The Molecule of More

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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 the source of creativity and, further along the spectrum, madness; it is the key to addiction and the path to recovery; it is the bit of biology that makes an ambitious executive sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, that makes successful actors and entrepreneurs and artists keep working long after they have all the money and fame they ever dreamed of; and that makes a satisfied husband or wife risk everything for the thrill of someone else. It is the source of the undeniable itch that drives scientists to find explanations and philosophers to find order, reason, and meaning.

To your brain, this single molecule is the ultimate multipurpose device, urging us, through thousands of neurochemical processes, to move beyond the pleasure of just being, into exploring the universe of possibilities that come when we imagine.

Lieberman, Daniel Z.; Long, Michael E.. The Molecule of More . BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

This is dopamine, and it narrates no less than the story of human behavior.

Lieberman, Daniel Z.; Long, Michael E.. The Molecule of More . BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

Love
Drugs
Domination
Creativity and Madness

Harmony

Dopamine and the Serrotonin neurotransmitters evolved to work together. They often act in opposition to one another, but that helps maintain stability among constantly firing brain cells.

Dopamine alone will never satisfy us. It can’t provide satisfaction any more than a hammer can turn a screw. But it’s constantly promising us that satisfaction is right around the corner: one more donut, one more promotion, one more conquest. How do we get off the treadmill? It’s not easy, but there are ways.

(1). Mastery

Mastery is the ability to extract the maximum reward from a particular set of circumstances.

It’s reward extraction success: dopamine achieving dopamine’s goal. When mastery is achieved, dopamine has reached the pinnacle of its aspiration—squeezing every last drop out of an available resource. This is what it’s all about. This is the moment to savor—now, in the present. Mastery is the point at which dopamine bows to H&N. Having done all it can do, dopamine pauses, and allows H&N to have its way with our happiness circuits. Even if it’s only for a short time, dopamine doesn’t fight the feeling of contentment. It approves. The best basking is basking in a job well done.

Mastery also creates a feeling of what psychologists call an internal locus of control. This phrase refers to the tendency to view one’s choices and experiences as being under one’s own control as opposed to being determined by fate, luck, or other people. It’s a good feeling. Most people don’t like being at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

In addition to making people feel good, an internal locus of control also makes people more effective. People with a strong sense of internal locus of control are more likely to achieve academic success and get high-paying jobs.

Mastering a skill requires a student to constantly move outside her comfort zone. As soon as a piano player gets good at an easy song, she has to start on a harder one. It’s a tough slog, but it can also be a great joy. Those who don’t give up generally feel it was worth it. It can result in a feeling that they have found their passion, something so engrossing they become completely immersed in it.

What dopamine loves more than anything else is reward prediction error, which, as we have discussed, is the discovery that something is better than we had anticipated it would be. Paradoxically, dopamine does everything in its power to avoid such incorrect forecasts. Reward prediction error feels great because your dopamine circuits get excited over the fact that there is something new and unexpected to make your life better. But being surprised by an unexpected new resource means the resource isn’t being fully exploited. So dopamine makes sure the surprise that felt so good will never be a surprise again. Dopamine extinguishes its own pleasure. It’s frustrating, but it’s the best way to keep us alive. What can we do to keep the surprises coming?

I feel like this is a very exploitable aspect of dopamine

Paying attention to reality, to what you are actually doing in the moment, maximizes the flow of information into your brain. It maximizes dopamine’s ability to make new plans, because to build models that will accurately predict the future, dopamine needs data, and data flows from the senses. That’s dopamine and H&N working together.

So what if I made prediction a game. I make predictions of my thoughts, feelings and future and it has three side effects. One, I'm more aware of how I'm thinking and two I get better at prediction and three, it makes life and paying attention more interesting

Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it.

This is when I get in the zone of reading, when I read a novel insight to capture it makes reading something I can do all day

Living our lives in the abstract, unreal, dopaminergic world of future possibilities comes at a cost, and that cost is happiness.

By spending time in the present, we take in sensory information about the reality we live in, allowing the dopamine system to use that information to develop reward-maximizing plans. The impressions that we absorb have the potential to inspire a flurry of new ideas, enhancing our ability to find new solutions to the problems we face. And that’s a wonderful thing. Creating something new, something that has never been conceived of before is, by definition, surprising. Because it is always new, creation is the most durable of the dopaminergic pleasures.

Lieberman, Daniel Z.; Long, Michael E.. The Molecule of More (pp. 219-220). BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

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