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Daniel Z. Lieberman, Michael E. Long: The Molecule of More

Up versus down

Look down. What do you see? These are things that you can touch. Now look up. What do you see? To reach them, you have to plan, think, calculate. This two distinction for your brain are two wildly different ways of thinking.

In your brain the down world is managed by a handful of chemicals – neurotransmitters. When you turn to up world, your brain relies on a different chemical – a single molecule.

The down chemicals are here & now chemicals (H&N). They allow you to experience what is in front of you. The up chemical makes you desire what you don’t yet have. It is the source of creativity and the key to the addiction. This is dopamine.

Love

Dopamine was discovered in the brain in 1957 by Kathleen Montagu. Some scientists christened dopamine the pleasure molecule, and the pathways that dopamine-producing cells take through the brain was named the reward circuit.

Wolfram Schultz is among the most influential pioneers of dopamine experimentation. A new hypothesis arose. Dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected – to possibility and anticipation. When things become regular events, their novelty fades, and so does the dopamine rush.

The scientists who studied the phenomenon of why new things excite us; they called it reward prediction error. When what happens is better than what we expected, it is literally an error in our forecast of the future.

Dopaminergic excitement doesn’t last forever, because eventually the future becomes the present.

Passion rises when we dream of a world of possibility, and fades when we are confronted by reality.

When it comes to lover, 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.

From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. The dopamine motto is “more”.

Dopamine is not a pleasure molecule; it is an anticipation molecule.

Sex is love on fast forward. It is ironic that brain circuit 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.

When it comes to love, dopamine is a place to begin, not to finish.

Drugs

There’s a big difference between wanting something and liking it.

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.

Dopamine urges you to posses and accumulate anything that might help keep you alive.

Dopamine turns on the imagination, producing visions of a rosy future. Dopamine circuits don’t process experience in the real world, only imaginary future possibilities.

The transition from excitement to enjoyment can be challenging.

The ability to trigger dopamine in the desire circuit is what makes a drug addictive. Not all drugs trigger dopamine to the same degree.

When it comes to addiction, easy access matters.

It is the frontal lobes that give adults good judgment.

The circuit that opposes the desire circuit might be called the dopamine control circuit.

Emotions are an H&N phenomenon.

Domination

Just wanting rarely gets you much of anything.

Dopamine moving through different brain circuits yields different functions, too, and toward a common end: a relentless focus on enhancing the future.

Urges come from dopamine passing through the mesolimbic circuit, which we call the dopamine desire circuit. Calculation and planning – the means of dominating situations – come from the mesocortical circuit, which we will call the dopamine control circuit.

Control dopamine takes the excitement and motivation provided by desire dopamine, evaluates options, select tools, and plots strategy to get what it wants.

Dopamine encourages us to maximize our resources by rewarding us when we do so. It is the dopamine that makes the work possible. No dopamine, no effort. The ability to put effort is dopaminergic.

Hunger is an H&N phenomenon, an immediate experience, not an anticipatory dopamine-driven one.

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 assist you in achieving your goal. Affiliative relationships, on the other hand, are for the purpose of enjoying social interaction. Most relationships have both affiliative and agentic elements. Some people are comfortable with both, others with neither.

Agentic people tend to be cool and distant. Affiliative people are affectionate and warm.

Agentic relationships are established for the purpose of dominating one’s environment to extract as much as possible from the available resources, the domain of control dopamine.

Some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement, but are unable to experience H&N fulfillment.

On the other spectrum of control dopamine are ADHD people. They are at high risk of addiction.

Biology is not destiny.

Dopamine doesn’t come equipped with a conscience. Winning competition releases dopamine. Winners cheat for the same reason that drug addicts take drugs. The rush feels great, and withdrawal feels terrible.

Winning competitions, along with eating and having sex, is essential for evolutionary success. Winning is never enough. Nothing is ever enough for dopamine.

Violence comes in two flavors: planned violence inflicted for a purpose, and spontaneous violence set off by passion.

Emotions is almost always a liability that interferes with calculated action. Emotions are an H&N experience. When passion drives aggression in response to provocation, dopamine is suppressed by the H&N circuits, and people who display this type of aggression usually degrade their future well-being.

A dopaminergic personality have one thing in common. They are obsessed with making the future more rewarding at the expense of being able to experience the joys of the present.

Some people are better at suppressing emotions. Scientists find correlation between density of dopamine receptors and ability to suppress emotions or personal engagement.

Dopamine control circuits and H&N circuits work in opposition, creating a balance that allows us to be humane toward others, while safeguarding our own survival. 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 alternat choices. Willpower is like a muscle. It becomes fatigued with use, and after a fairly short period of time, it gives out.

Even though it’s possible to strengthen willpower, it’s still not the answer to long-term, enduring change. So what does work? We have many different forms of psychotherapy for fighting drugs. The best are: motivational enhancement therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and twelve-step facilitation therapy.

In MET (motivational enhancement) patients tolerate feeling resentful and deprived, the punishment of disappointed dopamine, because they know it will lead to something better. CBT (cognitive behavioral) uses planning ability to control dopamine to defeat the raw power of desire dopamine.

Creativity and madness

The creative mind is the most potent force on earth.

Schizophrenia is a form of psychosis notable for the presence of hallucinations and delusions.

Salience refers to the degree to which things are important, prominent, or conspicuous. One kind of salience is the quality of being unusual. Different things are salient to different people.

Things are salient when they are important to you. Things are salient if they have the potential to affect your future. Things are salient to you if they trigger desire dopamine.

Brain cells have different receptors for different neurotransmitters, and each one affects the cell in a different way. If something blocks a receptor, such as an antipsychotic medication, then the neurotransmitter can’t get at it, and it can’t communicate its signal.

With one thought rapidly taking the place of another, and a limited ability to hold the thoughts back, expression becomes highly disorganized. A less severe form of this type of jumping around is called tangentiality.

Material things, objects int the H&N peripersonal space, can be experienced with all five senses. Our ability to sense things when we move away from personal space drops off one sensory modality at a time. First taste goes, then touch, then smell, hear and at last we cannot see things.

Models simplify our world and enable us to abstract. Models can be helpful when we need to choose among a number of different options.

How well our models fit the real world is of great importance.

Models are powerful tools, but they can look us into a particular way of thinking.

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.

Dreams often contain the theme of up, such as flying or failing from a great height. Dreams often involve future themes. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Dreams are brief madness and madness a long dream.”[1] Dopamine is unleashed during dreaming, freed from the restraining influence of the reality-focused H&N neurotransmitters.

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. Albert Einstein: “I love humanity, but I hate humans.”[2]

Some of the dopaminergic personalities:

  • The impulsive pleasure-seeker.
  • The detached planner.
  • The creative genius.

The genius lives in the world of the unknown, the not yet discovered, obsessed with making the future a better place through his/her work.

Highly dopaminergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory experience.

Politics

A collection of personality features – a personality constellation – is called P. People with low P scores are more likely to be altruistic, well socialized, empathic and conventional. People with high P scores are manipulative, tough-minded, practical. High P factors are a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia. Dopamine receptors were more crowded in the brains of high P people.

Liberals tend to call themselves progressive. Conservatives are more about maintaining what we have inherited.

Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error: Emotions, Reason and the Human Brain, notes that most decisions cannot be approached in a purely rational way. Either we don’t have enough information or we have far more than we can process.

Gene that codes for one of the dopamine receptors is called D4. The D4 gene has a number of variations. They are called alleles. One of the variants is called 7R. People with this variant are novelty-seeking.

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.

If you’re highly dopaminergic, the most important part of sex probably occurs prior to the main event. It’s the conquest.

Fear, like desire, is primarily a future concept.

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to focus on threat.

The essence of government is control. It’s a dopaminergic activity because the populace is governed from a distance through abstract laws.

Rebels are dopaminergic and politicians are dopaminergic. The goal of both is change.

Liberals want to help people become better, conservatives want to let people be happy, and politicians want power.

Progress

About one in five people have the 7R allele. More people with this allele are found further from the origins of people. Maybe the allele didn’t set the migration, but once it began, the allele gave its carriers a survival advantage.

People with dopaminergic personalities may do well when coping with novel situations, but they often have difficulty with relationships. When the need for cooperation is paramount, a dopaminergic personality is a liability.

People with bipolar disorder experience low and high mood. High mood is connected with high levels of dopamine. Scientists believe it is caused by a problem with something called the dopamine transporter. It’s job is to limit the amount of time dopamine spends stimulating the cells around it.

The four nations with the highest per capita creation of new companies are the US, Canada, Israel, Australia, three of which are among the top nine countries with the highest immigrant population in the world. Europe with a residual population is more likely to take an H&N approach to life.

Dopamine cells give the signal to do it, but that’s where dopamine – and conscious involvement – come to an end. Dopamine is the conductor, not the orchestra.

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.

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.

Dopamine-driven technological advances make it even easier for us to gratify our needs and desires. Dopamine drives our lives faster and faster.

There is only 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.


[1] In the book on page 128

[2] In the book on page 136

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