The Molecule Of More - by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long
Published:
The Molecule Of More - by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long
Read: 2025-04-07
Recommend: 10/10
Kobe, Musk, Einstein, Jobs, Gates. Idea of meditation: H&N.
This book reminds me of many successful and unsatisfied (unhappy) people: Kobe Bryant, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. It also reminds me to keep up with my daily meditation so that I can be in the here and now (H&N).
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation. As human beings, we get a dopamine rush from similar, promising surprises: the arrival of a sweet note from your lover (What will it say?), an email message from a friend you haven’t seen in years (What’s the news going to be?), or, if you’re looking for romance, meeting a fascinating new partner at a sticky table in the same old bar (What might happen?). But when these things become regular events, their novelty fades, and so does the dopamine rush—and a sweeter note or a longer email or a better table won’t bring it back. This simple idea provides a chemical explanation for an age-old question: 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. 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.
Passion rises when we dream of a world of possibility, and fades when we are confronted by reality. When the god or goddess of love beckoning you to the boudoir becomes a sleepy spouse blowing his or her nose into a ratty Kleenex, the nature of love—the reason to stay—must change from dopaminergic dreams to . . . something else.
From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters.
Dopamine is one of the instigators of love, the source of the spark that sets off all that follows. But for love to continue beyond that stage, the nature of the love relationship has to change because the chemical symphony behind it changes. 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.
When the H&Ns take over in the second stage of love, dopamine is suppressed. It has to be because dopamine paints a picture in our minds of a rosy future in order to spur us on through the hard work necessary to make it a reality. 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.
A romance built on dopamine is a thrilling, if short-lived, roller coaster ride, but our brain chemistry gives us the tools to move down the path that leads to companionate love. Just as dopamine is the molecule of obsessive yearning, the chemicals most associated with long-term relationships are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is more active in women and vasopressin in men.
Dopamine responded not to reward, but to reward prediction error: the actual reward minus the expected reward. That’s why falling in love doesn’t last forever. When we fall in love, we look to a future made perfect by the presence of our beloved. It’s a future built on a fevered imagination that falls to pieces when reality reasserts itself twelve to eighteen months later. Then what? In many cases it’s over. The relationship comes to an end, and the search for a dopaminergic thrill begins all over again. Alternatively, the passionate love can be transformed into something more enduring. It can become companionate love, which may not thrill the way dopamine does, but has the power to deliver happiness—long-term happiness based on H&N neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and endorphin.
That’s the nature of dopamine. It’s always focused on acquiring more of everything with an eye toward providing for the future. Hunger is something that happens here and now, in the present. But dopamine says, “Go ahead and eat the donut, even if you’re not hungry. It will increase your chance of staying alive in the future. Who knows when food will be available next?” That made sense for our evolutionary ancestors, who lived most of their lives on the brink of starvation.
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. It constantly scans the environment for new sources of food, shelter, mating opportunities, and other resources that will keep our DNA replicating. When it finds something that’s potentially valuable, dopamine switches on, sending the message Wake up. Pay attention. This is important. It sends this message by creating the feeling of desire, and often excitement. The sensation of wanting is not a choice you make. It is a reaction to the things you encounter.
Wanting and liking are produced by two different systems in the brain, so we often don’t like the things we want.
Alan Leshner, the former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said that drugs “hijack” the desire circuit. They stimulate it far more intensely than natural rewards like food or sex, which affect the same brain-motivation system. That’s why food and sex addictions have so much in common with addiction to drugs. Brain circuits that evolved for the crucial purpose of keeping us alive are taken over by an addictive chemical, and repurposed to enslave the addict that gets caught in its net. Drug abuse is like cancer: it starts small but can quickly take over every aspect of a user’s life.
To an addict, drugs are more important. At least that’s the way it feels. That guided-missile dopamine blast overwhelms everything else. If making decisions is like weighing options on a balance, an addictive drug is an elephant sitting down on one side of the scale. Nothing else can compete. An addict chooses drugs over work, family, everything. You think he’s making irrational choices but his brain is telling him that his choices are perfectly logical.
Drugs are fundamentally different from natural dopamine triggers. When we’re starving, there’s nothing more motivating than getting food. But after we eat, the motivation for getting food declines because satiety circuits become active and shut down the desire circuit. There are checks and balances in place to keep everything stable. But there’s no satiety circuit for crack. Addicts take drugs until they pass out, get sick, or run out of money. If you ask an addict how much crack he wants, there is only one answer: more.
addictive drugs are so powerful that they bypass the complicated circuitry of surprise and prediction and artificially ignite the dopamine system. In this way, they scramble everything up. All that’s left is a gnawing craving for more.
That’s not to say that snorting cocaine isn’t dangerous and addictive, but there’s a way to make it even more dangerous and more addictive: smoking it. Smoking cocaine as crack makes the process more efficient. Unlike the nasal mucosa, the surface area of the lungs is huge. Filled with hundreds of millions of tiny air sacs, the surface area is equal to one side of a tennis court. There’s plenty of room there, and when the vaporized cocaine hits the lungs, it goes right into the bloodstream and up to the brain. It’s a steep slope—a sudden burst—and a big hit to the dopamine system.
The link between a rapidly rising blood level and dopamine release is also why addicts progress to injecting drugs into their veins. Other routes of administration no longer give them the thrill they’re after. Injecting drugs is scary, though, and is a clear sign of an addict, so the stigma and fear of the needle may stop many of them from progressing further. Unfortunately, smoking gets the drug into the brain about as fast as intravenous injection. Smoking also lacks the stigma associated with needles. As a result, many would-be casual users of cocaine progress to life-destroying addiction. The same thing happened with methamphetamine when it became available in smokable form.
Desire dopamine overpowers the more rational parts of the brain. We make choices that we know are not in our best interest, but we feel powerless to resist. It’s as if our free will has been compromised by an overwhelming urge for immediate pleasure; perhaps it’s a bag of potato chips when we’re on a diet, or splurging on an expensive night out that we can’t really afford.
We’ve all seen “quit smoking” advertisements on buses and subways. They don’t work. We’ve heard about school programs that teach kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. In many cases drug and alcohol use go up after these programs because they pique the curiosity of the adolescent students. The only thing that has been shown to work consistently is raising taxes on these products and placing limits on where and when they can be sold. When these measures are taken, use goes down.
When they were shown a new video, their dopamine systems revved up again. This experience of a dopamine rush, followed by a dopamine drop (repeated images), followed by another dopamine rush (new images), pushes addicts to continually seek out fresh material, which may explain why browsing internet sex sites can become compulsive. It’s hard to resist the demands of dopamine circuits, especially with something as evolutionarily important as sex.
psychologist Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University found that nearly one in ten gamers ages eight to eighteen are addicted, causing family, social, school, or psychological damage because of their video game playing habits—a rate of addiction more than five times higher than that among gamblers, according to the National Research Council on Pathological Gambling.
It’s natural to confuse wanting and liking. It seems obvious that we would want the things that we will like having. That’s how it would work if we were rational creatures, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we persist in thinking that we are rational creatures. But we’re not. Frequently we want things that we don’t like. Our desires can lead us toward things that may destroy our lives, such as drugs, gambling, and other out-of-control behaviors.
the dopamine control circuit involves the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that is sometimes called the neocortex because it evolved most recently. It’s what makes human beings unique. It gives us the imagination to project ourselves further into the future than the desire circuit can take us, so we can make long-term plans. It’s also the part that allows us to maximize resources in that future by creating new tools and using abstract concepts; concepts that rise above the here-and-now experience of the senses, like language, mathematics, and science. It’s intensely rational.
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. Some weight-loss programs help you lose six or seven pounds in the first few weeks. They plan it this way because they know that if you begin with no more than a pound or two loss in that time, you are likely to drop out. They know you are more likely to stick with it if you see that you are capable of doing it. Scientists call this self-efficacy. Drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine boost dopamine, and one result is an increase in self-efficacy, often to pathological levels. People who abuse these drugs may confidently take on so many projects that it is impossible to complete them all.
Just as desire dopamine facilitates becoming addicted to drugs—chasing the high and receiving less and less dopamine “buzz” from it—some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement, but are unable to experience H&N fulfillment. Think of people you know who work relentlessly toward their goals but never stop to enjoy the fruits of their achievements. They don’t even brag about them. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.
These individuals exhibit the effects of an imbalance between future-focused dopamine and present-focused H&N neurotransmitters. They flee the emotional and sensory experiences of the present. For them, life is about the future, about improvement, about innovation. Despite the money and even fame that comes from their efforts, they are usually unhappy. No matter how much they do, it’s never enough. The family crest of James Bond, the resourceful, relentless, often ruthless secret agent, contains the motto Orbit Non Sufficit: The World Is Not Enough. Colonel Aldrin faced this problem in a more profound way than perhaps any human being ever had: I have walked on the surface of the moon. What could I possibly do to top that?
people whose control dopamine circuits are weak? Their struggle with internal control manifests itself as impulsivity and difficulty keeping themselves focused on complex tasks. This problem can result in a familiar condition: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Poor focus, concentration, and impulse control can severely interfere with their lives, and it can make them difficult to be with.
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.
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.
AA participants freely hand out their phone numbers so that struggling alcoholics have people to call for support and encouragement. If an AA member slips and experiences a relapse, no one condemns him, but he will inevitably feel like he has let them down. The H&N experience of guilt is a powerful motivator (as your mother knows). The combination of emotional support and the threat of guilt helps many addicts maintain a long-lasting sobriety.
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. Make sure you have a pen and paper next to your bed. As soon as you wake up from a dream, write it down, whether or not you think it’s related to the problem. Dreams can be tricky, and the answer may be disguised. It’s important to write down the dream immediately because the memory will evaporate in seconds if you begin to think about something else. Many people have had the experience of waking up from an intense dream, one that’s overflowing with personal meaning, and then being unable to recall any of the details less than a minute later.
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. Elite societies of scientists are filled with artistic souls. Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are one and a half times more likely to have an artistic hobby compared to the rest of us. Members of the U.K. Royal Society are about twice as likely, and Nobel Prize winners are almost three times as likely. The better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more likely you are to be an artist.
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. The scientist you meet at the cocktail party won’t shut up about his research because he can’t tell how bored you are. In a similar vein, Albert Einstein once said, “My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings.” And “I love Humanity but I hate humans.” The abstract concepts of social justice and humanity came easily, but the concrete experience of encountering another person was too hard. Einstein’s personal life reflected his difficulties with relationships. He was far more interested in science than people. Two years before he and his wife separated, he began an affair with his cousin, and eventually married her. Once again, he was unfaithful, cheating on his cousin with his secretary and possibly a half-dozen other girlfriends as well. His dopaminergic mind was both a blessing and a curse—the elevated levels of dopamine that allowed him to discover relativity was most likely the same dopamine that drove him from relationship to relationship, never allowing him to make the switch to H&N-focused, long-term companionate love.
They’re overly focused on maximizing future resources at the expense of appreciating the here and now. The pleasure seeker always wants more. No matter how much he gets, it’s never enough. No matter how much he looks forward to some promised pleasure, he is incapable of finding satisfaction in it. As soon as it comes he turns his attention to what’s next. The detached planner also has a future/present imbalance. Like the pleasure seeker he also has a constant need for more, but he takes a long-term view, chasing more abstract forms of gratification such as honor, wealth, and power. The genius lives in the world of the unknown, the not yet discovered, obsessed with making the future a better place through her work. Geniuses change the world—but their obsession often presents itself as indifference toward others.
I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand.
Highly dopaminergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory experience. To them, the difference between loving humanity and loving your neighbor is the difference between loving the idea of a puppy and taking care of it.
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.
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.
Many of the problems actors face are dopaminergic in nature. A 2016 study of Australian actors found that despite “feelings of personal growth and a sense of purpose in the actors’ work,” they were highly vulnerable to mental illness. The actors identified a number of key issues including “problems with autonomy, lack of environmental mastery, complex interpersonal relationships and high self-criticism.” These are challenges that would be most difficult for highly dopaminergic individuals, who need to feel in control of their environment and often have difficulty navigating complex human relationships.
One might conceptualize the extraordinary brain as being similar to a high-performance sports car. It’s capable of doing incredible things, but it breaks down easily. Dopamine drives intelligence, creativity, and hard work, but it can also make people behave in bizarre ways.
Cocaine blocks the dopamine transporter like a sock shoved into a vacuum cleaner nozzle. The blockage allows the dopamine to interact with its receptor over and over again. When that happens, people experience increased energy, goal-directed activity, and sexual drive. They have elevated self-esteem, euphoria, and racing thoughts that jump from one topic to another. Cocaine intoxication is so similar to mania that doctors have trouble telling them apart.
Dopamine-producing cells make up 0.0005 percent of the brain. That’s a tiny fraction of the cells we use to navigate our world. And yet, when we think about who we are in the deepest sense, we think about that tiny cluster of cells. We identify with our dopamine. In our minds, we are dopamine.
What else do we neglect when we identify our core being with our dopamine circuits? We neglect emotion, empathy, the joy of being with people we care about. 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. A Harvard study that’s been going on for seventy-four years has found that social isolation (even in the absence of feelings of loneliness) is associated with a 50 to 90 percent higher risk of early death. That’s about the same as smoking, and higher than obesity or lack of exercise. Our brain needs affiliative relationships just to stay alive.
Identifying ourselves with our dopamine circuits traps us in a world of speculation and possibility. The concrete world of here and now is disdained, ignored, or even feared, because we can’t control it. We can only control the future, and giving up control is not something dopaminergic creatures like to do. But none of it is real. Even a future one second away is unreal. It is only the stark facts of the present that are real, facts that must be accepted exactly as they are, facts that cannot be modified by a hair’s breadth to suit our needs. This is the world of reality. The future, where dopaminergic creatures live their lives, is a world of phantoms. Our worlds of fantasy can become narcissistic havens where we are powerful, beautiful, and adored. Or perhaps they’re worlds where we are in total control of our environment the way a digital artist controls every pixel on his screen. As we glide through the real world, half blind, caring only about things we can put to use, we trade the deep oceans of reality for the shallow rapids of our never-ending desires. And in the end, it might annihilate us.
When the human race lived in scarcity and on the brink of extinction, the drive for more kept us alive. Dopamine was the engine of progress. It helped lift our evolutionary ancestors out of subsistence living. By giving us the ability to create tools, invent abstract sciences, and plan far into the future, it made us the dominant species on the planet. But in an environment of plenty in which we have mastered our world and developed sophisticated technology—in a time when more is no longer a matter of survival—dopamine continues to drive us forward, perhaps to our own destruction.
There’s only one thing that will save us: the ability to achieve a better balance, to overcome our obsession with more, appreciate the unlimited complexity of reality, and learn to enjoy the things we have.
Paying attention to reality, to what you are actually doing in the moment, maximizes the flow of information into your brain. It maximizes dopamine’s ability to make new plans, because to build models that will accurately predict the future, dopamine needs data, and data flows from the senses. That’s dopamine and H&N working together.
By spending time in the present, we take in sensory information about the reality we live in, allowing the dopamine system to use that information to develop reward-maximizing plans. The impressions that we absorb have the potential to inspire a flurry of new ideas, enhancing our ability to find new solutions to the problems we face. And that’s a wonderful thing. Creating something new, something that has never been conceived of before is, by definition, surprising. Because it is always new, creation is the most durable of the dopaminergic pleasures.
Cooking, gardening, and playing sports are among many activities that combine intellectual stimulation with physical activity in a way that will satisfy us and make us whole. These activities can be pursued for a lifetime without becoming stale.
Our dopamine circuits are what make us human. They are what give our species its special power. We think. We plan. We imagine. We elevate our thoughts to ponder abstract concepts such as truth, justice, and beauty. Within those circuits we transcend all barriers of space and time. We thrive in the most hostile environments—even in outer space—thanks to our ability to dominate the world around us. But these same circuits can also lead us down a darker path, a path of addiction, betrayal, and misery. If we aim to be great, we will probably have to accept the fact that misery will be a part of it. It’s the goad of dissatisfaction that keeps us at our work while others are enjoying the company of family and friends. But those of us who prefer a life of happy fulfillment have a different task to accomplish: the task of finding harmony. We have to overcome the seduction of endless dopaminergic stimulation and turn our backs on our never-ending hunger for more. If we are able to intermingle dopamine with H&N, we can achieve that harmony. All dopamine all the time is not the path to the best possible future. It’s sensory reality and abstract thought working together that unlocks the brain’s full potential. Operating at its peak performance, it becomes capable of producing not only happiness and satisfaction, not only wealth and knowledge, but a rich mixture of sensory experience and wise understanding, a mixture that can set us down the path toward a more balanced way of being human.