water.
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.
the dopamine desire system is powerful and highly influential in the brain, whereas the liking circuit is tiny, fragile, and much harder to trigger.
The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.
The enhanced dopamine circuit boosted impulsive behavior, but not satisfaction—it boosted the wanting, but not the liking.
In fact, the most effective way to reduce the problems caused by these substances is to make it more difficult to get them.
What kind of circuit in the brain is powerful enough to oppose dopamine? Dopamine is. Dopamine opposing dopamine. The circuit that opposes the desire circuit might be called the dopamine control circuit.
In addition, the dopamine control circuit is the source of imagination. It lets us peer into the future to see the consequences of decisions we might make right now, and thus allows us to choose which future we prefer. Finally, it gives us the ability to plan how to make that imaginary future a reality.
Agentic people tend to be cool and distant. Affiliative people are affectionate and warm.
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.
The detachment test measured traits such as the tendency to avoid sharing personal information and to become involved with other people. The scientists found a direct relationship between receptor density and personal engagement. High density was associated with a high level of emotional detachment.
Since balance is essential, the brain often wires circuits in opposition.
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.
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.”
the therapist responds with positive reinforcement, or a request to “tell me more about that.”
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.
Salience refers to the degree to which things are important, prominent, or conspicuous.
Things are salient when they are important to you, if they have the potential to impact your well-being, for good or for evil. Things are salient if they have the potential to affect your future. Things are salient if they trigger desire dopamine.
In schizophrenia the brain short-circuits, attaching salience to ordinary things that ought to be familiar and therefore ignored. Another name for this is low latent inhibition.
Someone visiting your home might say, “What’s that sound?” And you answer, “What sound?”
It would be paralyzing if I had to do that with every car I encountered. Based on my experience with real cars, I built a model of an abstract car. If a car I’ve never seen before fits the general outlines of my abstract conception, I can quickly classify it and know that it’s made for driving.
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.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a series of cards showing ambiguous, sometimes emotionally charged pictures of people in various situations.
Many people have had the experience of waking from a dream, feeling as if they were caught between two worlds. Thinking is more fluid, making leaps from topic to topic, unconstrained by the rules of logic. In fact, some people report that they experience their most creative thoughts in this crack between the two worlds. The H&N filter that focuses our attention on the external world of the senses has not yet been reengaged; dopamine circuits continue to fire unopposed, and ideas flow freely.
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,
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.
It may be unseemly but it is explainable. Highly dopaminergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory experience.
collection of personality features—what psychiatrists call a personality constellation—called P. The
But do dopaminergic people really tend to support liberal policies? It seems that the answer is yes. Liberals often refer to themselves as progressives, a term that implies constant improvement. Progressives embrace change. They imagine a better future and in some cases even believe that the right combination of technology and public policy can eliminate fundamental problems of the human condition
The word conservative, on the other hand, implies maintaining the best of what we have inherited from those who came before us. Conservatives are often suspicious of change. They don’t like experts who try to advance civilization by telling them what to do, even when it’s in their own best interest;
You’re more likely to find a communist than a conservative in academia.
When circumstances change, liberals do a better job of rapidly activating neural circuits and adjusting their responses to meet the new challenge.
Another way of saying it is that an IQ test measures a person’s ability to build imaginary models based on past experiences, and then use those models to predict what will happen in the future.
A high score on an IQ test may be a good predictor of academic success, but for a happy life, emotional sophistication may be more important.
One of the variants of the D4 gene is called 7R. People who have the 7R variant tend to be novelty-seeking. They have less tolerance for monotony and pursue whatever is new or unusual. They can be impulsive, exploratory, fickle, excitable, quick-tempered, and extravagant. On the other hand, people with low novelty-seeking personalities are more likely to be reflective, rigid, loyal, stoic, slow-tempered, and frugal.
Altruism has been associated with greater well-being, health, and longevity. There is even evidence that helping others slows down aging at the cellular level.
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.
Irrationality is more enduring, and both desire dopamine and the H&N pathways can be taken advantage of to guide people toward making irrational decisions. The most effective tools are fear, desire, and sympathy.
The healthcare story is more pertinent to our lives, but the work of processing that story is no match for the easy pleasure of those dopamine hits. Control dopamine could push back, but it is invariably overpowered by the flood of whatever is new and shiny, and such things are the currency of the Internet. Where will this lead? Probably not to a renaissance of long-form journalism.
Every time a participant lost a bet, their amygdala fired up, intensifying feelings of distress. It was H&N emotion that was driving loss aversion. The H&N system doesn’t care about the future. It doesn’t care about things we might get. It cares about what we have right now.
Does that explain me? Low dopamine ? High other ?
When these individuals were presented with wagers, they attached equal weight to gain and loss. Without the amygdala, loss aversion vanished.
Fear, like desire, is primarily a future concept—dopamine’s realm. But the H&N system gives a boost to the pain of loss in the form of amygdala activation, tipping our judgment when we have to make decisions about the best way to manage risk.
Liberals had a stronger response to the positive photos, conservatives to the negative ones. Because the researchers were measuring a biological reaction—perspiration—the response couldn’t have been intentionally controlled by the participants. Something more fundamental than rational choice was being measured.
Using drugs to influence these decisions has the unsettling name of neurochemical modulation of moral judgment.
But what happens when the immigrants actually show up—when they change from an idea to a reality, from distant and abstract to right next door?
Conservatives appear to be the opposite. They want to exclude illegal immigrants from this country in order to prevent what they fear will be a fundamental transformation of their culture. However, harm aversion motivates them to take care of the ones who are here.
Abstract thinking is one of the primary functions of the dopamine system. Abstract thinking allows us to go beyond sensory observation of events to construct a model that explains why the events are occurring. A description that relies on the senses focuses on the physical world: things that actually exist. The technical term for this type of thinking is concrete. That’s an H&N function, and scientists call it low-level thinking.
The important thing to remember is that liberals want to help people become better, conservatives want to let people be happy, and politicians want power.
Bad changes may cause more stress than good changes, but the most important factor is the size of the change. Bigger change means more stress.
hyperthymic temperaments are upbeat, exuberant, jocular, overoptimistic, overconfident, boastful, and full of energy and plans. They are versatile with broad interests, overinvolved and meddlesome, uninhibited and risk-taking, and they generally don’t sleep very much. They become overly enthusiastic about new directions in their lives, such as diets, romantic partners, business opportunities, even religions, and then quickly lose interest. They often accomplish a great deal, but they can be difficult to live with.
If we ignore our emotions, lose touch with them, they become less sophisticated over time, and may devolve into anger, greed, and resentment. If we neglect empathy, we lose the ability to make others feel happy. And if we neglect affiliative relationships, we will most likely lose the ability to be happy ourselves—and probably die early.
in a time when more is no longer a matter of survival—dopamine continues to drive us forward, perhaps to our own destruction.
Too much dopamine can lead to productive misery, while too much H&N can lead to happy indolence:
When mastery is achieved, dopamine has reached the pinnacle of its aspiration—squeezing every last drop out of an available resource. This is what it’s all about. This is the moment to savor—now, in the present. Mastery is the point at which dopamine bows to H&N. Having done all it can do, dopamine pauses, and allows H&N to have its way with our happiness circuits.
What dopamine loves more than anything else is reward prediction error, which, as we have discussed, is the discovery that something is better than we had anticipated it would be. Paradoxically, dopamine does everything in its power to avoid such incorrect forecasts. Reward prediction error feels great because your dopamine circuits get excited over the fact that there is something new and unexpected to make your life better. But being surprised by an unexpected new resource means the resource isn’t being fully exploited. So dopamine makes sure the surprise that felt so good will never be a surprise again. Dopamine extinguishes its own pleasure.
Experiencing H&N sensory stimulation, especially within a complex environment (sometimes called an enriched environment), makes the dopaminergic cognitive facilities in our brains work better. The most complex environments, those that are most enriched, are usually natural ones.
When they looked at happiness, they found that people were less happy when their mind was wandering, and once again, it didn’t matter what the activity was. Whether they were eating, working, watching TV, or socializing, they were happier if they were paying attention to what they were doing. They researchers concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
Creativity is different because it stirs together H&N with dopamine. It’s like mixing little bit of carbon with iron to make steel. The result is stronger and more durable. That’s what happens to dopaminergic pleasure when you add physical H&N. But most people don’t bother to engage in acts of creation, like drawing pictures, making music, or building model airplanes. There’s no practical reason to do these things. They’re hard, at least in the beginning, and they probably won’t earn us money or prestige or guarantee us a better future. But they might make us happy.

ciwchris / books

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity--and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Lieberman, Daniel Z.; Long, Michael E. (2%) #2