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

A PSYCHOTIC SHORT CIRCUIT What happens, though, if the salience function of the brain malfunctions—if it goes off even when there is nothing happening that is actually important to you? Imagine you’re watching the news. The anchorman is talking about a government spying program, and suddenly your salience circuit fires for no reason at all.

You might then believe that this story on the news has something to do with you. Too much salience, or any salience at all at the wrong time, can create delusions. The triggering event rises from obscurity to importance.

A common delusion among people with schizophrenia is that people on TV are talking directly to them. Another is that they are the target of investigation by the NSA, FBI, KGB, or Secret Service. One patient said he saw a stop sign, and thought it was a message from his mother telling him to stop looking at women. Another patient saw a red car parked outside her apartment on Valentine’s Day, and believed it was a message of love from her psychiatrist. Even people who have never be...

There’s wide variation in how much salience different people attach to different things. Everyone has a lower limit, though. We have to categorize some things as having low salience, being unimportant, so we can ignore them for the simple reason that noticing every detail in the world around us would be overwhelming.

People with schizophrenia control their dopamine activity by taking medications that block dopamine receptors

Some receptors stimulate brain cells and others lull them into a state of tranquility. Changing cell behavior is how the brain processes information. It’s similar to transistors turning on and off in a computer chip.

Blocking dopamine usually doesn’t make all of the symptoms of schizophrenia go away, but it can get rid of the delusions and hallucinations.

Unfortunately, antipsychotic medications block dopamine all over the brain, and blocking the control circuit in the frontal lobes can make certain aspects of the illness worse, such as difficulty paying attention and reasoning with abstract concepts.

Doctors try to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms by getting the dose just right. They want to suppress excess dopamine activity in the salience circuit without overly suppressing the control circuit, which is responsible for long-term planning.

The goal is to give just enough medication to block 60 to 80 percent of the dopamine receptors.

Older antipsychotic medications don’t do this very well. They stick hard to the receptor. If something interesting happens and dopamine spikes, tough luck. The medication has latched on so tight, no dopamine can get through, and that doesn’t feel good. Being cut off from natural dopamine surges makes the world a dull place and makes it hard to find reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Newer drugs bind more loosely. A surge of dopamine knocks the drug off the receptors, and the this is interesting feeling gets through.

In schizophrenia the brain short-circuits, attaching salience to ordinary things that ought to be familiar and therefore ignored. Another name for this is low latent inhibition.

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. If you’re in an exotic foreign country, there’s not much to inhibit, and it can cause great pleasure but also confusion and disorientation—culture shock.

Author and journalist Adam Hochschild described it this way: “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.”

I’m losing my mind! There is just too much info in my head, and I get very little sleep. I can’t stand to look at anything else! I’m tired of being an observer! I’m tired of seeing everything! . . . I want to go to the deep woods and see nothing, read nothing, drop all technology, watch nothing, hear nothing. I want no clutter, nothing moved, nothing changed. I want to sleep without dreams that give me answers to problems that put me back to work as soon as I get up! I’m tired and don’t want to think anymore!

We see milder forms of low latent inhibition in the creative arts.

There may be chaos inside our heads that requires taming by the more logical parts of the brain, but there is also treasure. Whether or not you find that “shillings” improves Pooh’s poem, one of the cardinal rules of creative writing is to turn off your inner censor when creating the first draft. If you’re lucky, things will tumble out from your unconscious that will resonate in the unconscious of your readers, and your story will strike deep.

With one thought rapidly taking the place of another, and a limited ability to hold the thoughts

back, expression becomes highly disorganized. A less severe form of this type of jumping around is called tangentiality, in which the speaker leaps from one thought to another, but in a way that makes sense. For example, “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. At the far end of the spectrum is word salad, the most severe manifestation of out-of-control speech.

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?

In some ways model building is like latent inhibition. Models contain only the elements of the environment that the model builder believes are essential. Other details are discarded.

That makes the world easier to comprehend and, later,

to imagine a variety of ways it might be manipulated fo...

Mental time travel is a powerful tool of the dopamine system. It allows us to experience a possible, though presently unreal, future as if we were there.

Mental time travel is responsible for every “next step” in our lives.

For example, if a child grows up with critical parents, she may develop the conviction that she is an incompetent person, and this belief will shape the models of the world that she creates all her life.

This suggests a simple model: typing instructions on a keyboard is the way to operate a computer. The scientists at Xerox PARC had to free themselves from that model before they could invent the computer mouse and the graphical user interface.

It’s dopamine that builds models, and dopamine that breaks them apart. Both require us to think about things that don’t currently exist, but might in the future.

while they were solving a problem that required creativity. He found that when they

discovered the solution to the problem, the front of their brains on the right side was activated. He wondered if this part of the brain was also involved in model breaking.

Then he asked them to imagine things that don’t exist, things that don’t fit the conventional model of reality, such as “a living thing that is a helicopter.” With the volunteers in the scanner, he found that the same part of the brain lit up as before, but only when participants thought about objects that did not exist in life. When they imagined reality itself, the region stayed dark.

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 schizophreni...

of reality that we had previously written off as unimportant, and we attach salience to things we ...

In small studies these devices have been shown to accelerate learning, enhance concentration, and even treat clinical depression.

The ability to draw a connection between two things that had previously appeared to be unrelated is an important part of creativity, and it appears that it can be enhanced by electrical stimulation.

Dopaminergic drugs can do the same thing. Although some patients who take dopaminergic drugs for Parkinson’s disease develop devastating compulsions, others experience enhanced creativity.

As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “Dreams are brief madness and madness a long dream.”

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.

Many people have had the experience of waking from a dream, feeling as if they were caught between two worlds. Thinking is more fluid, making leaps from topic to topic, unconstrained by the rules of logic.

In fact, some people report that they experience their most creative thoughts in this crack between the two worlds. The H&N filter that focuses our attention on the external world of the senses has not yet been reengaged; dopamine circuits continue to fire unopposed, and ideas flow freely.

Cut off from the senses, dreams allow dopamine to run free, unconstrained by the concrete facts of external reality.

Much of the brain is every bit as active during dreaming as it is when it is awake, but there are crucial differences.

the parts of the brain that filter seemingly irrelevant details, the frontal lobes, are shut down.

But there is increased activity in an area called the secon...

This part of the brain doesn’t receive signals directly from the eyes, which receive no input during dreaming. Instead, it is responsible for processing visual stimuli. It helps ...

The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine.

The poet composing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the physicist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the ability to look beyond the world of the senses into a deeper, more profound world of abstract ideas.

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 managin...

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