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

From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. 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.

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.

Nicotine, in fact, is an unusual drug because it does very little except trigger compulsive use. According to researcher Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “When you give people nicotine for the first time, most people don’t like it. It’s different from many other addictive drugs, for which most people say they enjoy the first experience and would try it again.” Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. 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 feelings of excitement, enthusiasm, and energy dissipate. Dopamine has shut down. 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. “What will we do tomorrow?” they ask themselves as they chew their food, oblivious to the fact that they’re not even noticing this meal they had so eagerly anticipated. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive is the motto of the dopamine enthusiast.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

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.

Giving in to craving doesn’t necessarily lead to pleasure because wanting is different from liking. Dopamine makes promises that it is in no position to keep. “If you buy these shoes, your life will change,” says the desire circuit, and it just might happen, but not because dopamine made you feel it.

Winners cheat for the same reason that drug addicts take drugs. The rush feels great, and withdrawal feels terrible. Both know that their behavior has the potential to destroy their lives, but the desire circuit doesn’t care. It only wants more.

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.

overweight children are more likely to be hit by cars when they’re crossing the street. It’s not because they walk more slowly; it’s because they’re impulsive.

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 human communities". 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.

People who live with ADHD are at high risk of addiction, especially adolescents, because of their poorly functioning frontal lobes. Years ago, when the illness was less well understood, doctors and parents were reluctant to give these vulnerable children addictive drugs such as Ritalin and amphetamine. It sounded reasonable: don’t give addictive substances to people at risk for addiction. But rigorous testing showed unambiguously that adolescents who were treated with stimulant drugs were less likely to develop addictions. In fact, those who started the drug at the youngest age and took the highest doses were the least likely to develop problems with illicit drugs. Here’s why: if you strengthen the dopamine control circuit, it’s a lot easier to make wise decisions. On the other hand, if effective treatment is withheld, the weakness of the control circuit is not corrected. The desire circuit acts unopposed, increasing the likelihood of high-risk, pleasure-seeking behavior.

It’s not enough to just imagine the future. To bring an idea to fruition we must struggle with the uncompromising realities of the physical world. We need not only knowledge but also tenacity.

Instead of taking a bow for walking on the moon, Colonel Buzz Aldrin, PhD, told his admirers, “It’s something we did. Now we should do something else,” apparently no more satisfied than if he had painted a fence. His desire was not to bask in his glory but to find “something else”—the next big challenge that could hold his interest. This perpetual need to identify a goal and calculate a way to reach it was perhaps the most important factor in his historic success. But it’s not easy having so much dopamine coursing through the control circuits. It almost certainly played a significant role in Aldrin’s post-lunar struggle with depression, alcoholism, three divorces, suicidal impulses, and a stay on a psychiatric ward, which he described in his candid autobiography, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon.

There are few things we encounter in daily life that are more unlikely than winning the lottery. A person is more likely to have identical quadruplets, or be killed by a vending machine tipping over. It’s over a hundred times more likely that a person will be struck by lightning than win the lottery. Yet millions of people buy tickets.

One cool judgment is worth a dozen hasty councils.

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.

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.

From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. 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.

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.

From an evolutionary standpoint, food that you don’t have is critically different from food that you do have. It’s the same for water, shelter, and tools. The division is so fundamental that separate pathways and chemicals evolved in the brain to handle peripersonal and extrapersonal space. When you look down, you look into the peripersonal space, and for that the brain is controlled by a host of chemicals concerned with experience in the here and now. But when the brain is engaged with the extrapersonal space, one chemical exercises more control than all the others, the chemical associated with anticipation and possibility: dopamine. Things in the distance, things we don’t have yet, cannot be used or consumed, only desired. Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.

There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein’s dopaminergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally recognized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large population studies have also found a genetic component of a dopaminergic character. 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.

Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it. —Kelly McGonigal, Lecturer in Management, Stanford School of Business

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?

The dopamine desire circuit is powerful. It focuses attention, motivates, and thrills. It has a profound influence over the choices we make. Yet it isn’t all-powerful. Addicts get clean. Dieters lose weight. Sometimes we switch off the TV, get off the couch, and go for a run. 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.

Models are imaginary representations of the world that we build in order to better understand it. In some ways model building is like latent inhibition. Models contain only the elements of the environment that the model builder believes are essential. Other details are discarded.

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.

We also lose the pleasure of the sensory world around us. Instead of enjoying the beauty of a flower, we imagine only how it would look in a vase on our kitchen table. Instead of smelling the morning air and looking at the sky, we consult the weather app on our smartphone, neck bent, oblivious to the world around us.

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.

The ability to draw a connection between two things that had previously appeared to be unrelated is an important part of creativity, and it appears that it can be enhanced by electrical stimulation. Compared to participants who were given fake tDCS, those who got electricity created more unusual analogies—that is, analogies between things that seemed very unlike one another. Nevertheless, these highly creative analogies were just as accurate as the more obvious ones created by the participants whose devices were secretly turned off. Dopaminergic drugs can do the same thing. Although some patients who take dopaminergic drugs for Parkinson’s disease develop devastating compulsions, others experience enhanced creativity. One patient who came from a family of poets had never done any creative writing. After starting dopamine-boosting drugs for his Parkinson’s disease, he wrote a poem that won the annual contest of the International Association of Poets. Painters treated with Parkinson’s medication often increase their use of vivid color. One patient who developed a new style after being treated said, “The new style is less precise but more vibrant. I have a need to express myself more. I just let myself go.” Just like Winnie-the-Pooh: “It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come.