Reiew: The Molecule of More

 The Molecule of More is a book length exposition of Dopamine. There's plenty of exposition about Dopamine's role in well known human syndromes such as addiction, but this book managed to explain it in a clear and interesting fashion without boring me, which I thought made it an excellent book to read as a review of what I'd already learned in previous books.

The long and short of the book is that Dopamine is the molecule exuded by your brain when there's a positive prediction error. In other words when something is a lot more pleasant or pleasurable than you expected. This leads you to do more of whatever the action you took until that positive prediction error goes away, which of course is pretty fast in the case of typical substances like food or drink.

When it comes to addictive substances like drugs (alcohol, cocaine, or sometimes even video games), however, this prediction error can turn you into an addict. In those circumstances, what medical practice can do is to try to heighten the pleasure you get from the H&N ("here and now") molecules which your body uses to direct pleasure at what you currently have as opposed to anticipatory pleasure that dopamine provides. Disappointingly enough, the book doesn't go into very much detail about how H&N molecules work.

The book then expands on this principle to describe how certain people who have heightened dopamine receptors can never be unhappy no matter how much they have. This explains why certain driven people keep focusing on achievements no matter what they've achieved, and why Mick Jagger never settled down with a single woman and just kept looking for more.

Some of the book is clearly speculative, for instance, the section speculating on how immigrants tend to have more dopamine receptors. Many of the book's points are told in the form of stories about an individual that feel compelling.

I enjoyed this book and can recommend it.