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November 1, 2022 - October 8, 2023
Dopamine, they discovered, isn’t about pleasure at all. Dopamine delivers a feeling much more influential. Understanding dopamine turns out to be the key to explaining and even predicting behavior across a spectacular range of human endeavors: creating art, literature, and music; seeking success; discovering new worlds and new laws of nature; thinking about God—and falling in love.
dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.
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.
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 others, the chemical associated with anticipation and possibility: dopamine.
Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.
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 things that are unreal. Glamour is a lie.
It’s like our favorite old haunts—restaurants, shops, even cities. Our affection for them comes from taking pleasure in the familiar ambience: the real, physical nature of the place. We enjoy the familiar not for what it could become, but for what it is.
Dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose purpose is to maximize future rewards, starts us down the road to love. It revs our desires, illuminates our imagination, and draws us into a relationship on an incandescent promise. But when it comes to love, dopamine is a place to begin, not to finish. It can never be satisfied. Dopamine can only say, “More.”
That’s the nature of dopamine. It’s always focused on acquiring more of everything with an eye toward providing for the future. Hunger is something that happens here and now, in the present. But dopamine says, “Go ahead and eat the donut, even if you’re not hungry. It will increase your chance of staying alive in the future. Who knows when food will be available next?”
When it finds something that’s potentially valuable, dopamine switches on, sending the message Wake up. Pay attention. This is important. It sends this message by creating the feeling of desire, and often excitement. The sensation of wanting is not a choice you make. It is a reaction to the things you encounter.
Dopamine circuits don’t process experience in the real world, only imaginary future possibilities. For many people it’s a letdown. They’re so attached to dopaminergic stimulation that they flee the present and take refuge in the comfortable world of their own imagination. “What will we do tomorrow?” they ask themselves as they chew their food, oblivious to the fact that they’re not even noticing this meal they had so eagerly anticipated. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive is the motto of the dopamine enthusiast.
The desire circuit often breaks its promises—which is bound to happen, because it plays no role in generating feelings of satisfaction. It is in no position to make dreams come true. The desire circuit is, so to speak, just a salesman.
Dopamine is not meant to be an enduring reservoir of joy. By shaping the brain to make surprising events predictable, dopamine maximizes resources, as it is supposed to do, but in the process, by eliminating surprise and extinguishing reward-prediction error, it suppresses its own activity.
But addictive drugs are so powerful that they bypass the complicated circuitry of surprise and prediction and artificially ignite the dopamine system. In this way, they scramble everything up. All that’s left is a gnawing craving for more.
Not all drugs trigger dopamine to the same degree, though. The ones that hit dopamine the hardest are more addictive than ones that are more restrained. By triggering the release of more dopamine, the “hard hitters” also make the user feel more euphoric, and stimulate the most intense craving when the drug is gone. Intensity varies by drug.
When an expected reward fails to materialize, the dopamine system shuts down. In scientific terms, when the dopamine system is at rest, it fires at a leisurely three to five times per second. When it’s excited, it zooms up to twenty to thirty times per second. When an expected reward fails to materialize, the dopamine firing rate drops to zero, and that feels terrible.
Gamers progress through levels while increasing their strength and abilities. It’s a dopamine dream come true. To keep progress front and center in a gamer’s mind, the screen constantly displays the accumulating points or growing progress bars so players never forget. They have to keep pursuing more.
But we’re not at the ungoverned mercy of our desire. We also have a complementary dopamine circuit that calculates what sort of more is worth having. It gives us the ability to construct plans—to strategize and dominate the world around us to get the things we want.
dopamine moving through different brain circuits yields different functions, too, and toward a common end: a relentless focus on enhancing the future.
both circuits give us the capacity to consider “phantoms”—things that don’t physically exist. For desire dopamine, those phantoms are things we wish to have but don’t have right now—things we want in the future. For control dopamine, the phantoms are the building blocks of imagination and creative thought: ideas, plans, theories, abstract concepts such as mathematics and beauty, and worlds yet to be.
Dopamine encourages us to maximize our resources by rewarding us when we do so—the act of doing something well, of making our future a better, safer place, gives us a little dopamine “buzz.”
The ability to put forth effort is dopaminergic. The quality of that effort can be influenced by any number of other factors, but without dopamine, there is no effort at all.
Most of the time, we mirror the actions of people we’re talking to. If one person touches his face or gestures with his hands, so does the other. But this time it was different. When it comes to dominant and submissive postures, the research participants were more likely to adopt a complementary posture rather than mirror the same posture. Dominance triggered submission, and submission triggered dominance.
It didn’t matter if the confederate took a dominant or submissive posture. Participants who took the complementary posture not only liked the confederates more, they also felt more comfortable with them compared to the participants who mirrored the confederates.
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; for example, when a manager running an employee meeting gets the outcome he wants by keeping quiet.
some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement, but are unable to experience H&N fulfillment. Think of people you know who work relentlessly toward their goals but never stop to enjoy the fruits of their achievements. They don’t even brag about them. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.
The frontal lobes, where control dopamine acts, develop last, and do not fully connect to the rest of the brain until a person finishes adolescence and enters adulthood. One of the jobs of the control circuit is to keep the desire circuit in check; hence the impulse control problem associated with ADHD. When control dopamine is weak, people go after things they want with little thought about the long-term consequences.
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.
Winners cheat for the same reason that drug addicts take drugs. The rush feels great, and withdrawal feels terrible. Both know that their behavior has the potential to destroy their lives, but the desire circuit doesn’t care. It only wants more. More drugs, more success.
Emotion is an H&N experience. It’s what we feel right here, right now. Emotion is critical to our ability to understand the world, but emotions can sometimes overwhelm us. When that happens, we make less-logical decisions. Fortunately, dopamine’s opposition to H&N circuits can turn down the volume on emotion.
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. Usually the two work together, but when desire fixates on things that will bring us harm in the long run—a third piece of cake, an extramarital affair, or an IV injection of heroin—dopaminergic willpower turns around, and does battle with its companion circuit.
Hallucinations can cause a person to see things that aren’t really there, feel their touch, even smell them. The most common type of hallucination is the auditory hallucination—hearing voices.
Brain cells have different receptors for different neurotransmitters, and each one affects the cell in a different way. 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.
As we gain experience with the world, we develop better and better models, and this is the basis of wisdom. We embrace models that work well, and discard the ones that fail to take us where we want to go. Knowledge passed on from previous generations can help us improve our models in a different way than direct experience.
An analogy pulls out the abstract, unseen essence of a concept, and matches it with a similar essence of an apparently unrelated concept. The body’s senses perceive two different things, but reason understands how they are the same. Pairing a brand-new idea with an old familiar one makes the new idea easier to understand.
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.
These three personality types appear to be very different on the surface, but they all have something in common. They’re overly focused on maximizing future resources at the expense of appreciating the here and now. 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
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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:
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 chemicals, and that’s something highly dopaminergic people dislike and avoid.
Contrary to popular perception, the untreated pain of mental illness is a hindrance, not a help. “I used to go for long periods without being able to do anything, but now I play every day.”
The actors identified a number of key issues including “problems with autonomy, lack of environmental mastery, complex interpersonal relationships and high self-criticism.” These are challenges that would be most difficult for highly dopaminergic individuals, who need to feel in control of their environment and often have difficulty navigating complex human relationships.
Testing the ability to manipulate abstract ideas, courtesy of the dopamine control circuit, is a fundamental part of how psychologists measure intelligence.
If policy directs more resources to the poor, and charity adds additional benefits, why not just do both? The problem is that dopamine and H&N neurotransmitters generally oppose each other, which creates an either/or problem. People who support government assistance for the poor (a dopaminergic approach) are less likely to give (an H&N approach) and vice versa.
Almost everyone wants to help the poor. But depending on whether they have a dopaminergic or H&N personality, they will go about it in different ways. Dopaminergic people want the poor to receive more help, while H&N people want to provide personal help on a one-to-one basis.
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.
scientists studied two patients who had Urbach–Wiethe disease, a rare condition that destroys the amygdala on both sides of the brain. When these individuals were presented with wagers, they attached equal weight to gain and loss. Without the amygdala, loss aversion vanished.
Fear, like desire, is primarily a future concept—dopamine’s realm. But the H&N system gives a boost to the pain of loss in the form of amygdala activation, tipping our judgment when we have to make decisions about the best way to manage risk.
Activating dopamine pathways is one way to make conservatives think more like liberals. But we can do something similar by exploiting the very circuits that make conservatives act conservatively: the H&N circuits, specifically those that allow us to experience empathy. This approach uses strengths that are quintessentially conservative to generate greater acceptance of people who threaten change.
Transforming abstract groups into concrete individuals is a good way to activate H&N empathy circuits.
