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What you see when you look down are things within your reach, things you can control right now, things you can move and manipulate with no planning, effort, or thought.
Those down chemicals—call them the Here & Nows—allow you to experience what’s in front of you.
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, ...
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it is the key to addiction and the pat...
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It is also why we are never happy for very long.
This is dopamine, and it narrates no less than the story of human behavior.
Love is a need, a craving, a drive to seek life’s greatest prize. —Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist
In which we explore the chemicals that make you want sex and fall in love—and why, sooner or later, everything changes.
Some scientists christened
dopamine the pleasure molecule, and the pathway that dopamine-producing cells take through the brain was named the reward circuit.
dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.
Important
when these things become regular events, their novelty fades, and so does the dopamine rush
The scientists who studied this phenomenon named the buzz we get from novelty reward prediction error,
Maybe we get to leave work early, or we find a hundred dollars more in checking than we expected. 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.
Passion rises when we dream of a world of possibility, and fades when we are confronted by reality.
Pettigrew found that the brain manages the external world by dividing it into separate regions, the peripersonal and the extrapersonal—basically, near and far. Peripersonal space includes whatever is in arm’s reach; things you can control right now by using your hands. This is the world of what’s real, right now. Extrapersonal space refers to everything else—whatever you can’t touch unless you move beyond your arm’s reach, whether it’s three feet or three million miles away. This is the realm of possibility.
Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.
finding love takes a different set of skills than making love stay. Love must shift from an extrapersonal experience to a peripersonal one—from pursuit to possession; from something we anticipate to something we have to take care of. 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 end of the dopamine thrill we call romance.
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 another roller coaster ride.
Important
If you’ve had four thousand, we can safely say that dopamine is steering things in your life, at least when it comes to sex. And dopamine’s prime directive is more. If Sir Mick chases satisfaction another half century, he still won’t catch it. His idea of satisfaction is not satisfaction at all. It’s pursuit, which is driven by dopamine, the molecule that cultivates perpetual dissatisfaction. After he beds a lover, his immediate goal will be to find another.
We revel in the passion, the focus, the excitement, the thrill of finding new love. The difference is that most of us figure out at some point that dopamine lies to us.
we come to understand that the next beautiful woman or a handsome man we see is probably not the key to “satisfaction.”
From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters.
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 dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules, or the H&Ns.
They include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana).
According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, early or “passionate” love lasts only twelve to eighteen months. After that, for a couple to remain attached to one another, they need to develop a different sort of love called companionate love. Companionate love is mediated by the H&Ns because it involves experiences that are happening right here, right now—you’re with the one you love, so enjoy it.
When the H&Ns take over in the second stage of love, dopamine is suppressed.
H&N companionate love, on the other hand, is characterized by deep and enduring satisfaction with the present reality, and an aversion to change, at least with regard to one’s relationship with one’s partner.
The early part, passionate love, is dopaminergic—exhilarating, idealized, curious, future looking. The later part, companionate love, is H&N focused—satisfying, peaceful, and experienced through bodily senses and emotions.
Just as dopamine is the molecule of obsessive yearning, the chemicals most associated with long-term relationships are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is more active in women and vasopressin in men.
Vasopressin acted like a “good-husband hormone.” Dopamine does the opposite. Human beings who have genes that produce high levels of dopamine have the highest number of sexual partners and the lowest age of first sexual intercourse.
men with naturally high quantities of testosterone in their blood are less likely to marry.
We can live without companionate love, but the majority of us arrange a good portion of our lives around trying to find it and keep it.
Testosterone drives sexual desire in both men and women. Men produce large amounts—it’s responsible for aspects of masculinity such as facial hair, increased muscle mass, and a low-pitched voice.
From eager anticipation to the physical pleasures of intimacy, the stages of sex recapitulate the stages of love: sex is love on fast forward.
As physical contact begins, the brain shifts control to the H&Ns to deliver the pleasure of the sensory experience, mainly with the release of endorphins. The consummation of the act, orgasm, is almost entirely a here-and-now
now experience, with endorphins and other H&N neurotransmitters working together to shut down dopamine.
just as some people have difficulty moving from passionate love to companionate love, it can also be difficult for dopamine-driven people to let the H&Ns take over during sex.
Dopamine got the nickname “the pleasure molecule” based on experiments with addictive drugs.
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. That is the only stable basis for a long-term, satisfying relationship.
when it comes to love, dopamine is a place to begin, not to finish. It can never be satisfied. Dopamine can only say, “More.”
Sometimes people don’t know what they want at all; other times they want lots of things at once—things that they cannot have at the same time, because they conflict with one another.
In a broad sense, saying something is “important” is another way of saying it’s linked to dopamine.
It explains why Andrew couldn’t stop pursuing women even though he knew that in just a few hours, maybe in just a few minutes, it would make him unhappy.
Dopamine circuits don’t process experience in the real world, only imaginary future possibilities. For many people it’s a letdown.
The future isn’t real. It’s made up of a bundle of possibilities that exist only in our minds. Those possibilities tend to be idealized—we usually don’t imagine a mediocre outcome.
Dopamine makes us want things with a passion, but it’s the H&Ns that allow us to appreciate them:
