Hard-Wired for Wretched Excess

Dr. Peter C. Whybrow has bad news and good news on the stereotype of the overachieving, overweight, stimulation-junkie American. The bad news is, it’s all true. The good news is, we can blame it on brain chemistry. In his new book, “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough” (Norton), the director of UCLA’s neuropsychiatric institute argues that if you take human neurotransmitters programmed for pleasure-seeking, add an immigrant gene pool and a free-market economic philosophy and simmer for a couple of centuries, what you get is a consumption-crazy culture that’s burning up the asphalt on the road to wretched excess. Having migrated to Los Angeles after a rural English upbringing, Whybrow, who travels widely and keeps a second home in Plainfield, N.H., is intimately familiar with the “Fast New World” he writes about. We took advantage of a calm interlude to pop a few questions.

You say neuroscience can explain our high-speed consumer culture. Why?

The dopamine-driven reward pathways of the brain are acutely tuned to novelty and to self-preservation. When you have a society built on novelty, you hijack these systems. The person essentially becomes addicted, just like to cocaine. There is no fundamental difference, neurobiologically.

Sure, but why pick on Americans?

We’re ahead of the curve because of our migrant curiosity. The quintessential definition of American culture is that we all came from somewhere else. Americans are more curious than the average, we’re more entrepreneurial, we’re more risk-taking. That has made us this great commercial nation, but we have to be careful that it doesn’t take us over the top.

For a brain scientist, you sound a lot like a liberal scold.

It’s not a moral or political issue. If you reward an animal too much, it will run to greed or it will become anxious. These problems we’ve been having of executives trying to cover up the fact that their business cycle was taking down their share price, they’re doing that because they’ve been addicted to the idea that they should constantly be making more and more money. If I consistently reward you and then tell you you’re not going to get it anymore, you will try to get back to it. That’s exactly what many of these executives have been doing.

You see free-market capitalism as another factor in America’s consumption addiction.

When Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, Boston was 10,000 people. The market was the hub of the community, and people learned social and moral rules through the marketplace. That is not the case anymore. The original concept of the market society was, you released people to work to create new things, and in doing so they helped everybody else. But it was embedded in a civil society, which balanced the reward-driven side of the equation. Affiliative-type behavior is now totally [cut off] from the reward-driven, demand-driven society we’ve built. The balance has been lost.

What cultures, if any, are less prone to toxic excess?

Nobody has it completely right, but societies that have a traditional program of social reinvestment are closer. For example, France, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. The average American spends more time in the car with their children than eating around a table with them. That’s not true in most European countries. The meal itself is not as important as the interaction. That interaction teaches things you don’t learn from a laptop or from grabbing a pizza and going up to your room.

What are your own tactics for resisting manic business?

I consciously control the technology. I don’t carry a cellphone unless I need to be away for a while. I prefer people call me at my office, my apartment and so on. I don’t change my car every two years. I drive a 1979 Porsche, and I’ve carried the same furniture around for a long time. I’m fascinated by novelty in other senses, new ideas, talking to new people, enjoying theater, figuring out ways in which the world is advancing. I love that.

Now that you’ve told us we’re a nation of cravings, what is your own Achilles’ heel?

I love potato chips. Especially the ones cooked in lots of fat, Kettle Chips. If I buy them, I eat the whole package immediately.