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 Daniel Z. Lieberman

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.

When things become part of the daily routine, there is no more reward prediction error, and dopamine is no longer triggered to give you those feelings of excitement.

Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.

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.

Love that lasts shifts the emphasis from anticipation to experience; from the fantasy of anything being possible to engagement with reality and all its imperfections.

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.

Our affection for them comes from taking pleasure in the familiar ambience: the real, physical nature of the place. We enjoy the familiar not for what it could become, but for what it is. That is the only stable basis for a long-term, satisfying relationship.

Video games are more complex than slot machines, so there are more opportunities for programmers to bake in features that trigger dopamine release in order to make it hard to stop playing.

Systems that contain opposing forces are easier to control. That’s why cars have both an accelerator and a brake, and why the brain uses circuits that counter each other.

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.

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

The emphasis in each case is on effective strategy, planned in advance, sometimes in excruciating detail, and always aimed at gaining resources or control. This is dopamine-driven aggression, and it tends to have a low emotional content. It is cold violence.

the more times you resist temptation, the more likely you are to fail the next time around. Willpower is a limited resource.

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. —E. B. White