More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 10 - November 19, 2024
We unconsciously know when someone has a high expectation of success, and we get out of their way. We submit to their will—the overwhelming expression of their self-efficacy, powered by control dopamine. Our brains evolved this way for a good reason: it’s a bad idea to get into fights you can’t win. If you’re picking up signals that your adversary has a high expectation of success, the odds are that this is a fight you want to avoid.
The self-efficacy of the Buffalo Bills seemed to propagate itself. Success inspired confidence; confidence produced success.
A relationship that is formed for the purpose of accomplishing a goal is called agentic, and it is orchestrated by dopamine. The other person acts as an extension of you, an agent who assists you in achieving your goal. For example, relationships we make at networking events are primarily agentic, and typically result in mutual gain. Affiliative relationships, on the other hand, are for the purpose of enjoying social interactions. The simple pleasure of being with another person, experienced in the here and now, is associated with H&N neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphin,
...more
Some people are more comfortable in agentic relationships because they’re more structured, while others prefer affiliative relationships because they find them more fun. Some people are comfortable with both, others with neither.
Agentic people tend to be cool and distant. Affiliative people are affectionate and warm. They are also social, and turn to others for support. People who are good at both affiliative and agentic relationships are friendly, accessible leaders, such as Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. Those who are less able to navigate agentic relationships are more likely to be friendly, accessible followers. Those who have trouble with affiliative relationships but who are skilled with agentic ones may be viewed as cold and uncaring, whereas those who are poor at both come across as aloof and isolated.
Agentic relationships are established for the purpose of dominating one’s environment to extract as much as possible from the available resources, the domain of control dopamine. Although we think of domination as an active, even aggressive, activity, it doesn’t have to be. Dopamine doesn’t care how something is obtained. It just wants to get what it wants. So an agentic relationship can be entirely passive;
In the control circuit, dopamine drives domination of the environment, not necessarily the people in it. Dopamine wants more, and it doesn’t care how it gets it. Moral or immoral, dominant or submissive, it’s all the same to dopamine, as long as it leads to a better future.
Planning, tenacity, and force of will through personal effort or by working with others: these are the ways control-circuit dopamine lets us dominate our environment.
This perpetual need to identify a goal and calculate a way to reach it was perhaps the most important factor in his historic success. But it’s not easy having so much dopamine coursing through the control circuits.
It’s hard for a child with ADHD to extract valuable resources from his environment—typically in the form of good grades—when he can’t focus or control his impulses. But poor grades are only the beginning. Young people with ADHD have difficulty making friends. Who wants to be around someone who interrupts, grabs things, and doesn’t wait their turn?
In addition to drugs, they may also have problems with early sexual activity and overeating, particularly “pleasure foods” that are high in salt, fat, and sugar.
overweight children are more likely to be hit by cars when they’re crossing the street. It’s not because they walk more slowly;
Dopamine doesn’t come equipped with a conscience. Rather, it is a source of cunning fed by desire. When it’s revved up, it suppresses feelings of guilt, which is an H&N emotion. It is capable of inspiring honorable effort, but also deceit and even violence in pursuit of the things it wants. Dopamine pursues more, not morality; to dopamine, force and fraud are nothing more than tools.
Winning is never enough. Nothing is ever enough for dopamine. It is the pursuit that matters, and the victory, but there is no finish line, and never will be. Winning, like drugs, can be addictive.
The ability to suppress emotions such as fear, anger, or overwhelming desire provides an advantage in the midst of conflict. Emotion is almost always a liability that interferes with calculated action.
When bold action is required in the midst of chaos, the one who can stay calm, take stock of available resources, and quickly develop a plan of action is the one who will pull through.
we have for the present joy of making others happy. Dopamine control circuits and H&N circuits work in opposition, creating a balance that allows us to be humane toward others, while safeguarding our own survival. Since balance is essential, the brain often wires circuits in opposition.
The neurotransmitter dopamine is the source of desire (via the desire circuit) and tenacity (via the control circuit); the passion that points the way and the willpower that gets us there.
Willpower isn’t the only tool control dopamine has in its arsenal when it needs to oppose desire. It can also use planning, strategy, and abstraction, such as the ability to imagine the long-term consequences of alternate choices. But when we need to resist harmful urges, willpower is the tool we reach for first. As it turns out, that might not be such a good idea.
Willpower can help an alcoholic say no to a drink once, but it’s probably not going to work if he has to say no over and over again for months or years. Willpower is like a muscle. It becomes fatigued with use, and after a fairly short period of time, it gives out.
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.
Things are salient when they are important to you, if they have the potential to impact your well-being, for good or for evil. Things are salient if they have the potential to affect your future. Things are salient if they trigger desire dopamine. They broadcast the message, Wake up. Pay attention. Get excited. This is important.
Too much salience, or any salience at all at the wrong time, can create delusions. The triggering event rises from obscurity to importance.
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.
As the new environment becomes familiar, we adjust, and eventually master it. We separate out the things that will affect us from those that won’t, and latent inhibition returns, making us comfortable and confident in our new surroundings. We can once again separate the essential from the nonessential.
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.
Models are imaginary representations of the world that we build in order to better understand it. 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 for maximum benefit.
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 depends on models because we make predictions regarding situations we haven’t yet experienced.
Mental time travel is in constant use because it’s the mechanism for making every conscious choice in life. To the brain, each deliberate choice about the future is a matter for the dopamine system and the models it has created,
Mental time travel is responsible for every “next step” in our lives.
It was as if she didn’t believe the things she had to say were important enough to be spoken aloud.
It was clear that she couldn’t function in the high-stress environment of the intensive course of study she had signed up for, and she had taken a leave of absence. More than anything else, she felt guilt. Always the perfect daughter, she now believed she was a source of shame to her family.
How well our models fit the real world is of great importance. If our models are poor, we will make bad predictions about the future and subsequently bad choices. Poor models of reality may be caused by many things: not having enough information, difficulty with abstract thinking, or the stubborn persistence of wrong assumptions. Such bad assumptions may be so harmful that they lead to psychiatric illnesses such as anxiety and depression.
Models are powerful tools, but they have disadvantages. They can lock us in to a particular way of thinking, causing us to miss out on opportunities to improve our world.
This study supports Schopenhauer’s conception that living with schizophrenia is like living in a dream.
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.
The pleasure seeker always wants more. No matter how much he gets, it’s never enough. No matter how much he looks forward to some promised pleasure, he is incapable of finding satisfaction in it. As soon as it comes he turns his attention to what’s next.
The detached planner also has a future/present imbalance. Like the pleasure seeker he also has a constant need for more, but he takes a long-term view, chasing more abstract forms of gratification such as honor, wealth, and power.
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 oft...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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.
Progressives are idealists who use dopamine to imagine a world far better than the one we live in today. Progressivism is an arrow pointing forward.
Testing the ability to manipulate abstract ideas, courtesy of the dopamine control circuit, is a fundamental part of how psychologists measure intelligence.
Mental flexibility—the ability to change one’s behavior in response to changing circumstances—is also an ingredient in how we measure intelligence.
Another way of saying it is that an IQ test measures a person’s ability to build imaginary models based on past experiences, and then use those models to predict what will happen in the future. Control dopamine plays a large role.
Slight variations in genes are called alleles. Each person’s collection of different alleles (along with the environment they grew up in) helps determine their unique personality.
This reflects our often-observed difference in focus: dopaminergic people are more interested in action at a distance and planning, while people with high H&N levels tend to focus on things close at hand.
When an imagined object of desire turns into a real person, when hope is replaced with possession, the role of dopamine comes to an end. The thrill is gone, and orgasm is anticlimactic.
Rational decisions are fragile things, always open to revision as new evidence comes along. Irrationality is more enduring, and both desire dopamine and the H&N pathways can be taken advantage of to guide people toward making irrational decisions. The most effective tools are fear, desire, and sympathy.
Stirring up fear is an indispensable part of almost any political campaign. Encouraging Americans to hate one another is an unfortunate side effect.
Every time a participant lost a bet, their amygdala fired up, intensifying feelings of distress. It was H&N emotion that was driving loss aversion. The H&N system doesn’t care about the future. It doesn’t care about things we might get. It cares about what we have right now. And when those things are threatened, out comes the experience of fear and distress.
