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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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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
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