The Molecule of More

If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . 
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you 
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!” . . . 
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
—Rudyard Kipling, 
If
Emotion is an H&N experience. It’s what we feel right here, right now. 
Emotion is critical to our ability to understand the world, but emotions 

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DOMINATION
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 action is the one who will pull through.
HOW TO DUCK A PUNCH 
Although the complexities of modern society can make 
the automatic decisions of fight-or-flight work against 
our best interests, in more primitive situations it works 
just fine. A young doctor talking to an irritable substance 
abuser in the emergency room found himself unable 
to comply with the patient’s demand for drugs. When 
it became clear to the patient that he was not going to 
get what he wanted, he threw a punch. Fortunately, the 
doctor ducked, and before the patient had time to swing 
again, help arrived in the form of two security guards who 
were able to calm the patient down. When it was all over, 
the doctor said, “I had no idea what was going on. There 
was no time to think. It just happened.” He was pleased to 
discover that he was the lucky owner of H&N circuits that 
knew when to duck, no dopamine calculation required.
I took out my 40-foot boat with one crew member, and we sailed toward 
open ocean. Soon we encountered 35-mile-per-hour winds and 10-foot 

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
waves. Neither one of us was worried. We had seen this type of weather 
many times before.
I took the wheel to bring us about. As I was turning, I heard a loud 
pop, and the wheel spun freely. I no longer had control of the rudder, and I 
was more frightened than I ever remember being in my life.
We were within an L-shaped reef. The coral was visible just above the 
water, and the waves were pushing us toward it. My first thought was to 
jump out of the boat. I wanted to put on a life preserver, and try to swim 
out of danger. I quickly realized that would be impossible. The waves 
would either smash my body onto the reef, or the undertow would pull me 
farther out to sea. I could feel utter panic approaching, and I knew that if I 
allowed it to control me, I would lose my ability to think. This all happened 
over the course of about 10 seconds.
To save myself, I had to start thinking. I radioed a Mayday message, 
then my crewman and I got to work on the sails and used them to steer us