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October 20 - November 18, 2021
The participants who had been allowed to eat cookies worked on the problem for about 19 minutes. The ones who had been only allowed to eat radishes, those who had to exert self-control to counteract their desire for cookies, persisted at the task for only 8 minutes—less than half the time—before they gave up.
If you’re on a diet, the more times you resist temptation, the more likely
you are to fail the next time around. Willpower is a limited resource.
motivational enhancement therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and twelve-step facilitation therapy.
but desire not only gives us motivation to act; it also gives us patience to endure.
“We don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we say.”
Looking into the longer-term future also gives us the tenacity we need to overcome challenges and accomplish things that take a long time, things like getting an education or flying to the moon. It also gives us the ability to tame the hedonistic urges of the desire circuit, suppressing immediate gratification to achieve something better.
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.
We see milder forms of low latent inhibition in the creative arts.
“I can’t wait to go to Ocean City. They’ve got the best margaritas there. I have to find a place to get my car fixed this afternoon. Where are you going for lunch?” We often speak this way when we’re excited. Desire dopamine gets revved up, and overwhelms control dopamine’s more logical approach to communication.
Like people with mental illness, creative people such as artists, poets, scientists, and mathematicians will, at times, experience their thoughts running free. Creative thinking requires people to let go of the conventional interpretations of the world in order to see things in a brand-new way. In other words, they must break apart their preconceived models of reality. But what is a model, and why do we build them?
Models contain only the elements of the environment that the model builder believes are essential.
Models not only simplify our conception of the world; they also allow us to abstract, to take specific
experiences and use them to craft broad, general rules.
Such bad assumptions may be so harmful that they lead to psychiatric illnesses such as anxiety and depression.
Brain scans of people with schizophrenia show changes in that same area, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Maybe it’s because when we are being creative, we behave a little bit like a person with schizophrenia. We stop inhibiting aspects of reality that we had previously written off as unimportant, and we attach salience to things we once thought were irrelevant.
Few of us are geniuses or madmen, but we have all experienced the midpoint on this continuum: dreams.
Dreams often contain the theme of up, such as flying or falling from a great height. Dreams often involve future themes, too, sometimes in the form of the pursuit of some intensely desired goal that’s always just out of reach. Abstract, detached from the real world of the senses, dreams are dopaminergic.
Dopamine is unleashed during dreaming, freed from the restraining influence of the reality-focused H&N neurotransmitters. Activity in the H&N circuits is suppressed because sensory input from the outside world into the brain is blocked. This freedom allows dopamine circuits to generate the bizarre connections that are the hallmark of dreams. The trivial, the unnoticed, and the odd can be elevated to positions of prominence, supplying us with new ideas that otherwise would have been impossible to discover.
They found that fantasies produced immediately after dreaming were more elaborate. They were longer, and contained more ideas. The imagery was more vivid, and the content was more bizarre.
Many people have had the experience of waking from a dream, feeling as if they were caught between two worlds.
book The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—and How You Can Too,
The results were striking. About half the students had a dream related to their problem, and 70 percent of those who dreamed about the problem believed their dreams contained a solution. The independent judges mostly agreed. Among the students who had a dream about their problems, the judges deemed that about half offered a solution.
Choose a problem that’s important to you, one that you have a strong desire to solve. The greater the desire, the more likely it is that the problem will show up in a dream. Think about the problem before you go to bed. If possible, put it in the form of a visual image. If it’s a problem with a relationship, imagine the person it involves. If you’re looking
for inspiration, imagine a blank piece of paper. If you’re struggling with some sort of project, imagine an object that represents the project. Hold the image in your mind, so it’s the last thing you think of before you fall asleep.
It’s important to write down the dream immediately because the memory will evaporate in seconds if you begin to think about something else. Many people have had the experience of waking up from an intense dream, one that’s overflowing with personal meaning, and then being unable to recall any of the details less than a minute later.
The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine.
Elite societies of scientists are filled with artistic souls. Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are one and a half times more likely to have an artistic hobby compared to the rest of us. Members of the U.K. Royal Society are about twice as likely, and Nobel Prize winners are almost three times as likely.
The better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more likely you are to be an artist.
elevated levels of dopamine often come as a package deal: if you are highly dopaminergic in one area, you’re likely to be highly dopaminergic in others.
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.
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 “I love Humanity but I hate humans.”
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 on 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
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We’ve already seen the impulsive pleasure-seeker who has difficulty maintaining long-term relationships and is vulnerable to addiction. We’ve also seen the detached planner who would rather stay late at the office than enjoy time with friends. Now we see a third possibility: the creative genius—whether painter, poet, or physicist—who has so much trouble with human relationships that he may appear to be slightly autistic.
The genius lives in the world of the unknown, the not yet discovered, obsessed with making the future a better place through her work. Geniuses change the world—but their obsession often presents itself as indifference toward others.
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:
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity . . . Yet I am incapable of living in
the same room with anyone for two days together . . . I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It may be unseemly but it is explainable. Highly dopaminergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory experience. To them, the difference between loving humanity and loving your
neighbor is the difference between loving the idea of a puppy and taking care of it.
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.
In addition, heightened dopaminergic activity may overwhelm H&N systems, hampering one’s ability to form human relationships and navigate the day-to-day world of reality.
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...
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In 2006, he told Ability magazine that he started hearing voices at the age of twenty-five, a week after he had taken psychedelic drugs. “For the past 40 years I’ve had auditory hallucinations in my head, all day every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes the voices say something derogatory to me . . . I believe they started picking on me because they are jealous. The voices in my head are jealous of me.”
