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August 28, 2022 - November 1, 2025
The dopamine system as a whole evolved to maximize future resources. In addition to desire and motivation, which get the ball rolling, we also possess a more sophisticated circuit that gives us the ability to think long term, make plans, and use abstract concepts such as math, reason, and logic.
Dopamine yields not just desire but also domination. It gives us the ability to bend the environment and even other people to our will. But dopamine can do more than give us dominion over the world: it can create entirely new worlds,
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. —William Plomer, writer
Yet madness and genius, the worst and the best the brain can do, both depend on dopamine.
Psychiatrists prescribe medications called antipsychotics that reduce activity within the dopamine desire circuit. At first glance, that seems odd. Stimulation of the desire circuit typically leads to excitement, wanting, enthusiasm, and motivation. How could excess stimulation cause psychosis? The answer comes from the concept of salience, a phenomenon that will also play a crucial role in understanding the roots of creativity.
Salience refers to the degree to which things are important, prominent, or conspicuous. One kind of salience is the quality of being unusual. For example, a clown walking down the street would be more salient—more out of place—than a man in a business suit. Another kind of salience is value.
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.
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.
Receptors are molecules that sit on the outside of brain cells and catch neurotransmitter molecules (such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins).
If something blocks a receptor, such as an antipsychotic medication, then the neurotransmitter (in this case, dopamine) can’t get at it, and it can’t communicate its signal. It’s like putting a piece of tape over a keyhole.
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.
With low latent inhibition, an individual can treat familiar stimuli almost in the same manner as they would new stimuli.
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.
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?
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.
Models not only simplify our conception of the world; they also allow us to abstract, to take specific experiences and use them to craft broad, general rules. From this we can predict and deal with situations we’ve never encountered before.
Using imagination, we project ourselves into various possible futures, mentally experience them, then decide how we’re going to get the most out of what we see—how we’re going to maximize our resources,
Mental time travel depends on models because we make predictions regarding situations we haven’t yet experienced. How would my life be different if I bought this new dishwasher?
To the brain, each deliberate choice about the future is a matter for the dopamine system and the models it has created, whether you are deciding what to order at Burger King or the president is deciding whether to start a war. Mental time travel is responsible for every “next step” in our lives.
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.
Therapists can address these faulty, often unconscious assumptions through psychotherapy, which may include insight-oriented psychotherapy, in which the patient and the therapist work to uncover suppressed memories that locked in the negative assumptions. Another helpful technique is CBT, which addresses the assumptions head on, and teaches the patient practical strategies for changing them.
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.
Preexisting models have to be taken apart in order to see the problem in a fresh way.
Might there be a way to boost this priceless treasure? Would it be possible for someone to become more creative if a scientist stimulated the parts of the brain that are active during creative thinking?
They used a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). As the name suggests, specific regions of the brain are stimulated using direct current (DC)—that’s the kind of current you get from a battery,
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.
Dreams are similar to abstract thought in that they work with material taken from the external world, but they arrange the material in ways that are unconstrained by physical reality.
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.
Much of the brain is every bit as active during dreaming as it is when it is awake, but there are crucial differences. Not surprisingly, 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 secondary visual cortex.
Choose a problem that’s important to you, one that you have a strong desire to solve. The greater the desire, the more likely it is that the problem will show up in a dream. Think about the problem before you go to bed. If possible, put it in the form of a visual image. If it’s a problem with a relationship, imagine the person it involves. If you’re looking for inspiration, imagine a blank piece of paper. If you’re struggling with some sort of project, imagine an object that represents the project. Hold the image in your mind, so it’s the last thing you think of before you fall asleep. Make
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Sometimes having lots of dopamine is a liability. 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.
Albert Einstein once said, “My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings.” And “I love Humanity but I hate humans.”
Einstein’s personal life reflected his difficulties with relationships. He was far more interested in science than people.
His dopaminergic mind was both a blessing and a curse—the elevated levels of dopamine that allowed him to discover relativity was most likely the same dopamine that drove him from relationship to relationship, never allowing him to make the switch to H&N-focused, long-term companionate love.
In addition, the dopaminergic genius is so focused on his internal world of ideas that he wears different-color socks, forgets to comb his hair, and generally neglects anything having to do with the real world of the here and now.
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:
Dopamine gives us the power to create. It allows us to imagine the unreal and connect the seemingly unrelated. It allows us to build mental models of the world that transcend mere physical description,
But that power comes at a cost. The hyperactive dopamine systems of creative geniuses put them at risk of mental illness. Sometimes the world of the unreal breaks through its natural bounds, creating paranoia, delusions, and the feverish excitement of manic behavior.
What they care about most is their passion for creation, discovery, or enlightenment. 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.
The range of unusual creative connections suggests he experienced low latent inhibition associated with high levels of dopamine,
Wilson says that treatment to reduce the symptoms did not significantly reduce his creativity. Contrary to popular perception, the untreated pain of mental illness is a hindrance, not a help.
Conservative: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
The correct interpretation was the opposite of what they reported. It was the liberals in their study—not the conservatives—who were manipulative, tough-minded, and practical. And it was the conservatives, not the liberals, who tended to be altruistic, well socialized, empathic, and conventional.
Psychologists have worked for decades to develop ways to measure personality. They found that personality can be divided into different domains, such as how open a person is to new experiences or how self-disciplined he is. American psychologists divide personality into five domains, while the British prefer three.
The characteristics the study eventually associated with liberals—risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity, and authoritarianism—are the characteristics of elevated dopamine.
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. The word conservative, on the other hand, implies maintaining the best of what we have inherited from those who came before us. Conservatives are often suspicious of change.
