The best books on dopamine

A fascinating, readable nonfiction account of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness as children in the great epidemic of 1918. They grew to adulthood in a Bronx hospital, frozen in sleep for decades. The prognosis was hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Sacks dared to try a new drug, L-DOPA, giving his patients an astonishing, explosive, “awakening.” Dr. Sacks recounts case histories of his patients, their lives, and extraordinary transformations from his treatment. This book is a passionate exploration of the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care, and the human condition. The patients’ realization of themselves as adults is heartbreaking. Dr. Sacks wrote: “Awakenings came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have ever know.”

Solo Leveling (or Only I Level Up), in its webtoon form, is one of the peaks of LitRPG storytelling. The scenes are beautifully drawn, elevating the story beyond its original text-only format. You will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging read than this. The webtoon maintains tension incredibly well, and knows how to constantly supply its readers with little dopamine bombs along the way.

Solo Leveling plays with the formula of LitRPG, taking it off the rails by containing the game system inside the main character for much of the story, allowing him to grow stronger. Reading Solo Leveling is an absolute treat—perhaps doubly so for me as several of the niche ideas used in the story are also used in my books.

Why do we need to acquire good habits to begin with? One reason is we can’t feel a sense of fulfillment or achievement where there’s no stress. People like Elon Musk and Bill Gates surely have enough wealth to spend the rest of their lives lying on the beach, but that’s not what they do. Eating sweets is all it takes for the neurotransmitter dopamine to be released and give us a dose of happiness, but that doesn’t satisfy us for very long. In this book, author Gregory Berns focuses on the stress hormone cortisol. He shows us, in an approachable and entertaining manner, that a reasonable amount of stress is what actually helps us experience a deep sense of satisfaction.

Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and it’s exactly what we evolved to do as humans.

Nicole’s comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if it’s not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.

When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly – nobody wants to end up like Into the Wild’s Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!

Defiance of the Fall started as a web series and has some of the classic hallmarks of such… brief chapters ending in cliffhangers and a need to always recap what’s just happened.

Worse, the prose starts out very rough, though it improves with each successive book in the series.

So, why did I include it? Because it distills progression fantasy down to its purest form, to what some readers summarize as “Numbers go brrrr.”

In other words, there is always action and advancement happening. The dopamine hits for the reader never stop, and the main character, Zac, doesn’t either.

If there’s a problem, he’s cutting through it, and if he can’t, he’ll go on some sort of cosmic traveling trip to get strong enough to do so. Power is his all-consuming focus, and that is progression fantasy.

I love a good page-turner. I love to write them and I love to read them. I strive to write novels that the reader will binge. Novels as addictive as a drug. I want each chapter I write to be like another hit—a re-up that floods the reader’s brain with dopamine. Tell No One by Harlan Coben is a novel that I binged. It keeps you guessing until the end. And while some of the payoffs may seem a little over-the-top, I am able to overlook it because this novel (like much of Coben’s work) is just so damn addictive!

If you’re reading my book recommendations, it’s almost certainly because you read the book Dan Lieberman and I wrote about dopamine. In that case, you’ll want to read the book that inspired us to write our book, Fred Previc’s seminal explanation of the technical aspects of dopamine and psychology. If you were hoping for a deeper diver on certain points, Previc’s text is the only way to go – and we remain grateful to him for his groundbreaking work.