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. Look at everything in your immediate vicinity. The chair you’re sitting on, the screen you’re reading this off of, the few other things you can smell and touch; this is your here and now. Everything else is inspired and manipulated by dopamine. Even an object that is across the room (one that you can see), the desire to go and pick it up is driven by dopamine, because dopamine is the molecule that allows us to imagine a potential future. It makes you believe that whatever you have at present is not as good as what you could potentially have later. Is the steak you’re eating for dinner right now really that good, or will the pizza you’ve got planned for tomorrow night be better? Have you finally found love, or is there a person even more suitable to you still out there waiting to be met and courted? Is this book review a good one, or will the next book be more interesting? One of the most intriguing lessons I learned from this book was the connection between dopamine and creativity. Dopamine is the all important chemical for planning things in the future, and creativity is literally the process of imagining something new and creating it, therefore it makes sense that creative people have been found to have larger (or more populous) dopamine receptors in their brains. The world of science is similar. Scientists ask questions, imagine potential futures, and go in search of answers. Scientists have similarly been found to have more dopamine in their brains than the average person. Sometimes this can be a scary thing; how many great artists and scientists from history do we know who have had addictions or compulsions they were perpetually unable to overcome? Picasso and Einstein, both geniuses in their respective fields, are known to have philandered about with a variety of women (despite both being married several times throughout their lives). The line between madness and genius can indeed be a thin one. Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and economics, and also lived with schizophrenia (he is portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind based on the book of the same name). There is a story about Nash in which he is asked how he can possibly believe that he is being contacted by aliens, to which he responds: “the ideas I have about supernatural beings come to me the same way that my mathematical ideas do.” Another interesting anecdote is the idea that almost anything can become addicting if it triggers your dopamine circuits. I experienced this myself one year when I went on four separate multi-day vacations each precisely one month apart. After returning home from the fourth trip, I spent an entire week planning number five until I eventually talked myself out of it. I have personally found it true that any repeated behavior that gives me a positive hit of dopamine can become something that I crave again and again. For some people it’s an injection of heroin, for others it’s getting on an airplane to a vacation destination. 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? Our authors mirror all of this research with a study done on happiness, in which they found that people were less happy when their mind was wandering. “It didn’t matter what the activity was. Whether they were eating, working, watching TV, or socializing, they were happier if they were paying attention to what they were doing.” Especially with the rise of social media platforms, a lot of time spent mentally wandering is time spent comparing yourself to others who probably have more of what you want (or what you think you want). These platforms, and our cell phones in general, are the most addicting things ever invented—every ping triggers our dopamine receptors. The researchers concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Living in the moment makes a human happy, as does appreciating what you already have and doing your best not to pine for more. Turns out all of those spiritual gurus really are on to something! On the one hand, dopamine has made us Homo Sapiens the dominate species on the planet by giving our ancestors “the ability to create tools, invent abstract sciences, and plan far into the future.” We have brought into being a world in which buildings scrape the skies, the internet unites communities across the oceans, and 8 billion humans coexist relatively peacefully. We have achieved wondrous accomplishments thanks to our internal desires for a better and more comfortable life. The question on the other hand, however, is where does it end? Our authors cautious us, noting that “in an environment of plenty in which we have mastered our world and developed sophisticated technology—in a time when more is no longer a matter of survival—dopamine continues to drive us forward, perhaps to our own destruction.” Obviously we cannot renounce all sensual pleasures and plans for the future, we are not Buddha. We want things in life for ourselves and our loved ones and we want to contribute to the betterment and advancement of society. But we can recognize our addictions and find balance. Personally, I have gotten into the habit of leaving my phone on silent. In the past it was only when I was watching a movie or at the Thanksgiving dinner table, but now I leave it silenced almost exclusively. I don’t want my phone to be in charge of telling me when some ‘important’ message comes my way; I check my phone when I want to, not the other way around. It’s one small step towards living in the moment. (Don’t worry Mom, I got all six of your voicemails and I will call you back.) Are there areas of your life that you keep going back to, despite the knowledge that it is unhealthy for your mind or body? Dopamine is the molecule of more, which means the most important question to answer is this: When is more a good thing, and when is it detrimental? That is stability.