The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race

Love, sex, drugs, and artistic impulse are the subjects of this quirky book about “feel-good” dopamine by Lieberman, a professor at George Washington University, and Long, a speechwriter and lecturer at Georgetown University. Analyzing what “revs” desires, “illuminates our imagination,” and controls many neurotransmissions in the brain, the authors attribute many of the more intense human emotions—passion, self-confidence, and creative inspiration—to a cocktail of chemicals, dopamine being the most important; even political conviction gets linked to this molecule. The authors propose that people who are “dopaminergic,” or possess elevated levels of dopamine, in addition to being prone to divorce and mental illness, also tend to be creative and abstract thinkers, risk takers, and liberals. They go as far as to say that dopamine could have been responsible for ancestral migration across the Bering Strait, and caution that modern humans are in dopamine-induced overdrive, and perhaps headed toward destruction, thanks to humans’ vastly increased capacity for “gratifying our dopaminergic desires.” “In our minds, we are dopamine,” Lieberman and Long opine, and though the book does not really prove this, they do make an interesting case for how much of human behavior could be attributed to this one chemical. (Aug.)