The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race

by Daniel Z. Lieberman

Dopamine was discovered in the brain in 1957 by Kathleen Montagu, a researcher working in a laboratory at the Runwell Hospital near London. 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.

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.

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.

Imagine you’re walking to work on a familiar street, one you’ve traveled many times before. 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. You’re excited about the bakery, yet you haven’t eaten any of their pastries, sampled any of their coffee, or even seen how it looks inside.

You go in and order a cup of dark roast and a croissant. You take a sip of the coffee. The complex flavors play across your tongue. It’s the best you’ve ever had. Next you take a bite of the croissant. It’s buttery and flaky, exactly like the one you had years ago at a café in Paris. Now how do you feel? Maybe that your life is a little better with this new way to start your day. From now on you’re going to come here every morning for breakfast, and have the best coffee and flakiest croissant in the city. You’ll tell your friends about it, probably more than they care to hear. You’ll buy a mug with the café’s name on it. You’ll even be more excited to start the day because, well, this awesome café, that’s why. That’s dopamine in action. It’s as if you have fallen in love with the café.

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.

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.

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.

Every part of living is divided in this way: we have one way of dealing with what we want, and another way of dealing with what we have.

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.

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.

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.

Love that lasts shifts the emphasis from anticipation to experience; from the fantasy of anything being possible to engagement with reality and all its imperfections. The transition is difficult, and when the world presents an easy way out of a difficult task, we tend to take it. That’s why, when the dopamine firing of early romance ends, many relationships end, too.

Think of a man who plans a vacation to Rome. He spends weeks scheduling each day, making sure he will be able to visit all the museums and landmarks he’s heard so much about. But when he stands among the most beautiful artwork ever created, he thinks about how he’s going to get to the restaurant where he has reservations for dinner.

He’s not ungrateful to see the masterpieces of Michelangelo. It’s just that his personality is primarily dopaminergic: he enjoys anticipation and planning more than doing.

It feels good. In fact, some people spend the majority of their lives pursuing this feeling—a feeling of anticipation, a feeling that life is about to get better.

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.

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, and endocannabinoids.

People who are good at both affiliative and agentic relationships are friendly, accessible leaders, such as Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.

Think of people you know who work relentlessly toward their goals but never stop to enjoy the fruits of their achievements.

Winners cheat for the same reason that drug addicts take drugs. The rush feels great, and withdrawal feels terrible.

If you make a mistake, people will forgive you, but if you act dishonestly, it will stick with you for a long time.

fraud is a powerful, sometimes overwhelming temptation when chasing the high of victory.

Someone with a highly active desire circuit might be impulsive or difficult to satisfy, constantly seeking more. His counterpart would be someone who is easily satisfied. Instead of downing shots at a noisy nightclub, a less dopaminergic person might prefer to spend the day gardening and then go to bed early.

a dopaminergic personality can be expressed in other ways that we’ll describe later. These people all have one thing in common, though. They are obsessed with making the future more rewarding at the expense of being able to experience the joys of the present.

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. In complex situations, people who have what we call “a cool head,” people who are more dopaminergic, are able to suppress this response, and make more deliberate choices that often work better.

One of our evolutionary ancestors, one endowed with a particularly robust dopamine control circuit, might respond to a charging lion by suppressing the urge to panic, and instead of trying to outrun the lion, he calmly picks up a burning stick from his fire to frighten it away.

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 ...

A runaway train hurtles down the tracks toward a group of five workers. If nothing is done, they will all die. It’s possible, however, to stop the train by pushing a bystander onto the tracks. His death will slow down the train enough to save the five workers. Would you push the bystander onto the tracks? In this scenario, most people would be unable to push the bystander onto the tracks—unable to kill a person with their own hands even to save the lives of five other people.

That would be impossible for all but the most detached person.

Imagine you’re standing some distance away watching the scene unfold. There’s a switch you can pull that will divert the train from the track with five people on it to a track that will kill only one. Do nothing, and the five will die. Will you throw the switch?

Pull back farther. Imagine you are sitting at a desk in a different city on the other side of the country. The phone rings and a frantic railway worker describes the situation. From your desk you control the path of the train. You can activate a switch and divert the train to a track with only one person on it, or do nothing and allow the train to hit the five people. Will you throw the switch?

Imagine that you are a transportation systems engineer, designing the safety features of the railway track. Cameras have been installed by the side of the tracks to provide information about who is standing where. You have the opportunity to write a computer program that will control the switch. The program will use the camera information to choose which track will kill the fewest people. Will you write the software that in the future might save five people by killing one?

The scenarios change but the outcomes will be the same: one life is sacrificed so that five can be saved, or five lives are lost to avoid the direct killing of one person.

It’s almost as if there were two separate minds evaluating the situation. One mind is rational, making decisions based on reason alone. The other is empathic, unable to kill a man, regardless of the big-picture outcome. One seeks to dominate the situation by imposing control to maximize the number of lives saved; the other does not.

Willpower is like a muscle. It becomes fatigued with use, and after a fairly short period of time, it gives out. One of the best experiments that demonstrated the limits of willpower was the famous radishes-and-cookies study. This study relied on deception. Volunteers were told that they were signing up for a food-tasting study. Here is how one scientist described it: The laboratory room was carefully set up before participants in the food conditions arrived. Chocolate chip cookies were baked in the room in a small oven, and, as a result, the laboratory was filled with the delicious aroma of fresh chocolate and baking. Two foods were displayed on the table at which the participant was seated. One display consisted of a stack of chocolate chip cookies augmented by some chocolate candies. The other consisted of a bowl of red and white radishes. When the participants arrived, they were hungry. They had been told to skip a meal before coming to the laboratory. The sight and smell of the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies were very tempting under these conditions. One at a time the participants were ushered into the laboratory where the chocolate chip cookies had just come out of the oven, and they were told to sample two or three cookies or two or three radishes, depending on which group they had been assigned to. Before the participant began to eat, the scientist left the room, reminding the participant that she must only eat the food she was assigned to. None of the partic...

If 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.

If willpower is like a muscle, can it be strengthened through exercise? Yes, but it requires some high tech “exercise equipment,” the kind of equipment that scientists at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University used to see if they could enhance the part of the brain people use for willpower.

In the motivation experiment, the participants were shown a thermometer with two lines. One showed the current level of activity in the motivation region, and the other represented a higher target they should try to achieve. Now they could see which strategies worked and which ones didn’t. After a while, they built up a collection of imagined scenes that effectively boosted motivation activity. These strategies continued to work even when the thermometer was removed.

MET therapists build up motivation by encouraging their patients to talk about their healthy desires. There’s an old saying: “We don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we say.”

For example, if you give someone a lecture on the importance of honesty, then have them play a game in which cheating is rewarded, you’ll probably find that the lecture had little effect. On the other hand, if you ask someone to give you a lecture on the importance of honesty, they will be less likely to cheat when they sit down to play the game.