THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES

There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein's dopaminergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally reconized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large population studies have also found a genetic componet of a dopainergic character. An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of ver 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to belong to 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 getting along with other people, and engaged in an infamous scientific quarrel with German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. He was secretive and paranoid and showed little emotion, to the point of ruthlessness. When he served as Master of the Royal Mint he caused many counterfeiters to be hanged despite the objections of his colleagues.

Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hidden 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 alchemists believed had magical propertieds 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 problems, 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 buid 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 demolisheds 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 rist of mental illness. Sometimes the world of the unreal breaks through its natural bounds, creating paranoia, delusions, and the feverish excitement of manic behavior. In addition, heightened dopaminergic activity may overwhelm H&N systems, hampering one's ability to from 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 entrepreneurs. Whatever their calling, they never stop working. What they care about most is their passion for creation, discovery, or dnlightenment. They never relax, never stop to enjoy the good things they have. Instead, they're obsessed with building a future that never arrivess. Because when the future becomes the present, enjoying it requires activation 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. Evoluntionary 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.

--THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES, THE MOLECULE OF MORE: CREATIVITY AND MADNESS, DANIEL Z. LIEBERMAN, MD AND MICHAEL E. LONG