Your feelings are unique, but the chemicals that cause your feelings are the same as everyone else’s.
Your life experience is unique, but it overlaps with everyone’s because the same basic survival needs command your brain’s attention.
You may say you’re not focused on your “survival,” and you may not be, consciously. Loftier goals such as world peace and social justice get your attention when you talk to yourself in words. But your happy chemicals respond to your mammalian survival prospects as your brain has learned to define them.
Dopamine promotes survival by telling your body where to invest its energy. Your ancestors foraged for food by walking slowly until something triggered their excitement. That dopamine told them when to go for it. The mammal brain scans constantly for potential rewards, and dopamine is the signal that it has found some. It feels good, which motivates you to keep seeking and finding.
It’s important to understand foraging to understand your brain. Our ancestors didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. They constantly scanned their surroundings for something that looked good, and then invested energy in pursuit. Dopamine is at the core of this process. In today’s world, you don’t need to forage for food, but dopamine makes you feel good when you scan your world, find evidence of something that felt good before, and go for it. You are constantly deciding what is worth your effort and when it’s better to conserve your effort. Your dopamine circuits guide that decision. You might wish the good feeling of dopamine just flowed all the time, but that wouldn’t really benefit you.
A marathon runner gets a surge of dopamine when she sees the finish line. A football player is fueled by dopamine when he scores and does a victory dance. “I did it!” the brain tells the body. It feels so good that you look for ways to trigger that feeling again.
Of course, dopamine didn’t evolve for crossing arbitrary lines on the ground. It evolved to release energy when you have a chance to meet a survival need. An ape climbing to a piece of fruit enjoys dopamine as she nears the reward. Dopamine releases her reserve tank of energy so she’s able to meet her needs. She doesn’t say “I did it!” in words, but neurochemicals create that feeling without words.
An ape’s dopamine starts flowing as soon as she sees a fruit she can reach. That’s because her brain built a dopamine pathway when she first tasted fruit. The sugar triggered the message “this meets your needs! Get more of it!” That dopamine surge connected all the neurons active at that moment, which wired her dopamine to turn on when she sees anything similar in the future.
Your dopamine circuits are built from your own past dopamine experiences. Imagine a child foraging with his mother. He sees her excitement when they stumble on a delicious berry patch. His mirror neurons (which mirror the behavior of others, as we’ll learn more about in Chapter 3) get his dopamine flowing before he ever eats a berry. When he has his first taste, flavors rare in nature get his attention. More dopamine is triggered, which paves a pathway to the neurons active at that moment. That will help him recognize sights, sounds, and smells associated with berries in the future.
Without effort or intent, dopamine builds a neural template that helps you find rewards. It also stimulates the energy you need to pursue rewards. We are not born with circuits defining the rewards that meet our needs. We build them from life experience. That’s why one person gets excited about eating crickets while another person gets excited about the Food Network. You can meet your needs by foraging for a career opportunity rather than a berry patch. But you do it with the operating system that met survival needs before there was language.
You may not have a “Wow!” feeling about berries, because sweetness is no longer a rare taste. Your brain saves your energy for rewards that are scarce in your life experience. I get a rush of excitement when I see the first cherries of the season, but my excitement doesn’t last. Looking at cherries can’t make me happy all the time. My brain saves its dopamine for things relevant to my present needs instead of wasting it on things already available.
Social rewards are not easily available because they can’t be mass produced like berries and sugar. Seeking and finding social rewards stimulates the excitement of dopamine. People invest years of effort trying to become a heart surgeon or a rock star because each step along the way triggers dopamine. Even if your goal is committing the perfect crime or living on the beach, your brain releases dopamine as you seek and find steps that bring you closer. The social rewards that stimulate your dopamine depend on your unique life experience. But we all live with the fact that dopamine is soon metabolized and you have to approach a reward again to get more.
The fleetingness of dopamine was illuminated by a landmark monkey study. The animals were trained to do a task and get rewarded with spinach. After a few days, they were rewarded with squirts of juice instead of spinach. This was a bigger reward than they expected and the monkeys’ dopamine soared. But as the experimenters continued rewarding with juice, the monkeys’ dopamine declined to nothing in a few days. Their brains stopped reacting to the sweet, juicy reward. In human terms, they took it for granted. Dopamine evolved to store new information about rewards. When there’s no new information, there’s no need for dopamine.
This experiment has a dramatic finale. The experimenters switched back to spinach, and the monkeys reacted with fits of rage. They screamed and threw the spinach back at the researchers. The monkeys had learned to expect juice. It no longer made them happy, but losing it made them mad.
Cocaine stimulates more dopamine than real life. It gives you the thrill of finding berries or finishing a marathon without leaving the couch. You get the excitement of accomplishment without having to accomplish anything. Natural rewards feel less exciting if your brain learns to expect an artificial jolt.
Such research improves our understanding of dopamine significantly over initial research conducted in the 1950s. You have probably heard about the rat wired up to electrically stimulate its “pleasure center” by pressing a lever. The rat seized the day, pressing constantly until it dropped dead. It would not stop for food or water or attractive mates. Scientists presumed the electrode was triggering pleasure. But why would a brain define pleasure in a way that motivated it to die rather than eat, drink, or mate? Now we realize that the expectation of reward triggers dopamine. The unfortunate rat kept expecting rewards from the lever because it triggered more dopamine than real-world rewards.
A small potential reward triggers a small surge of dopamine; a huge potential reward triggers a huge surge of dopamine. For example, mothers have been seen lifting a car when their child is pinned underneath. Saving your child’s life is the biggest reward there is from the perspective of your genes. A mother is not consciously thinking of her genes when she risks her life to save her child; she’s not thinking at all. Such mothers report they had no idea what they were doing. The verbal part of the brain is not needed for a dopamine circuit to unleash the energy needed for the job.
The link between dopamine and survival is not always obvious, however. For example, computer games stimulate dopamine, even though they don’t meet real needs. Computer games reward you with points that your mind has linked to social rewards. To get the points, you activate the seek-and-find mechanism that evolved for foraging. You keep enjoying dopamine as you keep approaching rewards. The dopamine paves a pathway that tells you to expect good feelings from computer games. The next time you feel bad, the game is one way your brain knows to relieve those bad feelings. From your mammal brain’s perspective, it relieves the threat, though the social rewards may prove more elusive.
Dopamine is the excitement you feel when you expect a reward. A hungry lion expects a reward when she sees an isolated gazelle. A thirsty elephant expects a reward when he sees signs of a water hole. Dopamine unleashes your reserve tank of energy when you see a way to meet a need. Even when you’re just sitting still, dopamine motivates you to scan a lot of detail to find a pattern that’s somehow relevant to your needs. When you find details that are “just right,” it feels good. Finding the puzzle piece you’re looking for feels good because of dopamine.
Whatever triggered your dopamine when you were young paved neural pathways that tell your dopamine when to turn on today. These circuits work without words, so your dopamine can be hard to make sense of. You will learn if you pay close attention to patterns in your excitement. Sometimes this is easier to see in others (though they may not appreciate your observations). Spend time noticing the joy of finding what you seek:
The urge for more did not start with “our society.” In fact, our ancestors never stopped seeking either. When their bellies were full, they looked for new ways to meet their needs by making better arrows and stronger shelters. We know how hard they searched for the right materials because archaeological sites often contain materials from far away. Dopamine made the quest feel good, but the feeling soon passed and they kept seeking more. Every brain learns to link effort and reward, whether material rewards, social rewards, or relief from a threat.
If you are studying for a math test, you are fueled by dopamine. You may not consciously think it feels good, but something in your life connected math to other rewards. It could be material rewards, social rewards, or just the good feeling of an achievement. Solving math problems is another kind of seek-and-find activity. When you find the right answer, you get that “I did it!” feeling, which erases any cortisol feelings for a moment. When your answer is wrong, you may try again because you still expect a reward.
An athlete spends long hours training because a little dopamine is stimulated by each step toward expected rewards. Winning games or medals triggers a big burst of dopamine, but these are only steps as well. An athlete has linked these steps to rewards that feel relevant to survival, be it material rewards, social rewards, or internal rewards.
Each brain has built expectations about survival rewards and the steps it takes to reach them. When you moved toward your expected reward, dopamine makes it feel good.
“Euphoria” is a common description of the endorphin feeling. But this neurochemical did not evolve for good times. Physical pain is what triggers it. You may have taken a bad fall and got up thinking you were fine, only to discover that you’re seriously injured. That’s the power of endorphin.
Endorphin masks pain for a short time, which promotes survival by giving an injured mammal a chance to reach safety. If your ancestor broke his leg while hunting, or got worn down by hunger and thirst, the oblivion of endorphin helped him do what it took to save himself.
“Runner’s high” is a well-known endorphin experience. But you cannot get a daily high from a daily run. Endorphin is only released if you push past your capacity to the point of distress. This is not necessarily a good way to promote survival. Endorphin did not evolve to motivate self-inflicted pain. It evolved to escape pain.
Perhaps you’ve seen a zebra wriggle out of the jaws of a lion on a wildlife documentary. You see the zebra’s flesh ripped open but it can still run. Endorphin masks the pain for a few moments, which helps the zebra escape. If it fails to escape and ends up in the lion’s jaw, it will at least die in an endorphin haze. It’s nice to know about nature’s morphine when you see disturbing footage. It reminds you that endorphin exists not for partying but for momentary respite in the struggle for life.
The respite of endorphin is brief because pain has survival value. Pain is your body’s signal that something is urgently wrong. If you ignored pain all the time, you would touch hot stoves and walk on broken legs. You would not make good survival choices if you were always high on endorphin. We evolved to notice distress signals, not to keep masking them with oblivion.
When endorphin was discovered, it was called endogenous morphine because it was so similar to opiates yet was produced by the body’s own endogenous systems. But it would be more true to say that morphine is the drug industry’s endorphin. Heroin and other opium derivatives have an effect on us because they fit our natural endorphin receptors.
We are not designed to release endorphin all the time. Exercise can give you a little, but exercising to the point of pain doesn’t promote survival. Laughing and crying trigger internal convulsions that stimulate endorphin, but this road to euphoria is limited too. Fake laughs don’t trigger the internal convulsions, and real laughs only last for seconds. Real cries are painful, and fake cries don’t trigger the physical distress.
A broken heart doesn’t trigger endorphin the way a broken bone does. Endorphin did not evolve to mask social pain. In the past, daily life held so much physical pain that social pain was secondary. Today, we suffer less from the pain of manual labor, predator attack, foraging accidents, and deteriorating disease. We have more energy to focus on painful social disappointments. This leaves us feeling that life is more painful even as it’s less painful.
Endorphin is an oblivious feeling that masks physical pain. Endorphin allows an injured animal to escape from a predator and save its life. We are designed for survival, not for getting high. Nature’s opiate is only released in short spurts because pain is actually good for you: it tells you not to touch fire or run on a broken leg. Exercise is good, but “runner’s high” only happens if you exercise to the point of pain. We are not designed to inflict pain on ourselves to feel good. Fortunately, small drips of endorphin are stimulated by laughing, crying, and reasonable exertion. You can’t expect a constant high, but you can celebrate your body’s ability to manage pain. Notice your endorphin at work in a moment when:
Endorphin is different from adrenaline. Skydiving and bungee jumping trigger an “adrenaline high.” You anticipate pain and your body releases adrenaline to handle the emergency. The “adrenaline junkie” is not seeking pain, but the rush of energy designed to avoid pain. When you see the ground rushing at you, your brain anticipates pain, even if you’re safely attached to a rope or a roller coaster. Your brain evolved in a world of real threats, not self-imposed, artificially concocted threats.
Adrenaline is outside the scope of this book because it does not cause happiness. It causes a state of arousal, as if your body is stepping on the gas. Some people learn to like that feeling, but it is not a signal that something is good for you. It is a signal that something is extremely relevant to survival, whether good or bad, and thus requires your energy. For example, if you are about to accept the Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden, a spurt of adrenaline tells you that the moment is important and provides the energy to manage it. If your parachute doesn’t open, that is important too. Adrenaline amplifies the positive or negative message conveyed by the other neurochemicals. It prepares you for immediate action, but it doesn’t tell you whether that action should be going toward or running away.
When you feel like you can lean on someone, oxytocin creates that feeling. When you trust someone, or enjoy someone’s trust in you, oxytocin is flowing. The pleasure of belonging or safety in numbers is oxytocin too.
Social trust promotes survival, so the brain rewards it with a good feeling. But trusting everyone is not good for survival. That’s why your brain evolved to analyze social alliances instead of just releasing oxytocin all the time.
Feeding a horse is a simple example of the oxytocin feeling. When I walk toward a horse with food in my hand, we check each other out. The horse fears strangers but wants the food. I fear putting my hand into those huge teeth but I want to enjoy the shared trust. Each of us scans for evidence that it’s safe to trust. When both of us are satisfied that the other doesn’t pose an immediate threat, we relax, and it feels good. That’s the release of oxytocin.
Horses survive by trusting their herd mates. A herd is an extended alarm system. Each horse shares the burden of staying alert for predators. The horse that trusts its fellow horses can relax a bit and still survive.
Mammals live in herds and packs and troops because there’s safety in numbers. If they are separated from their group mates, their oxytocin falls and they feel bad. A herd animal panics when it can’t see at least one of its group. When it rejoins them, a surge of oxytocin relieves the cortisol.
Mammals take the risk of leaving their group when it promotes reproduction. Young mammals transfer to a new troop at puberty to improve mating opportunities. (Depending on the species, either the males or the females disperse at puberty.) A mother mammal leaves her group to search for a lost child or to give birth. Reproductive behaviors trigger more oxytocin than mere companionship, which motivates a mammal to leave the group to promote its genes.
When a mammal gives birth, her oxytocin surges. This motivates her to guard the newborn constantly in addition to facilitating labor and lactation. Oxytocin spikes in the newborn brain too, so a young mammal clings to its mother without comprehending the danger of leaving her. When the birth process is over, more oxytocin is stimulated by holding or licking. This paves neural pathways that facilitate the flow of oxytocin in similar settings. Bonds of attachment are a buildup of oxytocin circuits. Over time, attachment extends from the mother to the herd or pack or troop.
Touch triggers oxytocin. Primates are often seen running their fingers through a troop mate’s fur to remove debris. Oxytocin makes it feel good to both the giver and the receiver. Monkeys and apes invest a lot of time grooming others, and it appears to establish social alliances. Researchers find that monkeys and apes with more social alliances get better mating opportunities and have more surviving offspring. When there’s a conflict in a troop, primates tend to aid the individuals they groom with. Social alliances can entangle you in trouble, but oxytocin makes it feel good.
A herd only protects you if you follow the crowd and run when they run. If you insist on seeing the lion for yourself before you run, you are less likely to survive. Natural selection built a brain that can trust the judgment of others. But herd behavior has a downside that’s obvious to humans. We worry about jumping over cliffs when the other lemmings jump. We worry about group-think and gangs and codependence. We override our herd impulses and strike out on our own. But we often feel like a lamb among lions because of our urge for oxytocin.
Reptiles have no warm and fuzzy feelings toward other reptiles. They stay alone in their vigilance instead of distributing the burden among many eyes and ears. A lizard never trusts other lizards. Its chemical equivalent of oxytocin is only released during mating and egg laying.
Reptiles strike out on their own the moment they’re born. Instead of relying on parental care, a young lizard starts running the instant she hatches from her shell. If she doesn’t run fast enough, a parent eats her—the better to recycle the energy into another sibling instead of letting a predator get it. Fish don’t even wait for their eggs to hatch. They swim off to pursue other interests the moment their eggs are fertilized. Plants send their seed into the wind without ever knowing if it grows into mighty oaks.
Mammals, on the other hand, bond with their child because oxytocin receptors prepare us to feel good about it. (Birds have some parental care too, and they have a molecular equivalent of oxytocin.) Parental attachment revolutionized the biology of the brain. It became possible for mammals to be born without survival skills and to learn from life experience instead. Unlike reptiles, fish, and plants, which are born with all necessary survival knowledge, mammals are born fragile and stupid. The mammal brain does not fully develop in the safety of the uterus or egg. It develops by interacting with the world around it. A mammal needs protection while its brain is still developing, but this investment leads to a huge advantage: Each generation wires itself to survive in the world it actually lives in rather than the world of its ancestors.
The smaller an animal’s brain, the more it relies on prewired survival skills. That prewired brain is adapted to a specific ecological niche, and it quickly dies outside that niche. The bigger an animal’s brain, the more it builds survival skills from life experience. A big brain makes connections instead of being born with connections. The larger a creature’s brain, the longer it remains helpless after birth. It takes time to fill a brain with useful connections.
A big brain creates a huge survival dilemma because a fragile newborn is easily eaten by predators. A big-brained baboon or elephant cannot birth hundreds of offspring for a few to survive, the way a small-brained snake or lizard does. A warm-blooded, big-brained infant is hard to gestate, so a mother can only make a few in her lifetime. If she loses them to predators, her genes are wiped out. So she does her darnedest to keep every single one alive.
But the more you invest in each child, the more you lose if it dies. Attachment is what makes this strategy work. Momma mammals guard each newborn constantly, and herds help them out. When a predator snatches a young mammal, the mother loses a chunk of her lifetime reproductive capacity, but oxytocin keeps motivating attachment.
For most of human history, people spent their lives in the network of attachments they were born into. They might have transferred to a new group to mate, but such transfers were otherwise limited. Today, lasting attachments are less preferred and often disparaged. Without them, however, we feel like something is wrong. We don’t know why, but we long for the place where “everybody knows your name.” Or the crowded sports arena or concert hall where thousands of people act on the same impulse. Or the political group that shares your anger. Or the online forum that welcomes your comments. These things feel good because social alliances stimulate oxytocin. Of course, they are only brief moments of trust—small squirts that will soon pass. And that’s why the brain is always looking for a chance to stimulate more.
Oxytocin is the pleasure of letting down your guard near those you trust. It’s not the conscious decision to trust, but the physical feeling of safety you get from proximity to trusted others. Oxytocin flows in a gazelle surrounded by its herd and a monkey having its fur groomed. Social alliances promote survival, and mammals evolved a brain that makes it feel good. A human brain can abstract, so we can enjoy the feeling of social support without others being physically present. Our oxytocin pathways build from life experience. We mammals surge with oxytocin at birth, which builds our core attachment circuits. We wire ourselves to trust whatever we experience while our oxytocin is flowing. That’s how a young mammal transfers its attachment from its mother to its herd. Humans often leave the herd we grew up in, but our brains still crave oxytocin. Notice the good feeling stimulated by the following opportunities to lower your guard:
Alas, the good feeling of social trust sometimes leads to the bad feeling of betrayed trust. Since we avoid bad feelings, we make careful decisions about when to trust and when to withhold trust. Primates have enough neurons to be choosy about their friends. Monkeys and apes form individualized attachments instead of all-or-nothing bonds to a troop. With each social interaction, they update their circuits with oxytocin or cortisol. Over time, you “know who your friends are” because your neurochemicals react to individuals as “good for your survival” or “bad for your survival.”
Monogamy is rare in the mammal world, though it appears in species with high oxytocin. Most mammals bond with foraging partners rather than sex partners. You might have mixed feelings about the people you eat with and work with. You might not trust them sometimes and even wonder why you put up with them. But when you leave them, your oxytocin falls and your mammal brain tells you that something is wrong.
Primates are always negotiating their social alliances. This is easy to see in your daily life, when you interact with family members, friends, coworkers, or neighbors. You may find it annoying when you see others do it. But when you seek support, you feel like you are just trying to survive. Social alliances transform threatened feelings into safe feelings thanks to oxytocin.
Getting respect feels good because it triggers serotonin. The good feeling motivates you to seek more respect, and that promotes survival. You may feel sure that you don’t think this way, but you can easily see this dynamic in others. In the animal world, getting respect clearly promotes an individual’s DNA. They’re not thinking about genes, of course. They seek social dominance because serotonin makes it feel good. They avoid conflict because it’s linked to pain. The mammal brain is always looking for ways to enjoy the good feeling of serotonin without the bad feeling of pain.
Each mammal species has gestures that signal dominance and submission. A dominance gesture signals the intent to control food or mating opportunity. A submission gesture protects an individual from the pain of conflict with stronger individuals. Animals only fight when both individuals believe they are stronger. Conflict is usually avoided because animals are skilled at assessing their relative strength, and the weaker individual submits to avoid harm.
In the human world, we shift fluidly between the dominant and subordinate position in the course of each day. We sustain goodwill by taking the lead sometimes and ceding control at other times. You can say no one should ever dominate, but if you collide in a doorway and say “after you,” but the other person says “after you,” someone must act or you’ll be in that doorway forever. Maybe you will go last by insisting harder, and then feel superior about it. That’s your mammal brain’s quest for serotonin.
Mammals seek the one-up position because serotonin makes it feel good. One study showed this by separating an alpha vervet monkey from his troop with a one-way mirror. (An alpha is the individual to whom group mates routinely defer.) The alpha monkey made the dominance gestures typical of his species, but his subordinates did not respond with the expected submission gestures because the one-way mirror blocked their view of him. The alpha got agitated and his serotonin level fell. Each day the experiment continued, his serotonin kept dropping and his agitation grew. He needed their submission to keep up his serotonin.
All living creatures have serotonin, even amoeba. One-celled animals use serotonin in a way that’s curiously relevant to us. We humans have more serotonin in our digestive system than we have in our brains. An amoeba is too small to have separate digestive and nervous systems, so it uses serotonin in a dual way that explains everything. Serotonin signals the amoeba’s body to move toward food and get ready to digest it. The mechanism is astonishingly simple. An amoeba constantly forages and scans for danger by letting tiny amounts of water pass through its cell membrane. If the water sample shows a high concentration of foreign material, the amoeba interprets that as danger and it wiggles off in a random direction. If the sample contains a low level of foreign material, the amoeba perceives a good feeding opportunity and releases serotonin. That straightens its tail so it forges straight ahead, and it turns on its digestive juices. Serotonin is the sensation that it’s safe to go ahead and meet your needs.
In mammals, serotonin is the good feeling of having secure access to food or other resources. The stronger mammals in a herd or pack or troop typically dominate food and mating opportunities. This may conflict with one’s pristine view of nature, but close observation of countless species shows that each has its way of competing for resources. Much of the time, animals are having food fights, battling over mating opportunities, and doing everything possible to get their offspring ahead. Humans strive to curb these impulses, but we’ve inherited a brain that makes social dominance feel good. We scan for ways to enjoy the good feeling of social importance without the bad feeling of conflict.
Imagine a piglet born in a litter of sixteen to a mother who has twelve teats. Each piglet struggles for nourishment from the moment of birth. Complex decisions are required. If a piglet doesn’t struggle it could starve to death, but if it struggles too much, it may get injured in conflict or simply consume more energy than it takes in. Serotonin helps a piglet find the level of assertion that’s just right. Each time a piglet succeeds at dominating another, it gets a squirt of serotonin. That motivates it to seek more of the good feeling, and the extra nourishment helps it prevail. But it fails sometimes, and its serotonin falls. That motivates it to submit and conserve energy. Serotonin promotes survival whether it’s up or down by balancing energy expenditure with food intake.
The piglet’s cortisol spikes if it’s seriously underfed. That motivates aggression, which helps it get food. Aggression is different from social dominance, because cortisol feels bad while serotonin feels good. Social dominance is the calm, secure expectation that you will get what you need. Cortisol is the sense that something awful will happen if you don’t act now.
When a piglet has extra energy, it strives to dominate a teat and keep others away. If it succeeds, it strives for a better teat—one closer to the mother’s heart. The top teat brings more nutrition and more warmth than the hind teats. Researchers are still debating this, but farmers have observed it for centuries.
Mother Pig does not intervene in this conflict. The siblings sort it out for themselves by the time they are a few days old. Each piglet learns from the experience of pleasure and pain. Each brain builds expectations that tell it when to forge ahead to meet its needs and when to hold back to avoid pain. Soon the piglets will be out foraging for their own food, and then start competing for mating opportunities.
Every brain longs for the good feeling of serotonin, but the motivation is easier to see in others and can be difficult to see in yourself. The point is not that you should push your way to the best teat. The point is that your brain constantly monitors your access to resources. When access looks secure, you feel good for a moment, and then you look for ways to make it more secure. You may get annoyed when you see others trying to secure their position. But when you do it, you think, “I’m just trying to survive.”
Securing resources is tricky for creatures that live in groups. A solitary reptile can just lunge at food without worrying about others. If a group-living mammal lunged at food, it might crash into a bigger, stronger individual who would attack it. Avoiding injury promotes survival more than any one bite of food. So the impulse to compare yourself to others and decide whether you’re stronger or weaker is more pressing than the impulse to eat. When a mammal sees that it’s weaker, it restrains itself until the other has eaten. When a mammal sees that it’s stronger, its serotonin surges and it lunges at food.
I am not saying we should dominate the weak. I am saying we should recognize our own evolutionary urge to make social comparisons and come out on top. Young mammals quickly learn that stronger individuals will bite them if they’re in the way of desirable resources. The pain of being bitten wires a youth to hold back. You may call it “cooperation” when you see an animal hold back, but the animal wants its chance to eat and reproduce. It is not lyricizing about cooperation. It is scanning for safe opportunities to go for it.
Each gender seeks dominance in ways that best promote its DNA. In most species, females invest so heavily in each offspring that their genes are best served by enhancing the survivability of her young. A male’s reproductive success is often served by maximizing mating opportunities. Within these strategies, both genders dominate and submit to meet their needs.
Animals can’t save money for a rainy day. The only way they can put something aside for the future is to invest today’s extra energy into social power that can help them survive tomorrow. That’s why each mammalian herd or pack or troop has its status hierarchy. The organization is not conscious, of course. Each individual simply remembers whom they fear and whom they trust, and a hierarchy emerges organically. Cortisol tells a mammal to hunch down in self-defense in the face of a stronger group mate. Serotonin tells a mammal to swell with pride (or air, depending on how you look at it) when it is strong enough to get respect and meet its needs.
A cow that pushes her way to the center of the herd is safer from predators than a cow near the edge of the herd. The pushy cow improves her chances of living to reproduce and keeping her young alive. Bulls typically avoid the herd until mating time, when they ferociously battle other males for admission. The most dominant bull pushes his way to the center of the herd, where he meets and inseminates the most dominant cows. In each species, social dominance promotes reproductive success in one way or another. I am not advocating such behavior, simply recognizing the human challenge of trying to feel good while avoiding conflict.
You may have heard that animals are altruistic. There’s a demand for evidence that nature is good, and researchers tend to supply “studies” that meet the demand. In the name of science, hundreds of trials are done, and instances that can be construed as altruism are reported. The illusion of animal altruism is often built on highly artificial laboratory scenarios. In the wild, animals will snatch food from the mouths of juveniles who dare to go for it, but that’s not reported in the news.
In the animal world, higher-status males generally get more mating opportunities. Higher-status females tend to be more fertile and their young have higher survival rates. Brains that seek social dominance made more copies of themselves. We are descended from them.
At the same time, we strive for social trust to stimulate oxytocin. Your brain is always looking for ways to enjoy serotonin without losing oxytocin or increasing cortisol. For example, if your comment in a meeting gets respect, that feels good. But if you dominate the meeting, you may end up with pain. Each experience of pain or pleasure builds connections that help you figure out how to feel good and survive. Your brain is always trying to get respect using the circuits you have. (This is the subject of my book I, Mammal: Why Your Brain Links Status and Happiness.)
Serotonin is the feeling of being important. We see how much others like to feel important, but we hate to see this in ourselves. It helps to know that our brain was naturally selected to seek social dominance, because brains that did so made more copies of their genes. We strive to avoid conflict because aggression can wipe out your genes. So the mammal brain keeps calculating social data, and when you find a safe way to assert yourself, it rewards you with serotonin. A big human cortex tries to stimulate serotonin with abstractions rather than one-on-one showdowns, such as “pride,” “confidence,” or “self-respect.” It feels good . . . even if you hate to admit it. Noticing your mammalian urge for serotonin is a valuable skill. Practice by looking for:
Your past serotonin experiences built circuits that create your present expectations. If you expect to be master of the universe, you may end up feeling disrespected much of the time. Your life may be fine in objective terms, but the expectation of continual admiration from others leads to disappointment. A person who has set her sights differently may feel satisfied with the respect she is getting from her world, and thus enjoy the calm, secure feeling of serotonin.
Social dominance is different from socioeconomic status. A person who is number 3 on the world billionaire list might feel like his survival is threatened when he falls to number 4. By contrast, a person with little socioeconomic status might harshly dominate those around him and feel good about it.
Many social dominance strategies are unrelated to formal wealth and status. Appearance is a good example. One person may feel respected for his appearance, while another feels disrespected, even if the two people look exactly the same. Our neurochemicals depend on the expectation circuits we’ve built.
Antidepressants, like Prozac, are known for raising serotonin levels in the brain. The function of serotonin was not understood when antidepressants were introduced to the public, in the same way that aspirin was used before anyone knew how it worked. They may have created the impression that ingesting some “correct level” of serotonin can make a person happy independent of their thoughts and actions. We are only at the first stages of understanding the link between serotonin and happiness. Animals offer insight into our neurochemical ups and downs, but these insights are unsettling. The dominance-seeking urges of mammals are not a prescription for happiness, but they are a window into the power of self-respect.
Each happy chemical turns on for a specific survival reason, and then turns off so it’s ready to alert you to another survival opportunity. Unhappy chemicals are less noticeable during a happy spurt, but they get your attention when the spurt fades. It would be nice to eliminate unhappy chemicals, but the following chapter explains why they’re here to stay.