The Molecule of More

Hartford Courant
about his song “River of 
Dreams.” “I woke up singing that one, and then it wouldn’t 
go away.” REM’s Michael Stipe wrote lyrics for the band’s 
breakthrough song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know 
It (And I Feel Fine),” the same way. “I had had a dream about 
a party,” he told 
Interview
magazine. “Everyone at the party 
had names that started with the initials L. B. except for me. 
It was Lester Bangs, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Bernstein. That’s 
how one verse of the song came about.” Author Robert 
Louis Stevenson cited dreams as a source for 
The Strange 
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and Stephen King says that 
his novel 
Misery
came from a dream, too.

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
DREAM INCUBATION: HOW TO 
SOLVE PROBLEMS IN YOUR SLEEP
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 look-
ing 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 sure you have a pen and paper next to your bed. 
As soon as you wake up from a dream, write it down, whether 
or not you think it’s related to the problem. Dreams can be 
tricky, and the answer may be disguised. It’s important to 
write down the dream immediately because the memory will 
evaporate in seconds if you begin to think about something 
else. Many people have had the experience of waking up 
from an intense dream, one that’s overflowing with personal 
meaning, and then being unable to recall any of the details 
less than a minute later.
It may take a few nights before you find what you’re 
looking for, and the solution you get from your dream may 
not be the 
best
solution. But it will probably be a novel solu-
tion, one that approaches the problem from a new direction.
WHY NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS LIKE TO PAINT
The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than 
most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine. The poet 

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CREATIVITY AND MADNESS
composing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the phys-
icist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the 
ability to look beyond the world of the senses into a deeper, more pro-
found world of abstract ideas. Elite societies of scientists are filled with 
artistic souls. Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are 
one and a half times more likely to have an artistic hobby compared 
to the rest of us. Members of the U.K. Royal Society are about twice 
as likely, and Nobel Prize winners are almost three times as likely. The 
better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more 
likely you are to be an artist.
This similarity between art and science became especially impor-
tant when a computer programming crisis occurred at the turn of
the millennium. Computer programmers had developed the habit of
abbreviating years by using only the last two digits (e.g., 99 for 1999) in 
order to conserve then-expensive memory space (and a few keystrokes). 
The programmers weren’t thinking ahead to the next millennium, 
when 99 might mean 2099. Thousands of programs were at risk of
crashing; not just web browsers and word processors, but also software 
that controlled airplanes, dams, and nuclear power plants. The Y2K 
problem, as it was known, affected so many systems that there weren’t 
enough computer programmers to fix them all. By some reports, a few 
companies recruited out-of-work musicians because they were able to 
learn programming so easily.
WHY GENIUSES ARE JERKS
Music and math go together because elevated levels of dopamine often 
come as a package deal: if you are highly dopaminergic in one area, 
you’re likely to be highly dopaminergic in others. Scientists are artists 
and musicians are mathematicians. But there’s a downside. 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 

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
for social interaction. The scientist you meet at the cocktail party won’t 
shut up about his research because he can’t tell how bored you are. In 
a similar vein, 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.” The abstract concepts of
social justice and humanity came easily, but the concrete experience of
encountering another person was too hard.
Einstein’s personal life reflected his difficulties with relationships. He 
was far more interested in science than people. Two years before he and 
his wife separated, he began an affair with his cousin, and eventually mar-
ried her. Once again, he was unfaithful, cheating on his cousin with his 
secretary and possibly a half-dozen other girlfriends as well. His dopa-
minergic 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.
Understanding how the brains of geniuses work provides further 
insight into the dopaminergic personality, and the different ways it can 
manifest itself. We’ve already seen the impulsive pleasure-seeker who 
has difficulty maintaining long-term relationships and is vulnerable to 
addiction. We’ve also seen the detached planner who would rather stay 
late at the office than enjoy time with friends. Now we see a third pos-
sibility: the creative genius—whether painter, poet, or physicist—who 
has so much trouble with human relationships that he may appear to 
be slightly autistic.
4
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. Plato wrote about an incident in which 
Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, stood glued to one spot for an 
entire day and night, thinking about a problem, completely unaware of
what was going on around him.
4 Autism is also associated with abnormally high levels of dopamine activity in the 
brain.

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CREATIVITY AND MADNESS
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 takes a long-term view, 
chasing more abstract forms of gratification such as honor, wealth, and 
power. The genius lives in the world of the unknown, the not yet discov-
ered, obsessed with making the future a better place through her work. 
Geniuses change the world—but their obsession often presents itself as 
indifference toward others.
B E N E VO L E N T M I S A N T H R O P E S
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:
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in