The Molecule of More summary

If you’ve ever been in love, you probably know it can feel like being high. That’s because you were high– on dopamine. At the beginning of a romantic adventure, your brain is busy responding to all the exciting possibilities of a new relationship. Dopamine is firing like crazy. And this makes us feel euphoric, headless, love-drunk.

The problem is that relationships can’t stay new forever. And when the novelty goes, so does the dopamine. Anthropologist Helen Fisher has estimated that the rush of a new romance only lasts about 12 to 18 months. After that, many couples hit a bump. They begin to feel like something is missing from the relationship. And they’re right; they’re missing the dopamine.

Have you ever found yourself unpacking your shopping bags at home and wondering – once again – what drove you to buy another sweater you’ll never wear? Well, the answer is that wanting something is not the same as actually liking it. 

That’s because, as we saw in the last blink, our brain uses entirely different systems to produce desire and enjoyment. 

Our brain uses dopamine for many purposes. One of them is to make us crave things like foods, sex, or drugs. Luckily, it isn’t the only one. We have evolved a system which controls our dopamine desires and keeps them in check. You can think of it as a safety valve, and it’s driven by the same substance – dopamine. It’s called the dopamine control circuit. 

This system involves our frontal lobes, the part of the brain in which logical thinking happens. It controls planning, strategizing, and imagining the future. Even though the control and desire systems are driven by exactly the same molecule, their functions couldn’t be more different. Desire dopamine makes us want things – and control dopamine helps us get them.

Our brain uses control dopamine to plan, imagine, and strategize. Why? Because these things help us make our future better than our present. But achieving this aim often means thinking outside the box and making new connections between seemingly disparate things. 

This is where creativity comes into play. It is the skill of making unusual connections.

In 2002, researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University published a study on personality and political beliefs. It seemed to confirm what most academics thought anyway. Liberals, the study found, tended to be generous and sociable. Conservatives, on the other hand, leaned toward authoritarianism and impulsivity.

Except the truth was actually the opposite. Fourteen years later, researchers admitted that they’d accidentally mixed up the data sets. It was liberals who tended to be impulsive, authoritarian, and sensation-seeking – and conservatives were charitable and social.

Dopamine makes us seek out new experiences. And the more receptors our brains have for this chemical, the stronger its effect is on our behavior. 

This explains why people with a certain version of DRD4, the gene that codes for dopamine receptors, tend to be more risk-taking, adventurous, and keen to learn new things. Worldwide, about 20 percent of people have this gene variation, called DRD4-7R. 

Dopamine is the source of our desires, our tenacity, our creativity, and even our political beliefs. For most of us, these are the qualities that make us “us.” This means that of all our different brain chemicals, we identify most with dopamine. 

The curious thing is that dopamine makes up a pretty small portion of our brain chemicals. In fact, plenty of your character traits have nothing to do with dopamine. And yet, we often approach our life through a dopamine lens.