The Molecule of More

particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service 
of humanity . . . Yet I am incapable of living in the same room 
with anyone for two days together . . . I become hostile to 
people the moment they come close to me. 
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more 
than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests 
philosophy more efficiently than food.
—Alfred Nobel

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
I love humanity but I hate people.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sometimes they even use nearly identical language:
I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand.
—Charles Schulz (writing for Linus in 
Peanuts
)
It may be unseemly but it is explainable. Highly dopami-
nergic people typically prefer abstract thinking to sensory 
experience. To them, the difference between loving human-
ity and loving your neighbor is the difference between lov-
ing the idea of a puppy and taking care of it.
THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES
There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein’s dopa-
minergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally recog-
nized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with 
schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large pop-
ulation studies have also found a genetic component of a dopaminer-
gic character. An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of
over 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that 
placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disor-
der were more likely to belong to a national society of actors, dancers, 
musicians, visual artists, or writers.
Isaac Newton, who discovered calculus and the law of universal 
gravitation, was one of those troubled geniuses. He had difficulty get-
ting along with other people, and engaged in an infamous scientific 
quarrel with German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leib-
niz. He was secretive and paranoid and showed little emotion, to the 
point of ruthlessness. When he served as Master of the Royal Mint he 

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139
CREATIVITY AND MADNESS
caused many counterfeiters to be hanged despite the objections of his 
colleagues.
Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hid-
den messages in the Bible, and wrote over a million words on religion 
and the occult. He pursued the medieval art of alchemy, obsessively 
searching for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alche-
mists believed had magical properties and could even help humans 
achieve immortality. At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic 
and spent a year in an insane asylum.
Based on the evidence, it seems likely that Newton had elevated 
levels of dopamine that contributed to his brilliance, his social prob-
lems, and his psychotic breakdown. And he’s not alone. Many brilliant 
artists, scientists, and business leaders are thought or known to have had 
mental illness. They include Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Munch 
(who painted The Scream), Vincent van Gogh, Charles Darwin, Georgia 
O’Keeffe, Sylvia Plath, Nikola Tesla, Vaslav Nijinsky (the greatest male 
dancer of the early twentieth century, who once choreographed a ballet 
that started a riot), Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, chess master Bobby 
Fischer, and many others. 
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, 
moving beyond sensory impressions to uncover the deeper meaning of
what we experience. Then, like a child knocking over a tower of blocks, 
dopamine demolishes its own models so that we can start fresh and find 
new meaning in what was once familiar.
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 para-
noia, delusions, and the feverish excitement of manic behavior. In addi-
tion, heightened dopaminergic activity may overwhelm H&N systems, 
hampering one’s ability to form human relationships and navigate the 
day-to-day world of reality.
For some, it doesn’t matter. The joy of creation is the most 
intense joy they know, whether they are artists, scientists, prophets, or 

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
entrepreneurs. Whatever their calling, they never stop working. What 
they care about most is their passion for creation, discovery, or enlight-
enment. 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 acti-
vation of “touchy-feely” H&N chemicals, and that’s something highly 
dopaminergic people dislike and avoid. They serve the public well. But 
no matter how rich, famous, or successful they become, they’re almost 
never happy, certainly never satisfied. Evolutionary forces that promote 
the survival of the species produce these special people. Nature drives 
them to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of bringing into the 
world new ideas and innovations that benefit the rest of us.
SURF, SAND, AND PSYCHOSIS 
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is one of the most revolu-
tionary popular musicians. In his early years, his music was 
deceptively simple: catchy tunes about surfing, cars, and 
girls. But as time went on, he conducted unprecedented 
sonic experiments—music just as pleasant to listen to, but 
successively more layered and complex. As a composer, 
arranger, and producer, he began to introduce new sounds 
and new combinations of sounds to pop music. Some of 
these choices were variations of familiar forms: unusual 
voicing of common chords, unlikely assemblies of tones as 
chords, and standard progressions that begin and end in 
unexpected places. Wilson employed unusual instruments 
such as the harpsichord and theremin, which was previously 
used to create the eerie humming noise in horror movies. He 
also used devices that were not considered musical instru-
ments at all: a train whistle, bicycle bells, bleating goats. 
This experimentation culminated in the album