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

“Jim Watson, who deciphered the genetic code, famously said, ‘There are only molecules; the rest is sociology,’

In your brain the down world is managed by a handful of chemicals—neurotransmitters, they’re called—that let you experience satisfaction and enjoy whatever you have in the here and now. But when you turn your attention to the world of up, your brain relies on a different chemical—a single molecule—that not only allows you to move beyond the realm of what’s at your fingertips, but also motivates you to pursue, to control, and to possess the world beyond your immediate grasp. It drives you to seek out those things far away, both physical things and things you cannot see, such as knowledge, love, and power.

Those down chemicals—call them the Here & Nows—allow you to experience what’s in front of you. They enable you to savor and enjoy, or perhaps to fight or run away, right now. The up chemical is different. It makes you desire what you don’t yet have, and drives you to seek new things. It rewards you when you obey it, and makes you suffer when you don’t. It is the source of creativity and, further along the spectrum, madness; it is the key to addiction and the path to recovery; it is the bit of biology that makes an ambitious executive sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, that makes successful actors and entrepreneurs and artists keep working long after they have all the money and fame they ever dreamed of; and that makes a satisfied husband or wife risk everything for the thrill of someone else. It is the source of the undeniable itch that drives scientists to find explanations and philosophers to find order, reason, and meaning.

It is why we look into the sky for redemption and God; it is why heaven is above and earth is below. It is fuel for the motor of our dreams; it is the source of our despair when we fail. It is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. It is also why we are never happy for very long.

no creature has more of it than a human being.

It is a blessing and a curse, a motivation and a reward. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, plus a single nitrogen atom—it is simple in form and complex in result. This is dopamine, and it narrates no less than the story of human behavior.

Only 0.0005 percent of brain cells produce dopamine—one in two million—yet these cells appeared to exert an outsized influence on behavior.

Research participants experienced feelings of pleasure when they turned dopamine on, and went to great lengths to trigger the activation of these rare cells. In fact, under the right circumstances, pursuit of feel-good dopamine activation became impossible to resist.

Some scientists christened dopamine the pleasure molecule, and the pathway that dopamine-producing cells take through the ...

The researchers injected them with a combination of cocaine and radioactive sugar, which allowed the scientists

to figure out which parts of their brains were burning the most calories.

As the intravenous cocaine took effect, participants were asked to rate how high they felt. Researchers discovered that the greater the activity in the dop...

new hypothesis arose: dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.

As human beings, we get a dopamine rush from similar, promising surprises: the arrival of a sweet note from your lover (What will it say?), an email message from a friend you haven’t seen in years (What’s the news going to be?), or, if you’re looking for romance, meeting a fascinating new partner at a sticky table in the same old bar (What might happen?). But when these things become regular events, their novelty fades, and so does the dopamine rush—and a sweeter note or a longer email or a better table won’t bring it back.

This simple idea provides a chemical explanation for an age-old question: Why does love fade? Our brains are programmed to crave the unexpected an...

exciting possibility begins. But when anything, including love, becomes familiar, that excitement slips away, an...

That happy error is what launches dopamine into action. It’s not the extra time or the extra money themselves. It’s the thrill of the unexpected good news.

It’s the pleasure of anticipation—the possibility of something unfamiliar and better.

Dopaminergic excitement (that is, the thrill of anticipation) doesn’t last forever, because eventually the future becomes the present. The thrilling mystery of the unknown becomes the boring familiarity of the everyday, at which point dopamine’s job is done, and the letdown sets in. The coffee and croissants were so good, you made that bakery your regular breakfast stop. But after a few weeks, “the best coffee and croissant in the city” became the same old breakfast.

But it wasn’t the coffee and the croissant that changed; it was your expectation.

In the same way, Samantha and Shawn were obsessed with each other until their relationship became utterly familiar. When things become part of the daily routine, there is no more reward prediction error, and dopamine is n...

Dopamine’s job—and ability—to idealize the unknown came to an end, so dopamine shut down.

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

This brings us to a clarifying fact of neurochemistry: the brain works one way in the peripersonal space and another way in the extrapersonal space. If you were designing the human mind, it makes sense that you would create a brain that distinguishes between things in this way, one system for what you have and another for what you don’t. For early humans, the familiar phrase “either you have it or you don’t” could be translated into “either you have it or you’re dead.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, food that you don’t have is critically different from food that you do have. It’s the same for water, shelter, and tools. The division is so fundamental that separate pathways and chemicals evolved in the brain to handle peripersonal and extrapersonal space.

When you look down, you look into the peripersonal space, and for that the brain is controlled by a host of chemicals concerned with experience in the here and now. But when the brain is engaged with the extrapersonal space, one chemical exercises more control than all the oth...

Things in the distance, things we don’t have yet, cannot be used or consumed, only desired. Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to ...

Every part of living is divided in this way: we have one way of dealing with what we want, and another way of dealing with what we have. Wanting a house, experiencing the kind of desire that motivates the hard work necessary to find it and purchase it, uses...

Anticipating a raise activates future-oriented dopamine, and it feels very different from the here-and-now experience of receiving the larger paycheck for the second or third time. And finding love takes a different set of skills than making love stay. Love must shift from an extrapersonal experience to a peripersonal one—from pu...

These are vastly different skills, which is why over time the nature of love has to change—and why, for so many people, love fades away at the en...

Yet many people make the transition. How do they do it—how are they outsmarting t...

Those with higher levels of dopamine want to climb it, explore it, conquer it. But they can’t, because it doesn’t exist. The mountain itself exists. But the imagined experience of being on it is impossible to achieve. The reality is that most of the time you’re on a mountain you can’t even tell.

Typically you’re surrounded by trees, and that’s all you see. Occasionally you might come to a scenic overlook in which you can see for miles

over the valley. But as you look, it’s the far-away valley that’s full of promise and beauty, not the mountain you’re standing on. Glamour creates desires that cannot be fulfilled because they are ...

Whether it’s an airplane in the sky, a movie star in Hollywood, or a distant mountain, only things that are out of reach can be glamorous; only t...

There’s a dark side to dopamine. If you drop a pellet of food into a rat’s cage, the animal will experience a dopamine surge. Who knew that the world was a place where food dropped from the sky? But if you keep dropping pellets every 5 minutes, dopamine stops. The rat knows when to expect the food, so there’s no surprise, and there is no error in the rat’s prediction of a reward.

The modern standard for casino design is to dedicate a whopping 80 percent of floor space to slot machines, and for good reason: slot machines bring in the majority of casino gambling revenue.

One of the world’s largest manufacturers of slot machines is owned by a company called Scientific Games. Science plays a big role in the design of these compelling devices. Although slot machines date back to the nineteenth century, modern refinements are based on the pioneering work of behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, who in the 1960s mapped out the principles of behavior manipulation.

Then Skinner tried something different. He set up an experiment in which the number of presses needed to release a pellet changed randomly. Now the pigeon never knew when the food would come. Every reward was unexpected. The birds became excited. They pecked faster. Something was spurring them on to greater efforts. Dopamine, the molecule of surprise, had been harnessed, and the scientific foundation of the slot machine was born.

When Samantha saw her old boyfriend, all the feelings came rushing back—excitement, possibility, focus, butterflies. She wasn’t on the prowl for romance, but she didn’t have to be. Demarco’s appearance, and the half-conscious dream of another chance at passionate excitement, was an

unexpected treat dropped into her emotional life, and that surprise was the source of her excitement. Samanth...

But with an understanding of the role of dopamine, it’s clear that this relationship is not something new. It’s just another repetition of dopamine-driven excitement.

The novelty that triggers dopamine doesn’t go on forever. When it comes to love, 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 an...

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.

The transition is difficult, and when the world presents an easy way out of a difficult task, we tend to take it. That’s why, when the dopamine firing of early romance ends, many relationships end, too.

Early love is a ride on a merry-go-round that sits at the foot of a bridge. That carousel can take you around and around on a beautiful trip as many times as you like, but it will always leave you where you began. Each time the music stops and your feet are back on the ground, you must make a choice: t...

From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. Dopamine has no standard for good, and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new, never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is “More.”

Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented

Here and Now molecules,