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

MET therapists build up motivation by encouraging their patients to talk about their healthy desires. There’s an old saying: “We don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we say.” For example, if you give someone a lecture on the importance of honesty, then have them play a game in which cheating is rewarded, you’ll probably find that the lecture had little effect. On the other hand, if you ask someone to give you a lecture on the importance of honesty, they will be less likely to cheat when they sit down to play the game.

It’s better to be smart than strong. Instead of trying to attack an addiction head on through willpower, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) uses the planning ability of control dopamine to defeat the raw power of desire dopamine.

CBT therapists teach patients that craving is triggered by cues:

In a way, loss aversion is simple arithmetic. Gain is about a better future, so only dopamine is involved. The possibility of gain gets a +1 from dopamine. It gets zero from H&N, because H&N is only concerned with the present. Loss is also about the future, so it concerns dopamine, and gets a –1. Loss concerns H&N, too, because it affects things in our possession right now. So H&N gives it a –1. Put them together, and gain = +1, loss = –2, exactly what we see with the brain scans and the wagering experiments.

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.

The average amount of time they spent on one task before switching to another was only 47 seconds. Over the course of the day they switched between tasks more than four hundred times. Those who spent less time before jumping to something else experienced higher levels of stress and got less work done

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.