Story Behind The Book
“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.” - Mark Twain Hello! A funny thing happened on the way to completing The Perfect Pandemic. I started out working on a book about a long-held conviction that something terribly wrong is keeping the members of our species from realizing we’re sharing an amazingly, impossible, and fleeting mystical experience. We’re essentially optical illusions, living on a ball that is hurling through space, yet most people are more concerned about what others think about them than noticing how special we all are to find ourselves here, now, and together. To compensate for my lack of credentials I invented Erich Hawke, a brilliant scientist, who discovers a dehumanizing brain disease and then dies in a suspicious explosion. Explaining the fabricated brain disease required a significant amount of research. As things turned out, it wasn’t until the first version of The Perfect Pandemic was completed that I realized that a very real, common, and much easier to explain dehumanizing brain disease already existed — an addiction to the neurotransmitter dopamine. I considered retitling and completely rewriting The Perfect Pandemic before deciding to do a quick patch job that turned a fictional report into a fictionalized but useful introduction to dopamine addiction. The decision to rework (instead of rewriting) the book was based on my concern that scientists were on the brink of “discovering” dopamine addiction. After working for decades on the ideas that led to The Perfect Pandemic, I wanted to be able to establish that a layman had beaten the scientific community to one of the biggest breakthroughs of the decade. It’s many months later and it seems that the research community still isn’t interested in connecting all their own dots that point to dopamine addiction’s existence. As explained in my book and on DopamineProject.org, dopamine is a powerful drug that is capable of keeping 99.99% of the populating (including the most dedicated researchers) from wanting to learn about dopamine addiction. Why? Because addicts cling to the self-deceptions that allow them to deny their addictions. Which brings me to whether or not you should read my report, now that I’ve spilled the beans. As an author who has invested many years and a small fortune to reach this point, I think everyone should at least buy a copy of The Perfect Pandemic. As a “crank,” I’m more interested in finding the .01% of individuals who are ready, willing, and able to help wake up the scientific community before it’s too late to stop a curable brain disease that’s turned into the pandemic to end all pandemics. Sincerely, Charles Lyell