Over time things become hidden from out attention. It’s not that a thing starts out hidden, it’s that we make it hidden because it’s not important to us. We inhibit our ability to notice things that are unimportant so we don’t have to waste our attention on them. From the inside, though, it's actually very rational because you have to remember that these circuits were designed by evolution to keep us alive and make us successful. The problem with drugs is, is they give this chemical blast to the dopamine system — almost like a guided missile that causes more dopamine stimulation than natural behaviors. Mike Long: And so, that's, that's one step away from ink pen walk it to mommy. Well, that's a dog. And I bought sound? Yes.

Daniel Lieberman: Yes, that's right. It increases the amount of dopamine that's active at any given point in time. But that's basically by ferrying it from an inactive place to intact place. Daniel Lieberman: Yeah, and the difference is that when you're looking at things from a distance, you tend to use your dopamine circuits. When you look at things up close, you use your here and now circuits. They follow a different ethical tradition — not utilitarianism, but Harmer version and Harmer version says that it's wrong to hurt people, even if others will benefit from their suffering.

Ionic bonds

Daniel Lieberman: I think perhaps the broadest way to describe dopamine is that it's designed to maximize future resources, and we can see that working in ourselves when we're constantly focused on the future, I need more. I'm not satisfied. I'm not a good enough person rather than just kind of taking a deep breath and saying wow, look at all the wonderful things I have, the good things I've done. I'm grateful for them. The dopamine-boosting effect is also evident when marijuana smokers get lost in their own thoughts, floating aimlessly through imaginary worlds of their own creation. Here’s a question: Does Steven King still enjoy writing scary books? Or is he just chasing another dopamine hit? Do you think Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks still enjoy making movies, or are they simply looking for the rush of excitement they get from the next great script to be sent their way? Does Bob Dylan still get the same satisfaction from performing that he used to? Or is his dopamine drip firmly in control, always pushing him to play another show? Presenter: Wow, teeny tiny. Well, is there a way to help us visualise atoms to help us learn about them? Mike Long: Sure, so dopamine is all about the future, making the future better. Maximizing resources. It gives us desire and anticipation. But as Mike pointed out, it makes promises it can't keep. So, for example, you may be wanting a brand-new TV and going on the Internet, getting all excited about that TV. But as soon as you get it, things change because it's gone from the future to the present and dopamine can only process the future. So, what happens is dopamine shuts down, and that's one of the causes of buyer's remorse, which everybody has heard of.

Mike Long: I think this begins to open the door on what we think is so interesting about the book. dopamine, obviously has his evolutionary roll, and it has fulfilled it well, and to this point, it's, it's great. But, here we are in a modern age where a lot of the things that it was required for in a raw, empty place, we don't have that problem anymore. We don't have to worry about where the next meal's coming from most of the world. We don't have to worry about where we're going to sleep tonight and who were going to sleep with. Frankly, there are there are mechanisms and civilization to find that person When it comes to love, the loss of passionate romance will always happen eventually, and then comes a choice. Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times―and so good at figuring them out? So, the question is, is it ethically permissible to pull the switch to save five lives at the expense of one? Kaitlin Luna: So, it's really been integral in what has helped us evolve from early humans to where we are today?

Representing molecules: structural formulas

Daniel Lieberman: It's true, and most animals do have it. It's a very ancient chemical, but humans seem to have more of it than any other organism, and we are much more sophisticated than other organisms and so in human beings, it does a lot more, then just reward us when we engage in pro survival activities. It's responsible for a whole host of activities that people would never guess, such as love, creativity, even political affiliation. From dopamine’s point of view, it’s not the having that matters. It’s getting something—anything—that’s new. From this understanding—the difference between possessing something versus anticipating it—we can understand in a revolutionary new way why we behave as we do in love, business, addiction, politics, religion – and we can even predict those behaviors in ourselves and others. The book also looks at the fine line between creativity and madness and both of these are influenced by the hormone molecule that we know is dopamine. When we look at people with madness, often on antipsychotic medicines and what happens is that these people are given medicines which might contain substances which have receptors that allow neurotransmitters and hormones to either increase or reduce in how they work in the brain which can lead to changes in behaviour. And much of this is due to the dopamine molecule Mike Long: Dopamine sets us up to appreciate the world, to experience the world in two ways. And for me, this was, this was a revelatory. We have things that we appreciate — the color of your top right now, the color of the walls of the room, the feel of this table, a taste of a cup of water here I have. Things that we experience in the moment. We appreciate what they're like. That's one way we spend our time. So, it's just fascinating experiment in which they surveyed people about their political ideology, and they randomize them. In one, they put a hand sanitizer dispenser in the room as a very subtle reminder of the risk of infection. This simple presence of the hand sanitizer pushed people to be more conservative in their answers to the survey.

Daniel Lieberman: There are case reports of people who have been completely absent from sex their entire life. They're treated with these drugs, and all of a sudden, they become compulsively sexual. Characteristic of things in the extrapersonal space: to get them requires effort, time, and in many cases, planning. Mike Long: In fact, the easiest of all is to program the drone to do it, because there's nobody involved at all. Everything is hypothetical. It's a pattern that you're dealing with, not particulars. So, the easiest of all is to program a drone to take the utilitarian answer, because you don't have to feel anything when you write code. This may never be used. This book review took me a full week to write. Every time I sat down to collect my thoughts my phone would ping with a message from a friend and I would get swept up in whatever their drama was. One of those days I got a message from a young woman on a dating app, and the idea of meeting her for dinner consumed my mind to the point where I wrote nothing at all. Although frustrating, now that I am on day five of attempting to write this review, I have come to find it precisely appropriate that the dopamine mechanism in my brain kept me distracted for a full week. But let’s get to it. The ability to put forth effort is dopaminergic. We need to believe we can succeed before we are able to succeed.

Education and Career

And when you said that a moment ago, Dan, I think that's if you're listening to this, you wondering, well, what do you mean by creativity? This is one good way to begin to understand it. Creativity is associating things that have not been commonly associated before. Daniel Lieberman: That's why there's a fine line between art and insanity. Sometimes we don't know. Sometimes initially we say, this is crazy. This is not art. And then maybe a few decades later we take a second look and we say “wait a minute. That is art.” Let's say you're walking down the street and you see a pebble lying in a puddle. You're probably not going to think anything of it. But, if a highly dopaminergic poet is walking down the street and sees that same pebble, he may feel that that pebble is speaking to him in a very deep way that that pebble is revealing something about humanity and the world. He may even feel like that that pebble somehow reveals the hidden divinity of the world. And he may go on write a very beautiful poem about that that inspires dozens of people. Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely. That’s what it seems like. It does push the tide more. And I mean, something like opioids is affecting so many people and friends, family, that sort of thing.