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August 28, 2022 - November 1, 2025
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 why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. It is also why we are never happy for very long.
Mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish all have this chemical inside their brains, but no creature has more of it than a human being. It is a blessing and a curse, a motivation and a reward.
The brain is so complex that even the most sophisticated neuroscientist must simplify to build a model of the brain that’s capable of being understood.
The goal of research, on the other hand, is to answer a scientific question. Even though scientists work hard to minimize the risks to their participants, the science must come first.
Initially, dopamine was seen simply as a way for the body to produce a chemical called norepinephrine, which is what adrenaline is called when it is found in the brain. But then scientists began to observe strange things. Only 0.0005 percent of brain cells produce dopamine—one in two million—yet these cells appeared to exert an outsized influence on behavior.
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:
Shawn wanted to be sure they would be together forever, so one day he proposed to her. She said yes. A few months after their honeymoon, things began to change. At the start they had been obsessed with one another, but, with the passage of time, that desperate longing became less desperate. The belief that anything was possible became less certain, less obsessive, less at the center of everything. Their elation receded. They weren’t unhappy, but the profound satisfaction from their earlier time together was slipping away.
From that, a new hypothesis arose: dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.
Why does love fade? Our brains are programmed to crave the unexpected and thus to look to the future, where every exciting possibility begins. But when anything, including love, becomes familiar, that excitement slips away, and new things draw our attention. The scientists who studied this phenomenon named the buzz we get from novelty reward prediction error,
When what happens is better than what we expect, it is literally an error in our forecast of the future: 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.
All of a sudden you notice that a new bakery has opened, one you’ve never seen. You immediately want to go in and see what they have. That’s dopamine taking charge, and it produces a feeling different from enjoying how something tastes, feels, or looks. 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.
When things become part of the daily routine, there is no more reward prediction error, and dopamine is no longer triggered to give you those feelings of excitement.
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.
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.
This is the defining characteristic of things in the extrapersonal space: to get them requires effort, time, and in many cases, planning. By contrast, anything in the peripersonal space can be experienced in the here and now.
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 us in the future; the pursuit of better things.
Wanting a house, experiencing the kind of desire that motivates the hard work necessary to find it and purchase it, uses a different set of brain circuits than enjoying it once it’s yours.
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 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
Yet many people make the transition. How do they do it—how are they outsmarting the seduction of dopamine?
Glamour is present when we see things that stimulate our dopaminergic imagination, drowning out our ability to accurately perceive here-and-now reality.
Likewise, what could be more glamorous than Hollywood? Beautiful actors and actresses go to parties, stand around swimming pools, and flirt. The reality is far different, involving 14-hour days sweating under hot lights.
Glamour creates desires that cannot be fulfilled because they are desires for things that exist only in the imagination.
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.
When they are together, the time flies, just like when they dated before—and, when she thinks about it, just like it used to be with Shawn. Maybe, she thinks, Demarco’s the one. 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 another roller coaster ride. Choosing the dopaminergic kick takes little effort, but it ends fast, like the pleasure of eating a Twinkie.
So how many lovers would be enough to get “satisfaction”? 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. In this way, Mick isn’t alone. He isn’t even unusual.
George would be crazy about the woman up until the moment she returned his affection. When he didn’t have to try anymore, all he wanted was out.
Mick is like George, and George is like all of us. 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. Unlike the former latex salesman for Vandelay Industries and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, 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. 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 dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules, or the H&Ns. Most people have heard of 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). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these
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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—
When the H&Ns take over in the second stage of love, dopamine is suppressed. It has to be because dopamine paints a picture in our minds of a rosy future in order to spur us on through the hard work necessary to make it a reality.
When H&N circuits are activated, we are prompted to experience the real world around us, and dopamine is suppressed; when dopamine circuits are activated, we move into a future of possibilities, and H&Ns are suppressed.
It’s not easy to say farewell to the dopaminergic thrill of new partners and passionate longing, but the ability to do so is a sign of maturity, and a step toward long-lasting happiness.
Lovers experience the same disconnect between anticipation and experience. 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.
A romance built on dopamine is a thrilling, if short-lived, roller coaster ride, but our brain chemistry gives us the tools to move down the path that leads to companionate love. 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.
when male voles that were genetically programmed to be promiscuous were given a gene that boosted vasopressin, they mated with one female exclusively, even though other receptive females were available. Vasopressin acted like a “good-husband hormone.” Dopamine does the opposite.
Most couples have sex less frequently as obsessive dopaminergic love evolves into companionate H&N love. This makes sense, since oxytocin and vasopressin suppress the release of testosterone. In a similar way, testosterone suppresses the release of oxytocin and vasopressin, which helps explain why men with naturally high quantities of testosterone in their blood are less likely to marry. Similarly, single men have more testosterone than married men. And if a man’s marriage becomes unstable, his vasopressin falls, and his testosterone goes up.
Despite the superficial appeal of having multiple partners, most people eventually settle down. A United Nations survey found that more than 90 percent of men and women marry by the age of forty-nine.
On average, women have the highest levels of testosterone on days thirteen and fourteen of their menstrual cycle. That’s when the egg is released from the ovary, and they are most likely to get pregnant.
the type of sexual drive testosterone produces is similar to other natural urges, such as hunger. When one is hungry, all kinds of different foods will satisfy the urge to eat. Similarly, when a person experiences testosterone-induced sexual urges, the desire is for sex in general, not necessarily for a particular person. In many cases, especially with young people, nearly anyone will do.
With few exceptions the brain’s response to orgasm was the same: dopamine off, H&N on. That’s how it’s supposed to be. But 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.
While H&N neurotransmitters let us experience reality—and reality during sex is intense—dopamine floats above reality. It is always able to conjure up something better. To add to its seduction, it puts us in control of that alternate reality. That these imagined worlds may be impossible doesn’t matter. Dopamine can always send us chasing phantoms.
Testosterone and dopamine have a special relationship. During passionate love, testosterone is the one H&N that is not suppressed in favor of dopamine. In fact, they work together to form a feedback loop—a
Dopamine tends to shut down once fantasy becomes reality, and dopamine is the driving chemical of romantic love.
Dopamine got the nickname “the pleasure molecule” based on experiments with addictive drugs. The drugs lit up dopamine circuits, and test participants experienced euphoria. It seemed simple until studies done with natural rewards—food, for example—found that only unexpected rewards triggered dopamine release. Dopamine responded not to reward, but to reward prediction error: the actual reward minus the expected reward.
When we fall in love, we look to a future made perfect by the presence of our beloved. It’s a future built on a fevered imagination that falls to pieces when reality reasserts itself twelve to eighteen months later.
the passionate love can be transformed into something more enduring. It can become companionate love, which may not thrill the way dopamine does, but has the power to deliver happiness—long-term happiness based on H&N neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and endorphin.
