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April 20 - July 16, 2023
Sometimes our environment is so enriched with new things that latent inhibition is unable to pick and choose what is most important. This experience can be exhilarating or frightening depending on the situation and the person who is experiencing it.
“When I’m in a country radically different from my own, I notice much more. It is as if I’ve taken a mind-altering drug that allows me to see things I would normally miss. I feel much more alive.” As the new environment becomes familiar, we adjust, and eventually master it. We separate out the things that will affect us from those that won’t, and latent inhibition returns, making us comfortable and confident in our new surroundings. We can once again separate the essential from the nonessential. But what if the brain is unable to make this adjustment?
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.
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.
“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
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
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.
We’ve already seen the impulsive pleasure-seeker who has difficulty maintaining long-term relationships and is vulnerable to addiction.
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:
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.
Isaac Newton, who discovered calculus and the law of universal gravitation, was one of those troubled geniuses. He
At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic and spent a year in an insane asylum.
Many brilliant artists, scientists, and business leaders are thought or known to have had mental illness. They include Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Munch (who painted The Scream), Vincent van Gogh, Charles Darwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sylvia Plath, Nikola Tesla, Vaslav Nijinsky (the greatest male dancer of the early twentieth century, who once choreographed a ballet that started a riot), Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, chess master Bobby Fischer, and many others. Dopamine
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.
“Correlation not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies.” It was written
political beliefs and personality traits. They found that the two were connected, and that the connection could be attributed to genes. Along the way, they noticed that certain personality traits were associated with liberals and others with conservatives.
The authors noted that people with low P scores are more likely to be “altruistic, well socialized, empathic, and conventional.” By contrast, people who have high P scores are
“manipulative, tough-minded, and practical,” and present characteristics such as “risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity, and authoritarianism.” They concluded, “As such, we expect higher P scores to be related to a more conservative political attitude.”
The characteristics the study eventually associated with liberals—risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity, and authoritarianism—are the characteristics of elevated dopamine.1 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
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; for example, laws that require motorcyclists to wear
helmets, or regulations that promote healthy eating. Conservatives distrust the idealism of progressives, criticizing it as an impossible effort to build a perfect utopia; an effort that is more likely to lead to totalitarianism in which the elite dominate all aspects of public and private life.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and the people who work for them, tend to be quite dopaminergic. They are tough-minded, risk-taking, sensation-seeking, and practical—personality features associated with liberals in the corrected version of the American Journal of Political Science
think tank, the divorce rate among celebrities is almost twice that of the general population. It’s even worse during the first year of marriage when couples must make the transition from passionate to companionate love.
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.
Next on the list is academia. Academia is a temple of dopamine. Academics are described as living in an ivory tower (as opposed to an earthen hut, for example).
You’re more likely to find a communist than a conservative in academia. A New York Times opinion piece noted that only 2 percent of English professors were Republicans, while 18 percent of social scientists identified themselves as Marxist.
Being in touch with our emotions and processing emotional information skillfully are crucial for almost every decision we make. Intellectual prowess is not enough.
individuals who have a strong H&N system would have an advantage in this area. 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.
She might also do a genetics study and find out that people who have a gene that revs up the dopamine system are on average more creative compared to people who don’t have that gene.
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.
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.
Which is better: policy or charity? It depends on how you look at it. As one would expect, the dopaminergic approach, policy, maximizes resources that are made available to the poor. Maximizing resources is what dopamine does best. In 2012, federal, state, and local governments spent about $1 trillion on antipoverty programs. That’s approximately $20,000 for every poor person in America. Charitable giving, on the other hand, was only $360 billion. The dopaminergic approach provided almost three times as much money. On the other hand, the value of help is more than dollars and cents.
Charity is more flexible than law, so it’s better able to focus on the unique needs of real individuals as opposed to abstractly defined groups.
The hedonistic paradox states that people who seek happiness for themselves will not find it, but people who help others will.
There is even evidence that helping others slows down aging at the cellular level.
“spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America—especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington—makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country.”
separately. Conservatives have less sex than liberals, possibly because conservatives are more likely to be in companionate relationships in which testosterone is suppressed by oxytocin and vasopressin. Though the sex may be less frequent, it’s more likely to end in orgasm for both partners. According
speculated that conservatives are better at giving up control, an activity necessary for orgasm to occur. She attributed this ability to having clearer values, which makes it easier to relax.
This explanation, which relies on a connection between clear values and disinhibition during climax, may not be the most straightforward explanation. There may be simpler ones based on what we know about the neurobiology of sex. Most obviously, letting go of control, which is necessary for climax to occur, is easier within a trusting relationship. This type of relationship is more common among stability-seeking H&N conservatives compared to novelty-seeking dopaminergic liberals. Additionally, the ability to enjoy the physical sensations of sex in the here and now requires suppression of
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“Are orgasms the most important part of sex?” They divided up the data based on political and professional affiliation. Those most likely to answer no to the question were politically liberal writers, artists, and musicians. 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. Finally, as would be
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66 percent of Republicans were very satisfied with their lives compared to 53 percent of Democrats. Sixty-one
The world is rarely simple, though. Despite higher rates of marital satisfaction, more reliable orgasms, and less cheating, couples in red states are more likely to get divorced than those in blue states. They also consume more pornography. Although these findings appear to be counterintuitive, one explanation is that they are the result of a greater cultural emphasis on organized religion. Red state couples are pressured to marry sooner, and they are less likely to live together or have sex prior to marriage.
It’s possible that conservatives were less willing than liberals to admit to marital infidelity or unhappiness with life, which would have skewed the General Social Survey results.
On average, liberals are more likely to be forward thinking, cerebral, inconstant, creative, intelligent, and dissatisfied. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to be comfortable with emotions, reliable, stable, conventional, less intellectual, and happy.
The art of persuasion intersects with neuroscience at the point where decisions are made and action is taken—that is, the intersection of desire dopamine and control dopamine circuits where we weigh options and make decisions about what we think will best serve our future.
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.
Stirring up fear is an indispensable part of almost any political campaign. Encouraging Americans to hate one another is an unfortunate side effect.
Where will this lead? Probably not to a renaissance of long-form journalism. As quick-hit stories grow more prevalent in the news environment, they must get shorter and shallower to compete. Where does such a cycle end? Even words may not be bedrock. Most cellphones now offer to replace the text of typed phrases with something faster and simpler (and cruder) to catch the eye: an emoji.
In addition to tapping into primitive needs, another reason fear works so well is loss aversion, meaning that the pain of loss is stronger than the pleasure of gain. For example, the pain of losing $20 is greater than the pleasure of winning $20. That’s why most people reject a 50/50 coin toss wager when the amount of money is significant.
