A Chemical Mind

Addiction Resources: https://chemicalmind.substack.com/p/addiction-support-resourcesKo-Fi Link: https://ko-fi.com/dopamineNote: This is a true story, taken from one of the many fascinating case reports of medical literature. This is a fairly famous example in the annals of addiction neuroscience, and it reveals in stark colours the counter-intuitive nature of addiction.She couldn’t stop herself. She had to push the button.She kept it on all day, dialling the power knob between 75% and 100% in rapid bursts.All she could do was blast the electrodes buried deep in her brain, triggering an experience she called “pleasant discomfort,” a kind of “erotic sensation” as though her genitals were sending signals to her brain at kilowatts of intensity.By all objective measures, though, she was disintegrating completely.She would exhibit the physical symptoms of stroke. She would become extremely thirsty. Her verbal IQ would drop by a whopping 25 points. She even developed an ulcer on her index finger, the one she used to tune the power dial rapidly. This was not a particularly pleasant experience. Indeed, it was painful.And yet, she stopped going outside.She stopped talking to other people.She even stopped bathing, and eventually, eating.She could not pull herself away from the button.There were times when she’d beg for her family to take it away, and they would; only for them to give in when she went through inevitable withdrawal symptoms, and demanded its return.It was an addiction like any other; except this was not chemical. It was electrical.In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner released a remarkable study that would go on to shape our understanding of addiction. They implanted electrodes at various locations into the brains of rats, and gave them a series of levers they could press to stimulate the different electrodes.The behaviour of the rats demonstrated the existence of specific locations in the brain which, when stimulated, could produce profound addiction: the rats would go to stimulate them again and again and again, until collapsing from exhaustion.Such experiments would have been completely unethical if done in humans, and would never be approved by a review board. So, how had this woman, in the 1980s, ended up in the position of one of Olds’ and Milner’s rats?Years earlier, the 48-year-old New Yorker had suffered a herniated disc right at the base of her spine, between L5 and S1; an excruciating experience, leaving her with severe sciatica. Pain would surge through her legs like a bolt of lightning. Her lower back was in constant agony. The pain and suffering was constant and intractable.Eventually it became too much; she obsessed about finding a way to halt the pain.Although of limited effect, so far, opiates - specifically, methadone - was the only thing keeping her functional at a basic level. That wasn’t ideal. She had a history of alcohol abuse, and knew the dangers of addiction all too well.So she had turned her body into a veritable pin-cushion, subjecting herself to any and all ideas, in search of an alternative.She had seen so many specialists. They tried pharmacological treatments of all kinds, including antidepressants, atypical analgesics, and more.Every drug wore off quickly.Massages and exercises had no effect. Acupuncture was useless. Cognitive Behavioural Therapies made no difference.The TENS units - skin-conductance electrical stimulators of nerves - achieved nothing.They tried surgically removing the back plates of 4 of her vertebrae to relieve pressure on her spinal cord. They denervated the area at the base of her spine, and even severed specific nerve fibres in her spinal cord they believed were transmitting pain signals to the brain.All of it failed.All this medical science, all these doctors and specialists, all this money, and they were at a loss. Here they were - in the 1980s - and they had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it.One well-meaning specialist had an idea: if we can’t seem to solve it from the nerve side, perhaps we can find another way through the brain itself.Pressing the button below will instantly cure all ailments, guaranteed! (note: not actually guaranteed, but it might work?)Electricity for pain management is, remarkably, far from a new idea. There really is nothing new under the sun.The first written description we have found of using electricity to manage pain was by the ancient Greeks, where both Plato and Aristotle described the use of the “Torpedo Fish” - a kind of electric ray, after which the submarine weapon is named - as an aid in curing ailments; but it was the Romans who wrote specifically about its use in treating headaches and gout.Some 2000 years later, in the 1950s, we began to seriously experiment with delivering electricity directly to the brain. The implanting of electrodes directly into neural structures could bypass faulty central nervous system wiring, not to mention all the chemical filtering which made pharmacokinetics such a challenge.Early experiments with this method as a treatment for chronic pain seemed to yield some positive results.Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) was, indeed, originally meant to treat pain. Later, people like José Delgado would begin experimenting with the technique to treat movement disorders, epilepsy, and paralysis.DBS has a storied and controversial history. José Delgado, among others, would become the targets of crazy conspiracy theorists like Peter Breggin, who for their own political purposes ran a campaign of lies designed to paint Delgado in particular as an evil mind-control villain, eventually chasing him out of the United States.Despite this, by the 1970s, DBS for pain was quickly gaining traction, with companies like Medtronic setting up its neurological division for manufacturing devices to control electrode stimulation. Case reports started to come out showing positive results for pain with electrodes implanted into the thalamus.So, although still quite a new treatment, it wasn’t as hare-brained an idea as it might seem to us today, though it still sounds utterly counter-intuitive: stimulating a brain region that is signalling pain in order to suppress that pain. However, it was based on a historical precedent, or perhaps, neurological dogma: that stimulation mimics ablation (destruction).The thinking was that with electrical stimulation, based on this precedent, they could use it as a reversible alternative to destroying those neurons entirely. If it worked, we might never need to surgically damage or destroy anything in the brain, whether in cases of severe intractable epilepsy or chronic pain. It could eliminate the use of lobotomies, which were still popular in the United States at the time.So in ~1979, specialists handling the case of this woman’s intractable pain decided to give it a try.They made 2 attempts.First, they implanted an electrode in the right Posterior Medial Thalamus, the region of the brain mostly concerned with your emotional response to a sensory input, e.g being startled by sudden sharp pain. When they turned on the electric current, she felt a warm flush spread across the left side of her body, and the pain dissipated.For 6 months, this seemed to work remarkably well.However, like everything else, it was only temporary, and soon the device gave her no relief from pain at all. They left the electrode in place, dormant, and continued to pursue other treatment options.Four years later, they made another attempt.The target this time was the left Ventral Posteriolateral Nucleus, the region which helps to determine what a sensation is (touch, pressure, temperature, pain) and where it’s coming from; it then relays the information to other regions of the brain relevant to that specific sensation.Again, it seemed to have a reasonable impact on the pain. She initially reported a tingling “paraesthesia” down her left side, but that was it. For a few months, the pain became manageable again.Then, there was something else.She had begun to experiment with the settings on the stimulator. She found that by manipulating the controls in a certain way, she could induce these peculiar “erotic sensations,” and reported this to the clinicians shortly following the procedure.Unfortunately, this did not ring any alarm bells.When the pain inevitably returned a few months later, her need for stimulation didn’t end. Indeed, it was only beginning.She found herself continuing to need more and more stimulation. She would keep the device on, set to 75% power, and every few minutes rapidly turn the dial between 75% and 100% power. It brought her to the edge of climax, but never over the precipice. She was always just out of reach of satisfaction.During these intense stimulations, her body would writhe in severe discomfort. The left side of her face would droop as though she were in the throes of a massive stroke. She would experience paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, and the most extreme thirst leading to psychogenic polydipsia (compulsive water drinking to the point of toxicity.)There’s simply no way this could have been pleasure she was experiencing, and even if there was, it would have paled in comparison to the devastation and pain being inflicted upon her body and brain.Somehow, she managed to continue like this for 2 years. Her addiction was so total, she spent most of that time in complete inactivity, save for occasions when her obsession with stimulation drove her to tamper with the device in an effort to further increase its amplitude.IQ tests she performed shortly before and shortly after implantation of the electrode, and again by the authors of the case study 3 years later, reveal the utter devastation wrought on her brain.Initially scoring 99 both before and after implantation on full-scale IQ - a reasonable score - by the time of the case study, she had lost a whopping 11 points.Her memory quotient - initially around 96-97 - had plummeted to 64 (though interestingly, when stimulating, it rose slightly to 73).They had her do a PET scan before and during stimulation to see how much energy her brain was using (by measuring glucose) and the results were striking.When the device was off, the scan showed a startling lack of activity. Specifically, the researchers found right-sided hypometabolism and significant asymmetries between the two hemispheres. In this state, her metabolic rates were so low they were comparable to patients with advanced dementia.With the device on, this reversed completely, with both hemispheres lighting up with thalamic noise, essentially jamming much of the cross-region communication required for normal brain function.She had become completely enslaved to the button, and it was eating her alive.My friend Prof Kent C. Berridge - inventor of Incentive Salience theory of motivation, along with the Incentive Sensitisation theory of addiction - knows this study well, so I emailed him to get his thoughts on the idea of someone being trapped so tightly inside a “wanting” loop that even aversive stimuli, such as pain and discomfort, are not enough to break the cycle. He replied:“No one would sign up for such an electrode if advertised by her description, so there’s a massive explanatory gap between the not-very-pleasant experience and the intense desire to repeat and continue it.”Rather propitiously, just last year he and a colleague David Nguyen published a paper in Nature’s Communications on Biology about “Wanting What Hurts” (the title I also borrowed for this article, because it’s too good.)Imagine you are a rat. You’re in a little box with soft tray bedding at your feet. You look around and find a shiny rod-like object that you’ve never seen before.You wander over and give it a poke with your nose, and a sudden, painful electric jolt hits you!What do you do?Well, typically, rats will do something called “defensive burying”, where they will kick bedding litter over the top of some object that they see as harmful. They will bury it, to get it out of their environment.That’s what a rat would normally do to such an electrified rod.However, using specially optogenetically-modified rats hooked up to a device which stimulates the anticipatory reward centres of the brain using a light beam whenever the rat comes within 2cm of the rod, following their first shock, they seem to do something unusual.They give it another poke.Obviously, another shock ensures, making them flinch back, but this does not deter them.They give it yet another poke.Despite the total absence of pleasant sensation - indeed, in spite of the particularly unpleasant and painful sensation from electric shock - they develop an overwhelming addiction to poking the electrified rod with their nose. Some of them would even nibble and chew it with their mouths, all while receiving continuous electrical shock.The rats were even given the option to self-stimulate their own brain using a lever, which delivered no harmful or aversive stimuli; yet they would ignore the lever and consistently favour a zap from the rod. Something about the salience of that shock was like an answer to the question posed by the anticipatory reward circuits: “I predict this is going to be good for us, now let’s see…”Zap.As soon as the artificial stimulation of the brain ceases, the “addiction” disappears entirely, and the rats proceed to bury the rod. However, the point is still proved: the ability for an organism to become addicted to something can be independent of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.Since her case report in 1986, there has been no further information on the New York woman. Her story remains a singular, frozen snapshot in the annals of neuroscience. We don’t know whether she managed to recover from the addiction, nor even do we know whether the electrodes were removed, though we should probably assume they were at least deactivated.Her case stands as a remarkable demonstration of the physical anatomy of what we might call “the will,” encoded within our biochemistry.Although we like to believe our choices are guided by a pursuit of happiness, as both the New York patient and Berridge’s rats prove, something like addiction isn’t just some base hedonist’s failure of self-control.It’s a physiological malfunction, and one we are all susceptible to at some level.If you are suffering with addiction, beating yourself up over your inability to break free, remember this:It is not a character flaw. It is not a weakness of will. It is not a free choice.No amount of character or willpower alone can beat an addiction whose claws are embedded deeply enough. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done, just that we need to look at the problem through a different lens, and approach it collaboratively, leaning on others for help.I know that getting away from the feelings of shame and guilt is easier said than done, but I hope that understanding the physiological factors that cause it helps.If you or someone you care about is struggling, please make contact with addiction support services in your region. For help figuring out where to start, I’ve put together this list: https://chemicalmind.substack.com/p/addiction-support-resourcesThank you for joining me on this episode of A Chemical Mind. A big welcome to all the new paid subscribers, and those that have been added from the Ko-Fi list. I’m still figuring out the plan for paid content, but I will get to it, I promise. Please let me know your thoughts for what you want to see!These posts take a ton of research and time to put together. 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“The common conception that the brain is primarily for thinking, or other cognitive processes, is potentially misleading... neuroscience may benefit from a theoretical structure that centers on basic questions of how the brain coordinates and efficiently regulates the body.”What if our entire understanding of the purpose of the brain is wrong?By default, we have come to believe the main task of a brain is to think, to wield intelligence, to learn and remember and feel. Is this not what our own brains do the most?It turns out it’s not nearly so simple, and by focussing on just our own perceptions - our conscious mind - we have completely ignored perhaps its most fundamental role: regulation of bodily systems to keep us alive.I’m talking about the system of allostasis, or predictive regulation.Unlike homoeostasis, where the body reacts to problems when they arise, allostasis is all about predicting the bodies needs ahead of time and adequately preparing for them, regulating internal systems to manage energy and resource-use. It’s tasked with efficient logistics planning, ensuring the supply is available at times when demand is predicted to rise.This makes for a very obvious evolutionary purpose to the brain: it likely evolved as a means of managing the complex biochemistry of large multi-cellular organisms, and consciousness arose from the eventual complexity of its allostatic functions.Although not a new idea, allostasis seems to be going through a bit of a revival.According to an article recently published in Neuron Volume 113 (Issue 24), Jordan Theriault et al. argue that thought and consciousness might be a case of exaptation, a kind of happy accident of evolution which turned out to be useful in its own right.If we adopt this "allostasis-first" lens, the very things we traditionally call "the mind" - our emotions, awareness, even sensations - appear to be low-resolution readouts of our metabolic state. Your mood, for instance, may function as a low-dimensional "allostatic barometer," a summary of how efficiently your brain is managing your body’s internal energy budget.Even "stress" loses its purely psychological weight. In this biological framework, stress is simply the brain predictively issuing commands to deliver glucose and oxygen to your tissues in anticipation of a metabolic outlay. It is a value-neutral preparation for action should action be necessary.This is not to suggest that these barometers and predictions are always correct. Like any sensor, they can be fed faulty data or be improperly calibrated. Like some safety systems installed on aircraft, a bad sensor can kick off a distinctly inappropriate response (see: Boeing 737 Max)Still, this regulatory priority is etched into the very architecture of the human cortex. The brain is organised along a structural gradient that stretches from a "limbic core" to our primary senses. At this limbic core, signals are abstract and low-dimensional compressed summaries of the body’s collective needs. As these signals flow outward toward the motor and sensory systems, they "decompress" into the specific particulars required to move a muscle or adjust a heart rate.Simultaneously, the firehose of raw sensory data coming from the world is compressed as it travels inward. It is stripped of its noise and categorised into meanings, with the most salience being placed on its allostatic value, i.e “what does this sight or sound mean for my survival?”Ultimately, this shift in perspective dissolves the artificial wall we have built between the mental and the physical: we are not merely a mind inhabiting a body. The mind and body are a unified system.What happens if we look at cognitive decline using this allostatic lens? Take Alzheimer’s, one of the main examples cited in the paper: the perspective shifts from a system breaking down, to a series of desperate, yet calculated, sacrifices.Higher-order cognition uses up a fair bit of energy, but is non-essential for staying alive. It also produces a lot of waste products, due to the rather-inefficient method of anaerobic metabolism of glucose products into ATP (up to 15 times more inefficient than the aerobic alternative.). These waste products need to be removed regularly, mostly via the bloodstream, otherwise they can build up and cause havoc.However, as we age, our vascular health naturally declines and becomes less efficient at this waste-removal task.So when a system is faced with a situation where the waste produced by this high-energy, higher-order cognition begins to out-pace the brains ability to remove that waste, the authors suggest we might be forced into an “allostatic trade-off”, with the allostasis mechanism automatically rationing the amount of glucose supplied to the brain to reduce the overall demand on the vascular system.If brain waste clearance is compromised, then it may be allostatically beneficial for the brain to downregulate glucose metabolism by restricting the transport of glucose into neurons and across the blood-brain barrier. Consistent with this, in older adults, glucose uptake and glucose transporter density (GLUT1 and GLUT3) decline following amyloid accumulation but before the appearance of cognitive decline.That trade-off might allow the body to physically live longer than it otherwise would, but at what cost?Put your email in this box. Just trust me.Alzheimer’s results in the gradual destruction of the inner self; cognitive ability, memories, beliefs, even volition, eventually slip away.However, the allostasis model does suggest that approaching Alzheimer’s as an energy-management syndrome centred around glucose and the function of the vascular system in general might lead to better treatments. Perhaps, if we work on improving vascular system health, as well as finding ways to clear up debris as we presently do, this combined, systems-driven approach might give us a fighting chance.Everything psychological that a brain accomplishes—sensing, perceiving, thinking, feeling, deciding, acting—can be considered a means to the end of its core ongoing task: coordinating and regulating internal bodily systems, as an organism navigates a constantly changing but only partly predictable world.The mind is a prediction machine. That’s its purpose: to predict what happens next, what’s coming down the pipeline, where and when we need energy levels to be at their highest readiness and when we will need to rest. The mind is all about forward-projection, and from birth it is continuously training against the incoming data to identify sequences and patterns in time.As a fellow Substacker mentioned recently, it’s possible that consciousness arises only when the subconscious mind is inadequate to the task of managing one particular system in a particular context.Take breathing.You breathe autonomically, and are entirely unconscious of it most of the time. However, now that I’ve mentioned it and brought it to your attention, it will have entered your conscious awareness. You’re now aware of the action of your diaphragm, as it works to expand and contract the lungs. You can now choose to alter its action, slow it down, speed it up, or hold your breath for a period of time.This also happens at times of physical exertion, or when your head is underwater, or your conscious mind perceives the air around you to be unsafe to breathe: your conscious mind takes over to analyse the situation and decide when and how to take your next breath.Soon, likely in the next few minutes, it will return to subconscious autonomic action, and your conscious mind will focus on other things.If allostasis is the brain’s primary job, then it must prioritise the body’s internal state over external data. This leads to a phenomenon called sensory gating.Emerging evidence suggests that our distance senses - vision, hearing, and touch - are synchronised to our internal rhythms.We’re not perceiving the world at a constant, steady rate; the brain “samples” the environment in time with the cardiac cycle. In fact, so much about our perception is aligned with such cycles.For instance, during systole (when the heart contracts and pumps blood), we are statistically slower and less accurate at detecting visual or auditory stimuli. The brain actually suppresses external input during these moments of high internal pressure, effectively “blinking” our sensory awareness. We saccade - rapidly move our eyes - more frequently during systole, but we fixate and actually process the world during diastole, when the heart is at rest.Breathing acts in a similar way, functioning as a global “oscillatory pacemaker”. It synchronises neural signalling across the brain, impacting everything from memory consolidation in the hippocampus to how we process emotion and make decisions.Self-regulation isn’t a silo, either. Humans are social animals, we have evolved to “outsource“ some of our allostatic regulation to others.This is known as Social Allostasis, and resembles the concept of co-regulation.When we are in close, trusting relationships, our companions help regulate our heart rates, breathing, and even our core temperature, effectively reducing the metabolic “tax” on our own systems. The sense of safety these relationships provide allows us to operate at a reduced level of vigilance.This explains why loneliness is so physically toxic; without a social network to help distribute the load, our brains can remain stuck in a highly costly state of vigilance, which eventually wears down the system. In the context of Alzheimer’s, it’s one way to explain why strong social support shows a slower rate of cognitive decline; the social environment can help regulate a struggling internal energy budget.In short: we see and hear with our hearts, think with our lungs, and heal with our friends.Thank you for joining me on today’s short dive into some new research that I’ve been looking into. What do you think about the Allostasis model? I’d love to get your insights, let me know in the comments!This is also the first post of 2026! If you’ve been here a while, please consider a paid subscription; it comes with some perks, and will give me the ability to deliver so much more value to all of you chemically minded folks out there.Thank you so much to everyone that has donated, subscribed, liked, shared, restacked, and commented. Please share this around with your friends as well! The more the merrier.Take care, until next time! 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Coffee Fund: https://ko-fi.com/dopamineNote from Author: Yes, the title is slightly click-bait; but only slightly. Welcome to another deep dive.Morality (from Latin moralitas ‘manner, character, proper behavior‘) is the categorization of intentions, decisions and actions into those that are proper, or right, and those that are improper, or wrong.Let me ask you a simple question: would you ever commit murder?We need to dig deeper. Let’s clarify a bit: would you ever commit murder if you knew there would be no negative consequences?What if the proposed victim had brutally abused and murdered your children, and would not face justice in any other way?If you answered either “Yes” or “No” to any or all of these, you’d actually be wrong. The only possible answer to these is “maybe”. There is no way to know what you will or will not do in any future situation.However, if I were to ask: “is it ever morally acceptable to commit murder?” the answer is quite simple: No.Morally, it is never OK to commit murder, despite some backward parts of the world remaining committed to capital punishment (which is, indeed, a type of murder.)The distance between what we know as being morally right or wrong and our commitment to that moral judgement in our actions can be vast and incredibly dynamic. One easy example is this: is it ever morally OK to lie? Technically, the answer here is more of a “maybe,” but even so, you negatively judge those that you believe to have lied for personal gain, while simultaneously fudging the information on your résumé.Don’chya?The presence of a moral sense is consistent with a focus of human evolution on mechanisms of individual behavior that maximize survival in social groups. Evolution has promoted social cooperation through emotions against harming others, a need for fairness and the enforcement of moral rules.Mario F. Mendez, The Neurobiology of Moral Behavior: Review and Neuropsychiatric Implications (2009)Our moral values feel universal and immutable. We struggle to talk about them or think about them in any other way. We disdain others who don’t share our moral values, and often dehumanise them entirely.The Imperial Japanese in WWII believed dying for the emperor was the single highest moral good a human being could achieve on earth.Compared to the Yankee boys in the Pacific who, although ready and willing to fight and avenge the attack on Pearl Harbour, would have preferred to be home and warm and safe and at peace.They could not comprehend each other at all, and saw each other as less than fully human.When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness.A troglodyte with a toothbrush moustache.Interestingly, that brutality Hitler spoke of to his Generals shortly before the war, was never intended for to the soldiers of the nations at war with him (except for the Russians, of course.)No, that brutality he spoke of was meant only for a specific subset of people: those considered “racially impure” or “defective”, such as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled, and many more men, women and children. The Germans would go on to murder millions of them with industrial efficiency.Considering the fairly frequent self-justifications made by officials, they knew it was wrong. Hitler knew they would know, and demanded they operate with black hearts regardless.Despite having some of the most potent chemical weapons ever made (even to this day) and having mass stockpiles of them ready to be used, Hitler refused to deploy them on the battlefield, not out of fear of retaliation, but as a moral judgement.Imagine that.The Japanese saw it as quite acceptable to decapitate captive enemy soldiers with a samurai sword, and did so frequently. They saw this as building up their own “Sei-shin”, or “Fighting Spirit”.The Allies saw this as barbaric; they preferred to do their slaughter from a great distance and with superior technology, such as the fire-bombing attacks on Japanese cities which burned alive around half a million men, women and children.Indeed, it was perhaps this idea that the Japanese had deliberately crossed some kind of universal red line into immorality in their waging of war which may have helped to loosen the Allies own inhibitions on morality, allowing them to adopt one of the most barbaric war-fighting tactics: terror-bombing.More recently, there have been debates about how pharmacology may one day provide “moral enhancement”, in which certain drugs could re-enforce a specific set of moral ideals and behaviours. The problem is: whose moral ideals and behaviours, exactly?It’s hard for many people to imagine that simply changing the balance of certain chemicals in the brain and body could change how we make moral decisions, but in fact, they already do.Research in 2014 found that we already have such drugs, and they’re already impacting our morality so much more than we could imagine; beta-blockers for example were found to significantly reduce racial bias in tests with only a single dose.So, if certain drugs can strengthen our moral inhibitions, there must be others which can weaken them, right?Press this button to get your fix!Weakening the WillIn the late-2000s, a teacher from the UK was caught downloading sexually explicit images of minors. During the investigation and trial, it was found that the medications he was on - to treat his worsening Parkinson’s Disease - had been a direct cause of this paraphilia which had not been present before treatment.The medications in question - primarily dopamine agonist levodopa, but also the many others which contribute to overall dopamine agonist effect - have long been linked to the development of various psycho-social/sexual disorders, but this was a fairly landmark case which essentially found that a psychoactive medication was the causative agent of a persons offending.This leads one to wonder: how exactly does this occur, and in what circumstances?As far as I am aware (IANAL), individuals that go on drug-fuelled binges and commit crimes are considered responsible for their actions under the law. The reason is fairly straight forward: despite the mass of information put out about the impact on decision making by various drugs - alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, PCP, and more - choosing to take them anyway means you assume full moral and legal responsibility for your actions while under their influence.However, in a case like this, the substance was medically necessary (quite literally life-saving), properly prescribed, and the potential influence on decision-making was not widely known.All medications which have an effect can influence us in one way or another; even placebos which have no biological or chemical effect can change our perceptions and decision-making. Paracetamol reducing pain can result in a better mood, with decision making patterns that would be different to those made while in pain. Beta-blockers like Propanolol inhibit instant amygdala-driven fear responses, significantly reducing things like racial bias.Then, there’s dopamine.I’ve long been fascinated with the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc). It’s a tiny little blob of brain cells (two of them actually, on both sides of the brain). It’s essentially the seat of motivation and goal-directed valuation.My friend Kent C Berridge developed the Incentive Salience theory of motivation, in which the NAcc plays its part by calculating how much value something has. This calculation is done using dopaminergic neural circuits running along the mesolimbic pathway.When we think of an action that might have some value - regardless of morality, consequences, effort, or any other cost - a signal is sent out along that pathway. The stronger the signal, the greater the potential value.Inhibition then acts to counter that signal. It is essentially subtractive, performing the other part of the Volition Equation, which is to subtract cost - in effort, risk, social standing - from the original value, thus weakening the signal.In order for an action to be taken, this signal must run the gauntlet of our inhibitions, and remain strong enough to clear a minimum threshold. Anything below that threshold is dropped.Morality can play a part on both sides of the Volition Equation; either adding or subtracting, so on the one hand, doing the “morally right thing” can boost the motivating signal. On the other, it can slam the brakes on behaviours and actions which might be detrimental to those social measures.Morality evolved to help us maintain conformity with a group, and as a core part of our own sense of self. So, while moral behaviour is an obvious benefit when in a group context, we still often exhibit moral behaviour when alone.Sometimes, this need for conformity can work against us, and lead to horrible and dramatic consequences.Drugs of Brute ForceA teenager is hanging out with his friends one day, when one of them - a leader in the group - brings out a crack pipe. The teenager has never seen one before, but he’s able to make an inference on what it’s likely to be. He’s been told, by his parents, teachers, the government, and others, never to try it, because one hit is all it takes to cement a permanent addiction and lead him into a life of ruin, destitution, and early death.His friends, however, are all jovial about it.“Nah that’s all b******t, I can stop whenever I want to. I just like having fun, it feels f*****g awesome. C’mon don’t be a pussy.”The attitude of his in-group - the group with whom he identifies - significantly reduces the inhibitory effect of anxiety about the potential dangers, and his need to prove himself a bona-fide member of his in-group - a core part of moral decision making - proves stronger than the inhibitions of broader social norms regarding drug use.So he takes the hit, and the addiction is indeed cemented permanently. It is a grievous mistake, the consequences of which will last his entire lifetime. Severe neurochemical changes have already taken place in his brain, not just to cement the addiction, but also to break many more of his existing inhibitions.This straw-man example demonstrates the result of an explosion of dopamine in the NAcc occurring nearly immediately following the act of consuming the drug. Normal incentive-based re-enforcement learning in the human brain is hijacked, and the drug causes a reward signal so large that nothing else in normal life can ever compare.Even if all µ-opioid signals - the neurotransmitters that cause pleasurable sensations, including endorphins - in the brain are blocked entirely, resulting in no pleasurable sensations whatsoever, the addiction would still be just as strong, because pleasure - or a “high” - isn’t what’s driving this; it’s pure chemical computation.What happens when you take any action in which there is potential for reward - so basically any and all actions - is two-fold: first, a prediction signal is fired, indicating the expected reward for the course of action being contemplated. When the action is a novel one, the expected reward is a guess, synthesised from past experiences which might be similar, and from any observations of others taking the same action in the past. If - after various inhibitory processes have subtracted from the signal - it remains above the activation threshold, then you will take the action.Second, upon completing the action, the brain awaits a signal to indicate the actual reward obtained. When this signal is received, the predicted signal is subtracted from the actual signal, and you get something called a Reward Prediction Error (RPE).If the RPE is positive, then the actual reward was more than what was predicted, and structural changes occur in the brain, making you more likely to pursue the same reward in the future. If the RPE is negative, this has the opposite effect. The difference between positive and negative values is indicated by a phase change. This is part of Associative Learning. The greater the value - in either positive or negative directions - the more significant the structural changes.What a drug of addiction does, however, is amplify the actual reward signal so much, that the most extraordinary changes in the brain occur. Typically, these are supposed to be small, and developed through repetition. Instead, a drug of addiction can, from a single solitary action, re-wire the brain to a similar degree as a concert pianist from decades of daily and intensive practice.To be clear, this method is simple brute force: the moral compass is not necessarily re-oriented. Instead, it’s simply rendered ineffective at inhibition. It can’t subtract enough from the action signal to play any meaningful role, so long as cues related to the drug are triggered.Drugs are not the only way to achieve this. For a small subset of the human population, there is a built-in dysfunction to their dopaminergic circuitry, one they were likely born with.Parkinson’s ParadoxBrain damage or dysfunction induced by neurological diseases can profoundly alter different higher-order human functions including moral, religious, and criminal behavior.Ponsi et al. Human moral decision-making through the lens of Parkinson’s disease (2021)I’ve tried gambling on a few occasions; playing roulette a few times at a casino, playing around on the stock market a little. Each time, the novelty for me is very brief, and as soon as I start losing money - an inevitability - I lose interest.I’m not particularly motivated by money in general anyway.For some folks, though, even the smallest chance for a big win is enough to power them on like a perpetual motion machine. Every throw of the dice - or in most cases, press of the button, such as in those awful pokies machines - is like a novel experience. Even when they know that the odds of winning are so small to be practically insignificant, it doesn’t faze them.In patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, the vast majority exhibit “hyper-honest” behaviours and are extremely risk-avoidant compared to the general population. In fact, it’s such a common observation that it is sometimes referred to as a “Parkinson’s trait”. They are significantly more inhibited and reward-desensitised in general, meaning any given stimuli to the brain is less likely to reach the threshold needed for activating “motivational salience” (the property that drives us to take action in pursuit of something.)In a study of moral decision-making among Parkinson’s patients, a small subset was found to exhibit the exact opposite behaviour. This subset is called the “hypo-honest” group; people who become much more prone to immoral tactics for personal gain as the disease takes hold. The factor most common among them is a history of gambling addiction.This doesn’t make sense. How can people suffering from the same disease exhibit two completely opposite behaviours?Their early symptoms before diagnosis don’t seem to differ much from the norm. Only once treatment begins do these new “hypo-honest” behaviours emerge.In Parkinson’s disease, not all dopaminergic neurons in the brain are destroyed; the damage occurs primarily to those which help to control motor movement. Other pathways, such as the motivating Mesolimbic pathway, are much less affected.So it turns out, the answer lies not in the disease, but in its treatment.PathwaysThere are several locations in the brain that produce dopamine, but the majority originates from just two areas. First is the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA), which fuels the “Value/Motivation Pathway” (the Mesocortical and Mesolimbic routes). Second is the Substantia Nigra, the engine of the “Motor Pathway.” Nestled within the Basal Ganglia, the Substantia Nigra exerts a “right of veto” over the motor cortex, and modulates movement like a sculptor shaping clay.Parkinson’s disease strikes the Motor Pathway with surgical precision by destroying its main dopamine supplier: the Substantia Nigra. However, the characteristic motor symptoms only become recognisable after a staggering 70–80% of these neurons are gone. By the time of diagnosis, the Motor Pathway is already operating on a nearly-empty tank.While medications like levodopa are life-changing - a miracle on par with penicillin - they suffer from a fundamental lack of selectivity. Chemistry is a blunt instrument, while biology is a masterpiece of organic “urban sprawl” without a tidy master plan. There is currently no practical way to ensure a drug reaches the Motor Pathway alone.Instead, we are forced to flood the entire brain with newly minted dopamine. This excess is up-cycled by transporters across all circuits, including the Value/Motivation Pathway. This “brute-force” method is the central difficulty of all pharmacotherapy (Lauren Cortis back me up here)Adjusting neurochemistry isn’t as simple as adding fibre to your diet. Because the disease is progressive, symptoms begin while some natural production remains, yet we have no way to measure that remaining capacity in a living patient. Short of a post-mortem slicing of the Substantia Nigra into a kind of usu-zukuri sashimi to examine under a microscope, we are flying blind.Consequently, treatment is a game of trial and error. We start with small doses and gradually increase them, trying to strike a balance before the “overflow” of dopamine into healthy systems triggers debilitating side effects, ranging from physical nausea to complex cognitive shifts.We remain limited by this lack of targeting.For now.What comes next?Research continues into delivery systems which might have improved tropism (selectivity). Since we know that compounds like MPTP and Manganese can selectively target and destroy the Substantia Nigra, there is hope; if those compounds can be so selective, there might be a way to achieve something similar and deliver dopamine to that area.Levodopa alone can’t do this. Although it can cross the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB), finding its way to the right places would require something more.During the last 2 years, research has been focussed on 2 main approaches to this problem:* Gene Therapy: The use of viral vectors (Adenovirus and Lentivirus) to biologically implant dopamine synthesis enzymes directly into the putamen, effectively turning other neurons in the Basal Ganglia into dopamine factories;* Nanotechnology and Molecular Transport: Utilising specially-engineered liposomes, exosomes and polymers which can cross the BBB, decorated with special homing beacon chemical compounds which can locate damaged areas to deliver their cargo of dopamine;Although much of this research relates specifically to treating Parkinson’s, the mechanisms could pave the way for developing highly selective treatments for a whole range of neurological diseases and disorders.ADHD patients, for example, often suffer from side-effects such as dyskinesia, dry mouth, elevated heart-rate and anxiety when taking their medications. If we could target just the areas of dysfunction mainly related to the motivation pathway, we could avoid many of those side-effects.The better we get at highly selective treatment of the brain, the better are patient outcomes. This would also unlock doors to much more interesting experiments which could identify how specific parts of the brain respond to specific compounds.However one thing is already quite clear: we are what our neurochemistry makes us.Where’s your free will now?Thank you so much for joining me on the last edition of A Chemical Mind for 2025. I’ve been running this little series for over 3 years now! How time flies. If I ever reach 1,000 subscribers, we’ll have to do a special edition.This year has been very rough on me and family, as it has for many people around the world. If you have ever enjoyed my work, please consider a donation to the coffee fund, or a paid subscription. This will help to keep my work free from pay-walls, not to mention body-and-soul together while we’re going through this difficult time.Huge thank-you to those that have already made donations. You are angels!If you have a project that needs a highly experienced software engineer, or know of someone who does, please reach out. I can build just about anything, and I have 15 years of experience; from Generative AI and RAG, to cyber security, to complex web-apps, personal websites, and even desktop and mobile applications. For more information, including details of my portfolio of past work, reach out to me: [email protected] for reading. Until next year! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

If you’re interested in further discussion on neuro-integration from all aspects and angles, I’ve set up a discord server here. Come join the fun!WARNING: The following contains MANY spoilers for the show Pantheon (2022) from AMC. You probably haven’t seen it yet, but reading this article will make you want to see it, so I highly suggest you watch it first if you care about spoilers. If not, let us proceed.On the 30th of November 2022, the technological landscape tilted on its axis. OpenAI released ChatGPT, and suddenly Generative AI was the only thing anyone could talk about. We became obsessed with Large Language Models, transformers, and the eerie ability of a machine to predict the next token in a sentence.Just two months earlier, in September 2022, a show called Pantheon aired on AMC. While the rest of the world was about to lose its mind over a chat bot, Pantheon was quietly laying out a roadmap for something far more profound: Computer-Simulated Human Consciousness, or “Uploaded Intelligence” (UI).It contained some of the most realistic depictions of mind uploads, and the potential effects on society, that I have ever seen. It grapples with the hardest philosophical questions head-on, such as the true meaning of consciousness, personality cults, the consequences of immortality and digital death, self-copying, and the universe-as-simulation theory.I don’t think many people saw it when it came out. (I didn’t)Yet there are so many fantastic, mind-bending, life-changing things about AMC’s Pantheon not just in its philosophy, but also the way it depicts cyber-security, software engineering and big data concepts; not to mention the cut-throat world of big tech both within and beyond Silicon Valley. It’s not perfect, but it’s easily the most accurate I’ve ever seen from a show of this kind.Watching it today makes it feel somewhat prophetic, but likely was the result of extremely good footwork by the producers and their team, getting the most up-to-date picture of the inner world of big tech at the time, between 2021 and 2022. Facebook became Meta at the end of 2021 as a result of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse strategy, and you see a lot of those ideas were depicted in Pantheon.We also see clear depictions of things Generative AI are doing today: chat interfaces with digital intelligence, for instance.The digital intelligences in Pantheon weren’t artificial neural networks, but fully scanned and emulated human brains. They call these “Uploaded Intelligence”, or UI (which is confusing in tech, since UI stands for User Interface, but we’ll roll with it.)In the show, a UI is created by laser-scanning a biological brain, layer by layer, down to the stem. The brain is destroyed in the process - vaporised - but stored apparently in its entirety in digital form. This is a human mind, stripped of its biological substratum which is replaced by silicon.The entire connectome is then reconstructed digitally, presumably with simulated sensory receptors; the rest of the central nervous system is not included in the actual scan.Somewhere in between all that, there is some magic fairy dust that allows the full emulation to happen, but since that is still one of the great millennium-type problems of our time, I don’t expect them to have that bit of detail.At one point in the show, a UI produces an 80-page patent in seconds. Although GenAI today would likely screw that up with hallucinations, you can see the resemblance. It feels eerily prescient.However, we’re not here to talk about GenAI, and neither does the show: the real focus is on the Uploaded Intelligence and the ability to fully simulate a human being computationally. This requires a few major assumptions:* The brain - that is, the cortex and brain stem - constitutes the entirety of who we are as individuated conscious beings* An individual’s behaviours, emotions, and cognition, can be simulated in their entirety from a scan of the cortical network using classical and quantum computing platformsBefore we can even begin to tackle these assumptions, we need to understand what it is to compute, to be intelligent, and to be conscious.I Am, Therefore I ComputeWhen we perform a mental task, sometimes we are conscious of the effort expended to perform it. Other times, we are unconscious of that effort, and an input gets processed and turned into an output which is re-integrated with our conscious awareness sometime later.To us, these results arrive as flashes of inspiration or insight; that is the moment of reintegration. In truth, the brain was likely working on that problem for a period of time without you consciously being aware of it.These unconscious computations are presently done in our biological circuitry. Technically, the physical medium of computation doesn’t matter, and could be electronic. However, there is an inherent problem in viewing the brain as equivalent to electronic circuits.Classical computing and electronics are based on gates. Gates allow you to perform simple, but exact, operations on incoming electrical signals. For example, an OR gate takes 2 inputs, and so long as at least one of those inputs is receiving a signal, the OR gate outputs a signal. A simple way to model this would be like:0 OR 0 = 01 OR 0 = 10 OR 1 = 11 OR 1 = 1The number 1 denotes an electrical signal, while 0 is no signal.Meanwhile, an AND gate takes 2 inputs, and only outputs a signal if both inputs have a signal:0 AND 0 = 01 AND 0 = 00 AND 1 = 01 AND 1 = 1Gates like these feel intuitive to us. They follow a simple logic. They’re also exact and about as deterministic as it gets. They have no hidden influences outside the two expected inputs which can affect the result; so 0 AND 1 should never result in 1, just as 2 + 2 should never equal 5.Brains, and biology in general, are nothing like that.The thing about biological computation is that it is fuzzy. For most of us, doing novel arithmetic in our head is a combination of heuristics learned from repetition in similar tasks, which we use to get a sense of approximating a value; then more heuristics refine it down until we have a value in mind that we feel confident enough about.Let’s do a quick experiment. Solve the following 2 problems:* What is half of 10,000,000?* What is half of 8,626,400?Which one required more time/mental energy, the bigger number or the smaller one?If we followed a purely computational way of thinking about things, our expectation should be that the bigger number would be more computationally expensive to calculate than the smaller one. However for the human brain, it’s not dependent on the size of the numbers we’re working with, but on their composition.In the first problem, although the number was larger, its composition was vastly simpler, made almost entirely of zeroes. To solve it, we could reduce it by 6 decimal places, and then the problem becomes “What is half of 10?”The second smaller number had many more non-zero digits, meaning we could not reduce it in the same way. Instead, our natural inclination is to solve for each non-zero digit separately: “What is half of 8? What is half of 6? What is half of 2?” and so on.1 problem instantly turns into 5.“Therefore, our brains are not computers, therefore, our brains cannot be simulated by computers.”Woah hold up there cowboy, not so fast. Plenty of things which are not computers are simulated on computers literally all the time in every field ever; we just haven’t simulated literally everything in the universe that exists.This argument, that the brain is not a computer and therefore could never be modelled by one, always drives me a little insane: just because it doesn’t follow gate-based logic does not mean it is not performing computation, and does not mean that it cannot be simulated computationally. It is, and it can. The problem here is one of dimensionality.To simulate the human brain, you need way more than merely its connectome. We know this from simulations of C. Elegans, the Nematode Worm whose species all have exactly the same number of neurons: 302, no more, no less. We have been working to simulate its entire set of known behaviours for decades computationally, and we have made progress; but consider how incredibly simple C. Elegans is, and yet we still haven’t figured it out? How complicated can a near-microscopic worm possibly be?Some have reached the conclusion that the complexity is not in simulating the worm, but rather, simulating chemistry itself.Chemistry is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated and most powerful phenomenon in the physical universe. Chemistry is like the operating system, the essential firmware, upon which the software of human minds can run. Even firmware requires something firmer: hardware. That’s quantum mechanics. That’s effectively the architecture upon which the Firmware must execute.Indeed, if the answer is that we need to simulate chemistry itself, then think of our predicament this way:Imagine you were trying to simulate a classical gate-based Turing machine on some highly exotic computer, and you only managed to implement AND and OR gates; then you proceed to try running DOOM on it (as is tradition.)You wouldn’t get very far, would you?Technically, we can build a complete computing machine using any combination of “NOT” operator with “AND” or “OR” gates, but we don’t even know the NOT operator exists, let alone what a universal Turing machine even is.That’s more or less where we are in the grand scheme of things when it comes to simulating all of chemistry.I Am, Therefore I IntellectAnother very common assumption made by just about everyone is that the ability to think implies intelligence. It’s also extremely common to conflate intelligence with emotion, with motivation, with the survival instinct. This is part of the problem which has often taken debates on simulated cognition in circles: we assume a full suite of human cognitive abilities as the baseline for any model of cognition.Although you likely cannot have intelligence without the ability to think in some sense, it is not necessarily a given that thought brings with it intelligence. It is also essential to be aware of the fact that emotion is not included by default; in fact, emotion is a wholly separate concept. A machine that can think is not, by default, emotional. To be emotional, it would need to be given emotions explicitly; emotions evolved much earlier than intelligent cognition, and were a useful tool for boosting our instinctual motivations which promoted survival.We tend to assume that a super-intelligence will naturally develop super-ambition, or super-benevolence, or super-hatred. But this is a fallacy.This is best explained by the Orthogonality Thesis, proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom. It states, effectively, that intelligence and final goals are independent variables. You can have a clumsy intelligence that wants to conquer the world, and you can have a god-like super-intelligence whose only motivation is to count every paperclip in the universe.In a “pure” AI, there is no inherent reason for it to care about its own survival unless we program it to. It has no fear of death, no pride, no resentment.This is where Pantheon (and the concept of Uploaded Intelligence) gets interesting. The UIs in the show are not “Pure AI” sitting on an abstract graph. They are brute-force scans of biological architecture. They inherit the “spaghetti code” of human evolution. They maintain their human wants and human needs. They carry the baggage of the limbic system simulated alongside the cortex.If we are to achieve full emulation of a human mind, we must be prepared to emulate biological drives, emotions, hormones, the lot.A Means Without An EndEveryone always asks “What Is Consciousness”But no one ever asks “How Is Consciousness”Finally, we arrive at the most challenging hurdle of all. Let’s assume we solve the chemistry problem. Let’s assume we achieve full emulation. We boot up the simulation. The digital eyes open.The entity speaks.It says, “I am.”How do we know it is really aware?This is part of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. If we wanted to simulate a human mind, we must assume consciousness is part of the success criteria. Whatever else it might be, it must be conscious.Yet here we are, at the end of 2025, and guess what? We still have no idea how to tell for sure. We can’t even be sure that a rock is not conscious. I’m serious.Think of it like this; what, exactly, is conscious, when it comes to a human being? Is it the brain alone? Or the body? Do the proteins that make up the neuron cell count as being conscious? Is it the whole system?In our daily lives, we assume other humans are conscious because they act like us and are made of the same wet biological stuff as us. We assume a rock is not conscious because… it just sits there.This is an assumption based purely on external observation. We have no “consciousness detector”, yet. We cannot measure the internal subjective experience (qualia) of another being.Philosophers talk about the P-Zombie (Philosophical Zombie); a being that is physically identical to a human, acts exactly like a human, screams when you pinch it, and laughs when you tell a joke, but has absolutely zero inner experience. The lights are on, but supposedly, nobody is home.If we simulate a mind on a silicon chip (or a quantum substrate), and it screams in pain, is it actually feeling pain? Or is it just executing a code function, equivalent to:if (pain_intensity > 3) play_audio(”ouch.mp3”)I don’t personally believe P-Zombies can exist. If I simulate the universe, and within that simulated universe I also simulate a human being, and the simulation behaves exactly the way a human would in every case, to the degree that they are entirely indistinguishable from any “real” human being when observed from the outside, on what grounds can one deny its consciousness?If we can’t even prove a rock isn’t silently judging us, we certainly won’t be able to prove a digital mind isn’t experiencing qualia.The Integrated FutureSimulating the human mind in its entirety, including chemistry, is something which we will not see happen for a very long time; some have estimated a timeline of 100 years from where we are now.However, I believe there is a kind of part-way point which we are fast approaching, and when it hits, could herald another exponential growth curve in technology.For at least the past 10 years, I have thought about a future where the integration between the biological and digital is real and deep.It’s something I call “Neuro-Integration.”It’s the idea that we can extend on the human brain’s existing biological modules of cognition, adding digital ones. Not only could we add additional sensors - infra-red video, say - we could add vastly more powerful computational abilities, such as floating-point arithmetic, physics simulations, statistics, and more, all accessible directly to the conscious mind at a thought.Simply being able to control your laptop’s cursor with your mind isn’t what I’m talking about; we already can do some of this sort of stuff, but it’s fairly pedestrian. I’m talking about an input-output loop, two-way communication between mind and digital computers, via Brain Control Interfaces (BCI) and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) devices, without invasive techniques such as surgical implants.The technologies as they exist today are far from perfect; challenges remain to be solved around the level of accurate targeting, focal area, inter-individual variability and sensitivities, information encoding, and much more. Regardless, I truly believe these are solvable challenges.It could reduce to zero the friction and effort required to make use of terrifically accurate and high-speed computation. Similar to how LLMs can access tools, these tools could one day be accessible directly from the human mind, and the result could arrive the same way as a flash of insight or inspiration does now.If we combine this with various multi-modal ML technologies, and solve the problem of encoding various information modes so the brain can understand it, we could expand upon our own ability to visualise in our minds eye. We would never have to search our memory for the meaning of an uncommon word again; it could invoke an instant dictionary look-up. Semantic memory could be extended in ways which we can’t imagine, becoming a near-instant vector graph query for extended contextual information.Hell, just imagine if you could add to your mental workspace with custom scripts, like you can with a shell environment.What’s more, there are still questions of basic user experience, privacy and security to be answered before we can turn it into a platform for extending cognition: how does the human mind send input to the device, and in what manner does it perceive output? How do we minimise the risk of malicious passive scanning of brain activity? How do we address the risks of misuse and data security? How do we avoid amplifying inequality?Perhaps the biggest challenge to the general availability of this technology - for very good reason - is the slow pace of regulatory approval.Regardless, there is no doubt in my mind that this technology is coming, and probably faster than we think. The real question is: will we allow a small gaggle of tech bros to dominate the space like they have in Generative AI and Cloud Computing? Or will we take our destiny into our own hands for once?I am, as you would know, not a fan of “big tech”; we can already see the insanity going on with the narcissists at the top of most of these companies, whose greed is now amplified to 11, desperate to replace human workforces with anything they can.I am also much more cynical about the recent GenAI boom than most. However, I also know that some of that cynicism is a pure emotional response to the fact that this amazing technology humanity has developed has made that small gaggle of greedy narcissists at the top of Big Tech so much richer and more powerful than anyone ever thought possible, and it disgusts me.The technology itself, however, when stripped of all the amphetamine-like hype and euphoria - though knowing CEOs as I do, it’s not amphetamine, it’s cocaine - is really quite remarkable.The track we are currently on is one where corporations are desperately trying to scrape away the human “chattel”, whom they have long relied upon for their intellectual capabilities, in a race to replace almost all of their operations with machines, keeping on a skeleton crew of human meat sacks to monitor them, upgrade their hardware, keep the AC running; until they eventually get replaced by robotics. Meanwhile, the CEOs, board members and shareholders continue to rake in money until the mathematically inevitable collapse of aggregate demand.I believe there is a future where human intelligence and machine intelligence are not in conflict. That may not be the future we are currently hurtling towards at trillion-dollar speeds; but it is reachable from where we are.All that is required is for people who believe in the future of human kind and our continued relevance, who believe in fundamental ethics and open technology, to come together and start a conversation about how we can really create a future for all humanity, together.Not for profit, not for domination, not for any one nation; for everyone.Where we go from here should be up to us all.If you enjoyed this post, please consider a paid subscription. I’m trying to keep all my posts free, but it’s a challenge. Please help out if you can.Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of A Chemical Mind; what do you think of the possibilities of neuro-integration technology? What did you think of Pantheon? Would you ever upload yourself to the cloud? Please let me know in the comments on the Substack article!If you’re interested in further discussion on neuro-integration from all aspects and angles, I’ve set up a discord server here. Come join the fun!Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

“So far, there is no convincing evidence for Abdominal Migraines. Migraines just don’t work like that.”These were the words spoken to me by a Head of Neurology; a very accomplished man at the top of his career, running one of the most prestigious Neurology centres in the country. He was smiling paternally at me from across the desk, his arms leaning against it and his hands interlocked in front of him, his suit and tie practically glistening with the importance and prestige that oozed from every fibre of his being. I, the distinctly unimportant, uneducated, scruffy-haired kid in torn jeans and t-shirt that I was, glistened mostly with nervous sweat as I shifted uneasily in my seat, adjusting my direction of lean from left to right. I never sit straight up in any chair ever; I’m always tilted somehow. Just more comfortable that way.“Ok, well, what do you think it could be?” I asked. I knew he would have no good answer. Nothing I hadn’t already tried. I was right.“Sounds like an allergy, you should see a dietician.”It’s hard to tell someone whose expertise rightfully deserves respect that they are wrong, especially when you don’t have the benefit of all those many years of medical school, real-world experience and countless citations, awards, and grants to your name. I can’t help but cringe to the depths of my soul when I read stories of folks who are into homoeopathy proudly proclaiming victory over medical science, because “it worked for me!” and so I have developed a habit of deferring to the experts, even when I doubt them. However, not all experts are made equal, and not all illness is necessarily found in a diagnostic manual either.The reason I was even here, in this room, speaking to this highly accomplished medical professional, had nothing to do with abdominal migraines, or migraines at all for that matter. Several months earlier, I’d had a tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure. They were trying to find out if I had epilepsy (thankfully it was my first and so far only seizure, and no epilepsy was found). While I was there, I decided to ask them about something my doctor had mentioned to me. These were experts in the field of brain-things, surely they’d know something about migraines.Right?The fact is, I had gastrointestinal problems literally my entire life, and they go through periods of variation, kind of like “phases”. Y’know, like one day you discover them dressed up all in black, smelling of cigarette smoke and listening to My Chemical Romance. “It’s just a phase.”Sometimes, a phase would manifest as episodes of excruciating abdominal pain. Sometimes, it would be bloating and general discomfort. Most of the time, it included nausea. Nausea was the worst, particularly because I had a fear of vomiting (something called “emetophobia”). It would often send me into a spiralling panic attack, forcing me to pace the floor, back and forth sometimes for hours, controlling my breathing and repeating little “safety” behaviours to myself.Though certainly unwelcome, it was never a huge concern. That is, until I began working full time. There were days when I would be scared to get on the train in the morning when nauseous. A couple of times, I had to get off at a stop part-way to work and call someone to pick me up and take me home again.Fear and tunnel-focus can make us do weird stuff. Since I was young, it had been drilled in to me that if I ever felt like I was in trouble or having a crisis at a train station or some other public place, that I should just ask for help. I don’t know if you have ever tried asking for help when your stomach is turning itself in knots and you are in a full-blown panic, possibly on the verge of ejecting its contents: I did, at a central train station, and I got nothing but confused, bemused and mildly annoyed apathy. In all fairness, what are they supposed to do? Then again, what was I supposed to do??My mind returned to the Neurologist’s office, and his suggestion of a dietician. “I already tried that.”A single eyebrow on the Neurologist’s face migrated north, followed eventually by the other eyebrow, before the whole face gave in to that expression people use when they no longer want to bother. That, or he didn’t believe me. I mean, I was so skinny and pale and young, I bet he thought I just needed some protein, grit, and a tan.“Well, if it’s not dietary, then it’s almost certainly psychological. There is, medically speaking, nothing wrong with you.”I realised this conversation wasn’t getting anywhere, and ultimately it didn’t really matter. I had suffered this for so long, I had come to assume it was going to be my life now. I was just being naive, thinking that there might be hope for me. That maybe there might be a legitimate explanation for my infuriatingly inexplicable malady.My relationship with food had never been what one might call “normal”. I’d always been skinny, mostly because I was incredibly active and athletic, but also because I just wasn’t interested in food as a thing. I ate because I was hungry, and only to satiate that hunger.For the past few years leading up to this conversation, my stomach issues had escalated significantly; that nausea which used to stop by just to visit before leaving again, turned into something called cyclic vomiting, with cold sweats and excruciating abdominal pain. It would turn up seemingly out of nowhere, though it was more likely during some anxiety-inducing event; it wasn’t consistent in that regard. I went to hospital one time, thinking I was dying. I will never forget the looks of complete disdain from the hospital staff on that particular day. I was in total crisis, and I was made to feel like a fool for seeking medical attention. Thankfully that was the only time I had such an experience with a hospital (though perhaps that’s due to my avoiding them.)Much of my medical history was psychiatric: ADHD, ASD, Panic Disorder and general Anxiety. Autism Spectrum Disorder has a lot of overlap with gastric discomfort and upsets, so for a while we thought maybe it was just more of that manifesting. My father had died of Crohns disease when I was 20, so we were also on the look-out for any signs that I might also develop the disease, but no sign of that was present.Doctors had looked everywhere, poked and prodded, taken nearly my body weight in blood to be run through every test, had scopes of my gastrointestinal tract both up and down. They looked for cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues, drugs, various types of flu, they even wondered whether I still had dormant malaria from the times I had contracted P. Falciparum during my time in the Solomon Islands. They looked for Hepatitis, Gastroenteritis, Meningitis, Strep, they even checked me for ticks. I was checked for Toxoplasmosis, considering my lifelong history with cats. They looked for gastric ulcers, appendicitis, liver function, kidneys. They did an MRI on me. Actually, they did 3 of them.Nothing. Not. One. Thing. Was. Found.And yet, I was still losing weight, despite already being the skinniest guy I knew. It horrified me. I was struggling to keep food down. I was gaunt, pale, a bag of bones.I chanced to bump into someone I hadn’t seen for a very long time in the street one day, and they were shocked when they recognised me. “Are you ok?” I remember them asking. “Are you... like, sick?”I looked like a cancer patient.I didn’t know how to explain. I couldn’t really say “Ok, sit down, this is gonna take a while”. So I shrugged. “It’s fine.”The evening before my neurology appointment was when I had seen my GP. I had turned up to the clinic covered in sweat, trembling like mad, gaunt, and emaciated. It felt like an attack of the flu, but there was no virus. I was nearing a point of no return. If I couldn’t escape this cycle, I was seriously considering ending it all. After listening to my entire medical history, I remember him sitting back in his chair, hands folded across his chest, staring at the wall. The look on his face was utterly perplexed. It was a look I hadn’t actually seen before in any medical professional. It was strangely reassuring. Perplexity meant consideration. It meant he was seriously thinking about my situation. He was running it through in his mind, peering into his experience and education, searching for a glimmer of light somewhere in the darkness.He was taking me seriously.“Hmm...”, he broke the silence after a minute or two.“It’s a long shot, but from what you’ve told me, there’s only one thing you might not have tried yet.”My ears perked up. “Have you heard of abdominal migraines?”I hadn’t. “This is unlikely to work, but I think we should try you on a simple beta blocker. The good thing is that it has almost no side-effects, and we can stop it any time without harm. But there is a tiny chance that it might help, we can just see. How does that sound?”I jumped at it. A tiny chance that I hadn’t yet taken was a chance worth taking. I was booked in to see him again the next week.When I came back to see him, I nearly cried. It was the first time in years that I had gone a whole week without nausea. No nausea whatsoever. No vomiting. I could keep food down. I hadn’t had a crisis on a train while commuting. No crises while at the office. I could even eat yoghurt and I felt absolutely bloody fine.“You really don’t know what you’ve done for me”, I told him. My voice was breaking. I didn’t want to come across as melodramatic, but it was difficult to avoid: this man had saved my life. Somehow, a simple idea, and a simple remedy, had cured me from an illness that had been utterly intractable, an illness which had eluded so many more highly-paid and highly-respected experts, many of whom preferred to think I must be making it all up rather than admitting to their failure.It’s been over 10 years since then. I got back to a healthy weight (maybe a tiny bit over-healthy), I re-discovered food (it helps that my wife was once a chef), and after a few years, I didn’t even need the beta-blockers anymore. The migraines are gone, and they’ve never returned.Research on abdominal migraines is still severely lacking. Most cases are found in children and adolescents, and mainly in women and girls. It’s startlingly rare, but that’s more likely a factor of its vague diagnostic criteria. It’s one of these “functional gastrointestinal disorders” which can only be diagnosed by eliminating literally everything else which could conceivably cause that particular set of symptoms. Wanna know what else causes these sorts of symptoms?Frikkin everything, ever.So that doesn’t help. I don’t envy those tasked with diagnosing people like myself, let alone curing. It’s not easy. Regardless, there are several clear hints about where to look for the problem.It seems there are two possible biological mechanisms:* Arbitrary electrical discharge from the hypothalamus into the cortex, brain stem, and out through the spinal cord* Variable blood flow through the cerebral arteryIt’s highly likely that they’re not mutually exclusive mechanisms, and could explain some variability in the effectiveness of simple treatment with beta-blockers. However, the study numbers are so small, there simply is not enough evidence to clearly show efficacy of any treatment.People aren’t known to die of this condition. It’s not heart disease, cancer, or stroke. It’s not a deadly parasite. It’s not flesh-eating. Not only that, but it’s so damn vague, and super rare in adults. So who cares?I care. Those suffering it care.Sometimes, you just happen to get something that isn’t in the textbook. In that case, f**k the textbook. Find a way anyway. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Note: I’m neither an economist nor a demographist, I’m just some guy with an opinion about everything, and by default, you should assume that everything I’ve written here is wrong.Most of you know me by now, I think. I’m a socialist, with radical leftist pacifist leanings. I have all the leftist badges, although I don’t wear them on my sleeve. I won’t bore you with them here.I also frikkin love babies.Noisy? Yes.Smelly? Yes.Utterly incoherent?? Yes. Cute as hell? So much yes.Despite this, something has always made me feel uncomfortable about identifying myself with “pro-natalism”. The reason is fairly simple: it tends to be conflated with the pro-life, anti-contraception crowd, not to mention the “your body, my choice” types who like to troll Xitter. Quite frankly, contraception is one of the greatest public health boons in human history, and has saved an incalculable number of lives and livelihoods. Yet somehow, there have always been those among the super-religious of many kinds (and commonly right-wing though not exclusively) who have a thing for banning contraceptives; today you’ll typically find them wrapping it in the guise of “trying to stop a population crash”.So I started to ask myself: is it possible to be pro-natalist and pro-contraceptive/pro-choice? Is it possible to have a pro-natalist policy which doesn’t infringe on the rights of women?I think the answer is “Yes”.But then I realised I hadn’t even asked myself the very first and most obvious question:Question #1: What Is The Problem To Be Solved?Already, I’m struggling. I’m not entirely sure there is a real problem (yet).For many decades particularly following the baby-boom, there was widespread worry and panic about the possibility of over-population. For most of that time, there was good reason to be worried: it did look like we were in for unchecked exponential growth. In fact, we were in exponential growth for a while following World War 2.See the following charts, from Our World In Data:Y’know the term “baby boomer”? Yeah, that’s the sharp mountain bit. That was a thing that happened, and it was indeed exponential.In close-up, it looks like the population boom only started to emerge around 1925 at the earliest. There was, without doubt, an absolute explosion in population growth from 1945, peaking in 1963 and has been falling ever since. However, if we zoom waaaaaay the f**k out:Population growth has had a foot on the accelerator since the 1700s, and once we discovered how to treat disease - and, more importantly, avoid much of it - population hopped on a rocket sled and rode that sucker until the fuel ran out.Right now, and since about 1974, we’re in linear growth with roughly 1 billion people added to the pile every 12-14 years. Based on projections by the UN, world population is expected to peak in 2068 at 10.43 billion, and dip slightly.It seems to me that we might now be extrapolating that little dip the same way that people extrapolated the exponential growth phase - by simply assuming the immediate trendline to continue indefinitely - thus beginning a new panic about the coming “end of humanity.”Whereas to me, what seems more likely is a kind of population plateau, rather than a crash (let alone one so apocalyptic).As Hans Rosling once illustrated in a lecture on the subject (he did it with physical blocks, so I made a digital version):Even without a crash, we are presented with several economic problems. The first is that any country which is losing population is going to have a hell of a time. The East Germans built the Berlin Wall not to keep out spies or prevent sabotage: they simply could not afford the loss of population to the west, and their primary financial backer - the Soviet Union - would not pay the bill indefinitely.It’s often said that economics is not a zero-sum thing, but at a population plateau, it would certainly resemble one in important ways. There would only be a certain number of possible consumers world-wide, and population shift through migration is far less likely to be offset in any meaningful way by birth rates. That means there will most definitely be some losers.So, is there a problem?Well, maybe. It’s all very speculative at this point. If we remain at a plateau as I expect we probably will, things will be interesting for a little while, but very manageable.It only becomes a real problem in the event of an actual crash, and in the interests of hedging ones bets, it’s probably a good idea to at least start working on the problem now, so that we’re not caught out if such a time ever comes.So really, you could say pro-natalism is a bit of a “break glass” stance for me. If the future of the human population is ever at stake due to a crashing birth rate, then consider me a pro-natalist. Until then, babies are cute, and sex is awesome.As I see it, there are two main directions pro-natalist policy can take:* Subtractive policy: subtract the right to control how many children you have by making it difficult to have sex for fun or terminate a pregnancy (whether simply accidental, or due to a sex crime)* Additive policy: add support and assistance to people who want to have kids (or more kids) to ease the burden on the familySome people even suggest - as in one of the many really dumb-ass viral Xitter posts from a few months ago - that we should literally stop educating women, which is yet another wonderful example of subtractive policy.All these policies cost money, but only one has a hope in hell of actually working and not leading to a mass proletarian revolt. Can you guess which one it is? Hint: it’s the one that isn’t a buzz-kill.No, I’m not getting into an abortion debate in the comments. Don’t do it.Yeah but what if?Ok ok, lets talk about Japan. I know you really wanted to. Let’s do it.Japan is a fascinating case study for all sorts of things, but population dynamics has been a big concern for them since the “lost decade” of the 1990s. From October 2021 to October 2022, Japan’s population shrank by more than half a million people. According to the Financial Times, they lose 100 people every single hour.You might be surprised to know, however, that Japan isn’t actually the most relevant example for our purposes here. By far, that honour belongs to South Korea.South Korea has, for many years, had the worst birth rate in the entire world, and it gets worse year after year. In fact, it’s so bad right now, that within 50 years, their work-age population will have fallen by half. HALF.That’s mind-boggling. In fact, I dare say that’s catastrophic.This is all despite the vast amounts of money they have been throwing at the problem for the last 20 years, and despite politicians having declared it a legitimate national emergency. Honestly, for once, I don’t think that’s hyperbolic in any way shape or form.At the same time, South Korean women are saying that government simply is not listening to them. Whaaaaat?!How can this be? Surely, incentives would be the most preferred way of going about finding a solution to the problem?Clearly, spending to incentivise having children has not worked, neither for South Korea, nor Japan which has been taking many of the same approaches to a problem that has haunted them since the 90s. Actually, no, that’s not really true. We can’t just say that it “has not worked”, we need to be more specific: it has not worked in the very unique cultural, social and political circumstances of these two Asian economies.Much of Asia is a world that places incredible pressure on young people to have an all-consuming career, and where their malignant corporate culture and rampant sexism means that maternity leave is out of the question if you have any hope of remaining in work for the future.South Korea has the highest rates of women’s education in the world, but much of this push for education is in service of their economy’s insane demands on workers. First you slave away at that degree, with your parents demanding that you be top of the class; then you slave away at a job run by (mostly) men that demand all your time and energy be committed to work, and the moment you’re burned out, you’re discarded like empty packaging.This is when the great dragon that is Asia’s unique circumstances rears its head and stares us in the face: for the average South Korean woman, the near-impossibility of having both a work-life and home-life, let alone a balance between the two, is the determinant factor which drives them away from the prospect of raising a family. When actually asked, women will repeat this point consistently, though it seems their politicians prioritise the appearance of working the problem more than the substance.[One South-Korean woman] also shares the same fear of every woman I spoke to - that if she were to take time off to have a child, she might not be able to return to work."There is an implicit pressure from companies that when we have children, we must leave our jobs," she says. She has watched it happen to her sister and her two favourite news presenters.One 28-year-old woman, who worked in HR, said she'd seen people who were forced to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her never to have a baby.Jean Mackenzie, BBCJapan and South Korea are both in dire straits here. The only hope they have left is to radically overturn their entire social and corporate culture, one that is perhaps rooted in centuries of national development, and replace it with something that grants more individual liberty from their relentless “culture to succeed”, and at the same time, to punish businesses that directly or indirectly violate a persons right to return to work following maternity leave.Or, to phrase it in the language of additive and subtractive policy: they must subtract power from corporations to add sanity and a minimal “work-life balance” for individuals.Should they fail, they will become entirely dependent on immigration to cushion the fall. That’s going to be a very bitter pill to swallow for countries that are already fairly xenophobic at baseline. Given their socio-political and cultural problems, they’re unlikely to improve rates of migration without a systemic overhaul, either.So what about The West? If we were one day faced with a calamity like that of South Korea, could we spend our way out of it? The answer is probably yes.Firstly, we actually have a sane idea of work-life balance, when compared with our Asian counterparts. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s true. We also place way less pressure on young people, prioritising holistic well-being and personal fulfilment more than corporate hustle.Second, we also have some more progressive views on what constitutes a “family unit”:Same-sex marriage is illegal in South Korea, and unmarried women are not generally permitted to use sperm donors to conceive."I'd love to have children. I'd have 10 if I could," [says Minsung, a 27-year-old Korean bi-sexual woman.]"Hopefully one day this will change, and I'll be able to marry and have children with the person I love," she says.The friends point out the irony, given Korea's precarious demographic situation, that some women who want to be mothers are not allowed to be.Minsung’s idea of a family is considered perfectly reasonable in most Western countries, and as far as I know, there’d be little stopping her and her partner having as many babies as they like.Right now, people like Minsung are a shining beacon, screaming “WE CAN SOLVE THIS! LET US HELP!”Yet, South Korea’s political class refuse to acknowledge them, and then lament in front of the cameras: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”Here’s an idea which we could all use: try listening to women for once. After all, women are the solution.The moral of this story? Leftist ideals can fit just fine into pro-natalism, and although I’m not ready to panic over world population levels yet, I’m not ready to write it off either. We can hedge our bets without picking a side. With the world turning more and more to solar power and other renewables, we’re finally starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel on climate change (we’re not out of danger by any means yet).It kinda says something about the human condition that we’re already looking around for a new existential crisis. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

“All the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, starts with the humiliation of one individual.”Kofi AnnanRed. That was all I could see. Red. The colour. The smell. The sound.It saturated my very being. Every sinew, every muscle, every nerve. I was filled with a rage, a hatred, so large, so unimaginably monstrous, that I felt myself capable of anything in response.What was the cause of all this boiling emotion?A series of comments, made by an anonymous person, on Reddit, directed at me, another anonymous person. A laughing bombardment of insults and jeering which were invulnerable to my attempted de-escalations; by someone that followed me around, into threads on other communities; pursued me. Taunted me. Humiliated me. Called me “pathetic.”All this by someone I have never known, never met, and never will. Still, it felt personal. Deeply personal.Although it occurred many years ago, I can remember every detail.I’ve always practised a kind of “strategic patience”. I assume everyone is just having a bad day, that they’re truly good people underneath, and that I just need to show them that I pose no threat to them, and they’ll calm down. Then we can talk like grown ups.Very few people have actually broken my will to be patient when I’m actively putting it into practice. Those few that managed to do it live in my head rent-free. The reason?They made me feel utterly humiliated in front of others.If you want to destroy me, find a way to humiliate me in a public way. Works every time. Use at your own risk, can backfire severely.This feeling isn’t just an online phenomenon; it’s a force that has directly shaped history, and continues to do so. In her book “Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict”, scholar Evelin Lindner gave this force a name: “The Nuclear Bomb of Emotion”.Since its release in 2006, the book has given international relations and violence a whole new clarity: underneath the surface, the radioactivity of feelings of humiliation poison everything, and can last for generations. The humiliating act itself may be entirely forgotten by all but the individual who felt aggrieved. It might even be seen as humiliation only by the aggrieved.World War 2, and the rise of Hitler, was made possible by the very deliberate humiliation of Germany by the Entente powers after the end of the Great War. Hitler himself made use of these feelings, embedded in the German psyche, and his rhetoric of vengeance and reclamation of dignity and might were nearly irresistible. This is why most international correspondents who covered his rallies and speeches could not understand the reaction of the masses.William Shirer described seeing the “distorted faces” and “extended arms” of the audience in attendance at one of Hitler’s speeches, all engaged in a kind of primal scream as they saluted “der Führer”. The general excitement and enthusiasm shown by even those Germans who he believed were the least likely to fall for völkisch propaganda seemed to defy explanation.Shirer, being an American, did not share the feeling of humiliation. He wasn’t primed to receive Hitler’s message the way most Germans were. He was not equipped to understand the phenomenon he was witnessing.The message Hitler was sending - the one of reclaimed dignity - was utterly non-partisan. Left or right, socialist or nationalist, democrat or fascist, all were vulnerable. People were ready to do anything to overcome that sense of humiliation; from there, killing comes easily. Not the sanitised, abstracted kind of killing practised by the modern-day drone operator, separated as they are by thousands of kilometres, centring fuzzy blobs between virtual cross-hairs. The genocidal kind, the up-close-and-personal kind, the kind that defines the word “bloodlust”.During the Cuban Missile Crisis, even some of the fiercest critics of Fidel Castro within Cuba declared themselves ready and willing to enlist in the brigades, to defend with their lives the sovereignty and “Dignidad” - dignity, pride - of Cuba from the Yankee aggressor, should they ever attempt to invade the island. America had made Cubans feel humiliated for a very long time, and the Bay of Pigs was yet more salt poured into an open wound.So, when Khrushchev offered to send Castro his own weapons of mass destruction, it should have been obvious - had anyone in the Kremlin, or anywhere else, been paying attention - that the Cubans would seize on the opportunity to square up, chest against chest, with their belligerent superpower neighbour. Small bands of Cuban exiles notwithstanding, the determination to re-assert their sovereign existence was universal among Cubans, powered by those feelings of humiliation, and through this, they were unified.This is what made the crisis so dangerous. Castro and the Cubans were deadly serious. Not even Khrushchev understood that, and by the time he figured this out, he was standing “eyeball to eyeball” with Kennedy. The Genocide in Rwanda was fomented by a sense of humiliation, too. Hutus had long felt like second-class citizens, and saw the Tutsi as elite oppressors. Despite a Hutu “Power” dictatorship having been in control of the country for more than 30 years by the time of the genocide, those feelings were easily hijacked, and people could be turned instantly from friends and neighbours into brutal killers.Japan in World War 2? They had felt humiliated by the United States over sanctions following Japan’s invasion of China. They believed this action to be an overtly racist double-standard: they were “merely” following the same play-book the Western powers had been following for centuries, and now the Western powers were punishing Japan for it. They felt aggrieved and deliberately excluded from the World Power club, despite having proven themselves just as militarily capable as any European country after they smacked the Russians around at Port Arthur.School shooters, a phenomenon seen primarily in the United States, are often considered to be victims of bullying or acts of humiliation who have snapped. Although there are a few notable exceptions: Columbine, for example, was a classic case of charismatic psychopathy from the mind of Eric Harris, who swept Dylan Klebold up in a cycle of rage and hatred, which further amplified each other.These events can vary wildly in scale, yet they are all powered by similar psychological mechanisms. To understand why it’s so potent, we have to distinguish humiliation from simple embarrassment; because humiliation is so much more than that.Humiliation is external and relational. It can even feel existential.Its core ingredients are powerlessness, public exposure, and a sense of injustice.It’s an attack on the social self which, more even than the physical self, is essential not only to our own survival as part of the herd, but also to our own sense of identity. It introduces us to a whole new dimension of vulnerability, one we could never have imagined, one which we have not had time to make peace with.“…one of the defining characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless.”Evelin Lindner: The Anatomy of HumiliationThe perpetrator, the victim, the witness: this is called the “humiliation triangle”. Indeed, this is a defining characteristic of humiliation: it requires a minimum of 3 actors.The psychological and the physical are deeply intertwined when it comes to perceptions of pain. The same regions of the brain are lit up when experiencing either physical or emotional pain. Yet, these mechanisms are incredibly complex, and there is no single shared pathway which begins with the experience of emotional pain and ends in extreme violence.Moreover, “Perpetrator” is not always a strictly accurate description of one of the actors in the triangle; nor is “victim”.“…a perpetrator may want to commit humiliation but not succeed, some people may wish to be humiliated rather than wish to avoid it, a ‘do-gooder’ may cause humiliation while trying to do good, and a third party may identify ‘victims’ who do not see themselves as such, or fail to see victims in those cases where they do exist.”As with all human social interactions, there is a highly complex interplay of individual intent, perceived intent, intended perception, the act itself, the interpretation of free will behind the act, the view of 3rd parties, the reputations of those involved, their social caste, the dynamics of culture, politics, power and sexuality, and much else besides.What matters in the end is that someone has perceived a deliberate, malicious act on the part of another actor, identifying that actor as a perpetrator and themselves as a victim, and believes the act to have reduced their own social standing in the eyes of the witnessing parties.Regardless of the accuracy of this perception, it is the perception itself which creates the emotion and embeds it deeply into the psyche of the aggrieved.Thankfully, it is not always thus.Lindner found that, on rare occasion, leaders who deny themselves the kind of vengeance and retribution which might otherwise seem their right have emerged.Nelson Mandela did not unleash genocide on the white elite in South Africa. After 27 years of humiliation in prison, he emerged as a wise peacemaker, not as a humiliation entrepreneur like Hitler.Although today it is a bit of a cliché to cite Mandela as inspiration, no doubt Mandela’s example is particularly powerful, no less for the catastrophe that he had the power to unleash had he wanted to. He could have had all of white South Africa eradicated in an instant, along with anyone considered “collaborators”. After the treatment he experienced at their hands, we might have expected as much. Instead, he welcomed his perpetrators with open arms, without waiting for an apology, or a show of remorse. He told them they were welcome by his side, and indeed, he even kept the white men of the security service in place to protect him when he ascended to head the government. He was determined that one way or another, they would learn to make a new world together, as comrades. The Truth and Reconciliation process made it possible to forgive without forgetting.There are other examples where a deep sense of awareness of the perspectives of others may have prevented catastrophe: Ronald Regan eventually came to realise the cycle of humiliation, outrage and fear which pushed the two Cold War super-powers towards the precipice - one which he had continued to perpetuate when he first entered office - and took radical steps to change his behaviour, to recognise the Soviet perspective as real, and to do everything he could to make it clear that the United States legitimately wanted to live together in peace, not in fear. It went a very long way toward ending the Cold War.Imagine if the Germans had found a leader with the wisdom and humanity of a Mandela following the Great War.Imagine if the leaders of Hutu Power had taken a few pages from his book.Imagine if Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu had even the smallest scintilla of a Mandela, or even a Ronald Regan, in them.Imagine being such a positive influence on the world that mentioning your name actually becomes cliché.This finally brings us to the morals of this story, and they are important ones.The same dynamics of psychology play out both in a twitter pile-on, and during the drawing-up of the Treaty of Versailles; while the ultimate consequences may be distant in both time and space for most, the unfortunate fact is that someone will be saddled with the pain. Now and again, that pain can lead people down the darkest paths. That doesn’t mean a perpetrator isn’t responsible for their actions; but while we don’t bear any blame for their final choices, we can’t be blind to the climate our own words and attitudes help create.Commit to the dignified treatment of others. If there is no need to twist the knife, don’t do it. Be mindful of the fact that words do hurt. We can tell ourselves all day long how we shouldn’t care what others think of us, but the reality is that we do.When delivering any message, the only thing more important than its content is its delivery. How you deliver a message is critical to ensuring it is received. It’s possible to deliver hard truths without the extra salt. We can’t guarantee that a message, no matter how well packaged, will be received the way we intended, but the very least we can do is to give it the best chance we can.After all, we humans are a beautiful mess of sophisticated applied chemistry. In this constant process of mutual reactivity, dignity is one of the most powerful catalysts there is. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Warning: This post includes references to acts of GenocideNote from the author: Although my voice has returned for the most part, you will have to forgive my hoarseness in the audio narration; my vocal cords are still recovering. Regardless, I encourage you to listen to the audio version. I put a ton of effort into recording them. Enjoy!Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.Voltaire Questions sur les Miracles (1765)Commonly summarised as: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.I have this on-going back and forth debate in my head about free speech. This debate has only become more complex since I joined the Substack community, a place which certainly wants to think of itself as a safe harbour open to all. It hosts views from all corners, even the darkest ones.Earlier this year, I got into an interesting (and very cordial) discussion in the comments on another article talking about how this openness is an inherently good thing. I agreed for the most part, but drew a red line: I was adamant that there is indeed a difference between free speech and hate speech, and I don’t believe there should be anywhere on earth that is safe for actual Nazi ideology, ever.Colour me naive, but I was surprised by the amount of people who disagree with both of those positions.Of all the things we could have differing opinions on, I never imagined my position on Nazis would be one of them; save, of course, for people that are Nazis, who I’m sure would disagree with me. However it turns out that even this, one of my own “sacred cows”, is not taken to be so sacred, even by people who do not identify in any way shape or form with Nazis or their ideas.The point being made by my interlocutors seems to be that actually defining a Nazi can become inherently slippery. How do we identify them? How does one differentiate them from people that are not Nazis? Those who sport a Swastika arm band, or wave the Nazi flag, or voluntarily identify themselves as Nazis are almost certainly identifiable as such, but what about actors playing a role in a film, or a re-enactment?Ok, how about people who share all the same abhorrent views and opinions as, say, Adolf Hitler, but who vehemently deny having any association with or admiration for Nazis?Is everyone who has ever murdered a Jew a Nazi? Or only those who murdered them because they were Jews? How do we even identify what their real intent was?What about Kanye West? Is he now, officially, a Nazi? (This one is even more complicated, because mental illness is very much involved)If you think that’s a challenge, let’s try explicitly defining “Hate Speech”.Hate speech is an act that expresses or incites hatred toward people on the basis of some aspect of their identity.Hate speech is speech, writing, behaviour, text or commentary, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language towards a person or a group on the basis of identity. It can be based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, culture, colour, descent, class, sexuality, gender or other identity factors.Racism No Way, Australiahttps://racismnoway.com.au/about-racism/hate-speech/I quite like this definition, because it’s probably the most clear I’ve seen. However it presents two problems: the first is that it’s likely very Australia-specific. Second, since Nazi is a kind of identity, does that mean those speaking out against Nazis are engaging in hate speech?There are some possible solutions to this: we can define identity as something which is not formed by choice. For example, sexuality, gender, skin colour, ancestry, ethnicity are things that we don’t get to choose for ourselves. However, religion is certainly a chosen identity, and yet much of the prejudice we seek to deter is between those of different faiths. Nationality can be chosen, since (some of us) can choose to immigrate and take on the citizenship of another nation, yet so much prejudice is directed at such individuals, as though it’s a sacred right to choose which brand of milk you want to drink, but some kind of unnatural transgression to choose what country you want to live in.Some places have defined a special subset called “protected groups”, containing a kind of grab-bag of the most commonly targeted identity groups, but this of course has its own problems.The Wikipedia page on Hate Speech notes that “There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.”Ok, so I think you will agree that my interlocutors from that comment thread do indeed have a point: it’s complicated. Perhaps we should take a step back and ask the obvious question: Why is hate speech a problem?Voltaire - that most influential Enlightenment figure I quoted earlier in the original French - is spot-on: he was talking about how "absurd” - i.e unenlightened - ideas, once believed, effectively forfeit ones self-control to those who have convinced one of such ideas. You become nothing but a tool in the hands of others, whose intentions can be malicious.“Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur.” - If your God-given intellect cannot resist a demand to believe something impossible, then your God-given sense of justice cannot resist a demand to commit malicious acts.I frikkin love being able to translate that. Voltaire was no stranger to his own absurd ideas: he was quite the anti-semite even for his day, and believed that different races were, essentially, entirely different species with completely different genetic origins (polygenism), but this is not a post about Voltaire.Unpronounceable philosophising aside (redundant?), history does indeed demonstrate that the pre-requisite to just about any mass atrocity committed against any group is the determined spreading of absurd ideas about that group. They are absurd because they cannot make sense: a generalisation of a diverse group taken as literal and universal fact, applicable in the same way to all members. The ideas that drive hate speech are not benign, either. You might say that such and such an ethnic group have a universal love for unicorns; it’s still absurd, but generally harmless. Hate-speech, however, is about explicitly dehumanising whole groups of people - ascribing to them an absence of qualities that are seen as positive and uniquely human - and charging them as an imminent if not active threat.For example, lets take the utterly absurd idea that Jews - all of them - conspire together to control the world, or to bring about some specific catastrophe or disaster upon other peoples.There are, and have been pretty much throughout history, people who believe this literally. That literally all Jews, no matter where they live, where they were born, where they grew up, their age, sex, whether they even know that they have Jewish ancestry at all, are conspiring together to do all kinds of dastardly deeds which threaten you and your loved ones.It’s nuts. It’s almost perfectly absurd. You might as well believe the entire universe is contained inside the anus of a Dolphin.Nevertheless, people who might seem otherwise completely rational have been made to believe such madness, one way or another. In fact, most people involved in pogroms in 20th century Europe for example likely didn’t have to believe the full scope of all anti-semitic ideas circulating in their societies at the time.When being offered a banquet of such absurdities, most people treat it like a buffet: they might take a bit of this one and a bit of that one, sampling only those which resonated with their own sensibilities and tastes.For example, some believed that Jews were over-represented in Politics, while others believe them dominant in Entertainment, or Finance, with the implication being that they deliberately bar the way to other non-Jews; or that they were under-represented in the Armed Forces, the implication being that they are not as loyal to the nation.These ideas also created the sense of the Jews as “pest”, at first only implicitly, but then later quite explicitly, such as in Nazi propaganda which referred to Jews as various kinds of insect.However, the ideas themselves aren’t as important as the underlying association between the group and the threat which the ideas create in the mind of the believer. Even more powerfully, if one can create the association between a group and something already salient in the community - such as a war, or a drought, or a famine, or an economic downturn, or some other crisis - then all that is needed is but a single spark to set this particular Hindenburg aflame.Whatever sense of right and wrong the average “sensible” individual might have can be bypassed entirely, and when ordered to exterminate millions of innocent human beings they might at first hesitate, until informed they were all “Jews”.“Ja wohl,” and so the killings begin.“Do Your Work”: The Rwandan GenocideBy my estimate, nearly two-thirds of Rwanda’s Tutsi population were eliminated; one in five Hutu men participated in their deaths; the carnage was accomplished in just over 100 days; and it took place in almost every community in Rwanda where Tutsi lived.Omar McDoom, The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022).On 6th April 1994, Juvénal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda and an ethnic Hutu, alongside the President of Burundi, also an ethnic Hutu, were killed when their aircraft was shot down while coming in to land in the Rwandan capital of Kigali.In less than 48 hours, one of the most brutal episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern history, conducted at the community and village level, had begun, with machete-wielding civilian Hutus incited by racist extremists broadcasting over popular radio networks, against those whom they considered responsible for shooting down the Hutu presidents: an ethnic minority group called the Tutsi, as well as anyone else considered “sympathisers”.I’ve owned machetes. In the Solomon Islands where I spent some of my most formative years, they were an essential tool for tasks such as cutting grass, clearing a path through thick jungle, and opening coconuts. Everyone had one, or several. These were not well-made instruments: consisting of a shaped sliver of metal, with two pieces of polished wood sandwiched around one end for a handle. Such household machetes are rarely kept sharp, and spend most of the time in humid open air. It’s even rarer to see one not covered in rust end to end.Yet this was by far the most commonly used weapon during the slaughter. Victims occasionally begged for a bullet instead. Very few were granted that wish.Neighbours. Friends. Colleagues. Random people on the street. Men. Women. Children. Even family members. If they were Tutsi, they were slaughtered. If they were protecting Tutsis, they were slaughtered. It was the most efficient mass killing since the Atomic Bomb, and people were massacred faster than in the industrialised mass-murder of Jews during the Holocaust.Overall, it lasted 100 days and resulted in 800,000 dead.That’s 333 people killed every single hour, hour after hour; almost 8,000 people every single day, day after day. The sheer effort involved to carry out this task was immense. They didn’t have German-style camps or gas chambers. They weren’t rounding up their victims beforehand. Instead, people were literally chopped down wherever they were found, mainly with machetes, but sometimes, even with backhoes, or whatever they had lying around. Not designed for cutting through flesh and bone, these yard work tools made it a gruesome and back-breaking slog. Some survivors endured innumerable strikes and the loss of some limbs, only to miraculously make it out alive.That means not only did it require a massive number of perpetrators to carry it out, most of them worked at it like a full time job. A common refrain on Radio RTLM during the 100 days was "Do Your Work”, a call to continue the killings until there was no one left to kill.It was the culmination of a process which had been underway for nearly 100 years by that point. Between independence in 1962 and the outbreak of civil war in 1990, there had already been a few smaller and more localised massacres of Tutsis; and yet, no one predicted the sheer ferocity, vastness and overwhelming scale of the Rwandan Genocide.“The ethnicization of society and politics is the first indicator of civilian radicalization.” writes Omar McDoom of the London School of Economics, in his book The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022). In the context of inter-ethnic relations, threat then activates latent ethnic boundaries and raises the salience of ethnic identities. As the threat intensifies, ethnic distance increases and ingroup hostility toward the ethnic outgroup escalates. This distance and hostility can be amplified when the threat is framed as having historical and contemporary parallels. The threat then resonates against the collective memory and shared perceptions – the myths and narratives – that the threatened ingroup has of the threatening outgroup.This is the simplified pathway to Genocide. It never happens in a vacuum: the near-universal pre-requisite to all genocides is a process of perception-shifting, by which the in-group and out-group become increasingly stratified, through the spreading of certain cultural and collective myths, memories and beliefs.We collect our perceptions from the things we hear around us. We humans are voracious consumers of information, whether right or wrong, good or bad. We are especially receptive to it when it’s information coming from trusted and authoritative sources, or those with whom we feel a shared identity. Information salience further increases the more emotional its content, particularly fear and outrage. We tend to remember emotional negatives far more readily than emotional positives or neutrals.Such perceptions alone are rarely ever enough to spark a genocide: instead, they contribute significant flammable material to the socio-political environment. The Invention of Identity PoliticsRwanda was said to have originally been inhabited by members of the Twa ethnic group since the ice age, with Hutus supposedly migrating around the year 1000AD, followed supposedly by Tutsi in the 15th or 16th century. Prior to colonial domination by European powers, it had been an independent Kingdom for an unknown period of time, ruled by a supposedly Tutsi royal bloodline. When the Germans sent an expedition in the late 1800s, it was the first time a Rwandan Mwami - King - had encountered Europeans. Although they had a strong administrative state and defended their borders with a strong unified army, the situation became volatile and unstable following the King’s death due to a succession struggle. The Germans took their opportunity and established a protectorate called German East Africa, with a figurehead Mwami on the throne.When the First World War broke out, the neighbouring Belgian Congo invaded the German East African territories, including the Rwandan lands, establishing an occupation which continued until the war’s end, when Belgium was granted the territories under something like a United Nations mandate. They continued the setup the Germans had established: choosing indirect control via a puppet Mwami. At the same time, they sought to divide and rule by creating a heightened awareness of ethnic identity, despite the fact that Rwandans had been a highly integrated people long before the Europeans turned up. Government-issued identity cards came clearly marked with a determined ethnicity, making possible a racist administrative caste system.The Belgian colonials had brought with them the Hamitic hypothesis: the utterly absurd myth which determined Tutsis to be Rwanda’s “Master Race”, supposedly of Semitic origin, and therefore “superior” to the common African Hutus. Therefore, the Belgians ensured Tutsi were always placed in positions of power. This naturally created a kind of “Tutsi Elite”, and by design, the result was that Hutus felt unjustly subjugated, and the target of their animosity was the Tutsi, rather than the Belgian colonial masters. This remained a core part of Rwandan historical memory long after the shackles of colonialism finally fell away following independence in 1962.In the Rwandan context, the brutal history of this deliberate stratification of ethnic groups out of what was once a highly integrated mix of peoples, served as a historical anchor by which the emotional sense of outrage and injustice felt by Hutus at what was seen as Tutsi’s historic (and contemporary) criminality was legitimated.This was coupled with the colonial myth that Tutsi peoples were essentially foreigners: that somehow they must have come from Ethiopia, turning up some time after the Hutus. This would become another important factor during the genocide, and was used as propaganda to denounce Tutsis as foreigners with no right to live in Rwanda, let alone to rule it.…the Belgians propagated the idea the Tutsi were racially distinct and, in origin, alien to Rwanda. They drew on both racial science and religious scripture to justify these beliefs.…The idea that the Tutsi were allochthonous – they did not belong in Rwanda - would become an important theme during the genocide.In 1962, Rwanda became a republic and saw its first-ever attempt at democratic elections, which propelled the radical and racist Mouvement Démocratique Républicain “Parmehutu” (MDR) party to an overwhelming majority. The MDR was the embodiment of radical identity politics, which believed staunchly in not only overthrowing the old Tutsi elite as they saw it, but establishing Hutu supremacy over all Rwanda. They wanted to flip the old order upside down, and then scale it even further in their direction.By 1965, the MDR was deemed the only legal political party in Rwanda.Furthermore, the ongoing civil war which had begun in 1990 between primarily Tutsi exiles - who had been trying to return home since being forced to flee during the revolution - and the Rwandan Government, made for an emotionally salient threat, and propaganda easily turned the civil war into an ethnic war in the minds of many Hutus.Extremist Hutu ideologues had been referring to Tutsi peoples as Inyenzi - cockroaches - since the 1960s. As far as they were concerned, this was a problem of pest control; everyone well knew that cockroaches are pests to be eradicated. Then, in 1992, Government leaders actively began calling for their extermination.Why don’t we seize all those who bring them and exterminate them all? Are we really waiting now for them to come and exterminate us?Leon Mugesera, Government Official in 1992, speaking to party membersSmaller-scale massacres of Tutsi peoples had been occurring since the Civil War’s onset, sometimes in the form of “counter-insurgency” operations by the Rwandan militia, but other times, purely as a reaction by Hutu civilians to something heard on the Radio.The Radio was the most important source of media and information to Rwandans, as only 56% of the population had basic literacy. Also in 1992, “the radio falsely broadcast that Tutsi planned to kill important Hutu leaders, especially in Bugesera,” which kicked off a massacre of Tutsi peoples in that region.It was a harbinger of things to come.2 years later, during the Genocide, Hutu men were seen walking around carrying their machete in one hand, and a portable radio in the other. Through the hate speech and incitement to violence propagated via radio - and often through one particular extremist radio station, RTLM - those Hutus who had been convinced of absurdities for much of their lives about the Tutsi being foreigners, inhuman pests, and an active threat, were given their marching orders, and proceeded to follow them without mercy or hesitation. Long time friends, neighbours, family in law, teachers and students, these interpersonal bonds suddenly lost all importance and meaning for the perpetrators.Rwanda became a land of mutilated and rotting corpses. They were everywhere. It was difficult to walk the land without eventually hearing the crunching of bone and feeling the unnatural squash of dead flesh underfoot. Many were simply left in piles, along the sides of roads, in ditches, stuffed into drains and wells, poisoning the only sources of fresh water for many, resulting in deadly cholera outbreaks. Some were left in shallow mass graves. Some merely had a mound of dirt poured over the top.Those who had managed to survive often didn’t fare much better: many a victim was left with limbs missing when the perpetrators who hacked at them with the machetes failed to complete the job, leaving them to bleed out.Occasionally, like with many Genocides before it, people were saved from death when a perpetrator or person of authority recognised them as a good friend. Indeed, while the vast majority of those killed were murdered by people they knew, including their own friends and family, there are harrowing stories from survivors saved at the very last moment when an interpersonal bond with a perpetrator somehow managed to rise above that homicidal drive, and they would be quickly hidden away somewhere out of sight, where they could remain for months waiting for the killings to stop.Ethnicity had been part of Rwandan politics since independence, and over time, it became seen as a replacement for having individual political views in the minds of many. If you were Hutu, you were for the Government. If you were Tutsi, you were for armed rebel groups. This was the tenor of Rwandan identity politics, completely distorting the reality of the situation.Ultimately, all this stratification and segmentation was built on nothing but words. Words which were wielded as a means to political ends, whether by the European Colonials who sought to keep the native people divided and subjugated, or later, by native Hutu politicians who were effectively pursuing the same ends.Simply being exposed to hateful messaging is unlikely to drive someone to kill. Humans are an overwhelmingly pro-social species. We are genetically pre-disposed toward helping others over harming them, even those that we may not necessarily like, or identify with. However, we are also prone to tribalism. We can be suspicious and wary of out-groups. We are also sensitive to threats, or perceptions of threats; emotions, especially fear, can overwhelm our rationality, simplify our thinking, and make every action we take seem justified at the time. Of all the factors which have been studied about Genocide and its precursors, there is one near-universal pre-requisite for all: the deliberate and purposeful spreading of hate speech.Without the kind of messaging that dehumanises and isolates the target group, whether in the moment of greatest tension or throughout the years preceding the critical events, the likelihood of genocide becomes practically negligible.Share this with another chemical mind in your life!Aftermath: Theory vs PracticeThe 100 days of slaughter came to an end when the rebel RPF effectively defeated the government militias, and seized power. The drafting of a new constitution began shortly thereafter, in which the new government introduced articles allegedly intended to depoliticise factors like race and religion, clan or gender, and make the political hegemony of any one ethnic group impossible. The stated goal was to prevent extremist identity parties such as the old MDR - the Hutu Supremacist and formerly governing party - from being formed to begin with.Most would have agreed, in the context of the aftermath of a genocide, such a measure made sense.So the new constitution included Article 54, which states: “political organizations are prohibited from basing themselves on race, ethnic group, tribe, clan, region, sex, religion or any other division which may give rise to discrimination".Furthermore, laws were introduced which made it a crime punishable by decade-long prison terms to simply “belittle” the genocide, laws so vague they could be used to justify the imprisonment of just about anyone. More laws were added which meant anyone who had spent more than 6 months in prison, for any reason, was permanently barred from public office.Almost immediately, Paul Kagame, leader of the RPF and installed as Vice President of Rwanda, as well as Defence Minister, began using Article 54 to turn Rwanda into effectively a one-party state: this time, instead of outright banning all other parties, he would simply ban those which he deemed a potential threat to RPF dominance. During the transition years, he kept himself in the Vice Presidents position officially in order to create a false sense of humility and shared power. Whenever asked about his political ambitions, he would tell about his desire to leave politics and become a farmer. Western aid organisations and governments fawned over his show of democratic principles.Yet that was all it was to be: a show.When the time came for Rwanda’s next attempt at presidential elections in 2003, Paul Kagame stood for the RPF. Although a handful of newly minted parties contested, the results had been pre-determined: Kagame has won over 90% of the vote in every single election he has now stood for. Every single result was overwhelmingly fixed, through violence, intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and if that wasn’t enough, he used the vague hate-speech laws meant to prevent genocide to instead imprison anyone seen as a potential rival for the presidency, thereby making them legally ineligible to run.His rule closely resembles the personal dictatorship of the tiny and cowardly Vladimir Putin, yet somehow he manages to get away with it more successfully. A combination of international shame over having done nothing to intervene during the 100 day genocide, and a historic sense of guilt (entirely justified) over the crimes of colonialism, the international community is desperate to please, continuing to send aid and offer loans, while praising the “clean streets” of the capital Kigali, and turning a blind eye to the massive rigging of elections, which delivered over 98% of the “vote” to Kagame in the 2024 edition of this charade.It is a complete police state, on par with the old East German regime, yet more violent. People are still being disappeared for not showing complete obeisance and grovelling at the feet of Kagame: whether they be old RPF fighters who had fought all their lives for the cause, the closest old school friends of Kagame who had for one reason or another become suspect in his eyes, or innocent civilians who were supposedly overheard saying something potentially critical of the state of the country, the RPF, or Kagame himself. Revenge killings en masse at unknown scale were carried out after the RPF’s seizure of power, and kept mostly quiet. Some have called these reprisal killings genocidal: some estimates are that around 30,000 additional people, mostly Hutus, were slaughtered by the triumphant RPF. Many former insiders of the RPF over the years, frozen out by Kagame’s psychotic paranoid rage, have admitted to the RPF’s role in shooting down the presidential airplane in 1994 which immediately precipitated the genocide. Paul Kagame himself, it seems, planned the operation, and gave the shoot-down order.Such whistle-blowers continue to be hunted down relentlessly worldwide by the Rwandan security services to this day, alongside the extra-judicial killings and assassinations of Rwandan expatriates all over the world who dare to voice even minor criticisms of Kagame, the RPF, or the situation in Rwanda.So the dilemma is a real one. How does a country effectively prevent the necessary pre-requisite to all genocide - violent hate-speech - without risking the creation of a police state?Ultimately, I believe the answer comes down to the strength of institutions to stand up to the executive. Rwanda makes a big show of democratic principles, yet keeps everyone in fear for their lives, and uses hate-speech laws to silence dissent. Notice, however, how no one ever criticises Paul Kagame (and lives), and moreover, anyone that ruled against him in the very early days of Rwanda’s post-genocide government from the judiciary were silenced. Despite being against Rwanda’s constitution, all their Supreme Court justices were replaced by Kagame himself with those who were ready to kowtow to him personally.So the story of free speech continues to play out in the west. Yet Rwanda serves as the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales.On the one hand, how genocide is made possible by certain forms of speech, and on the other, how trading freedom for safety can leave you with neither in the end.Thank you so much for reading and listening. This has been my most intensely-researched article, and although I only quoted from a few sources, two books in particular helped me to understand the Rwandan context immensely, and made this work possible:* We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, (1998)* Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong (2021)Thank you to my paid subscribers, who make all of this possible, and everyone who has donated to the coffee fund.If you liked this work, please consider a paid subscription, or dropping me some spare change with a donation via my ko-fi button below.Until next time! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Huge thank you to Doctors Tommy Blanchard and Gunnar for agreeing to have me tag along to this extremely scientific and highly intellectual discussion on the impending threat from Chicken Zombies.We had a ton of fun, and I hope you will too :)It’s always more fun with friends: subscribe! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Before we get started…I’ve updated BlockedStack, my Substack Browser Extension, with the ability to export all your Substack notes that you’ve ever posted and download them all into a single giant Markdown text file. Give it a try! Available for Firefox and Chrome.Now, on to today’s article. Enjoy!In late 2018, one Mark Zuckerberg got a haircut, something which made a lot of people on the internet very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move.What’s wrong with haircuts? Well first of all, it didn’t seem like a particularly good haircut (and profoundly rich people only get the best haircuts), and second - according to internet historians - it looked strikingly similar to the haircut on some ancient statues of Augustus.You know, the Roman Princeps, adopted son of Julius Caesar, the kid that overthrew the Roman Republic and replaced its peaceful, all sunshine-and-rainbows democracy with a dastardly evil Empire? That interminably blood-thirsty psychopath who once appointed a horse as head of government? (That last part wasn’t Augustus, actually, that was Caligula, but the way journalists were talking about him, it might as well have been!)Well, apparently, our boy Zuck here has a certain fondness for Augustus, and he and his wife spent their honeymoon checking out relevant historical sites around Italy. So, naturally, given the fact that the Romans were also fond of cutting their hair every now and again, the implication was clear: Mark Zuckerberg believes he IS Augustus, Supreme Roman Dictator, Princeps Metamaximus!Once this connection was made - between a haircut and a Roman emperor - the news media ran with it so hard.It was one of those occasions when one can only assume it was a slow news day, or perhaps week. Suddenly, a whole lot of nonsense non-stories started spewing forth from respectable publications (and otherwise), all at once, all casting shade on my boy Augustus.I have no fondness for Mark Zuckerberg, let’s just be clear on that.I have even less fondness for autocrats and dictators. (If you’ve been following me for any appreciable length of time, you would know this.)However, I do have a certain fondness for Augustus in particular, and it’s not for any of the reasons you might think. Trust me. In order to explain, we’re going to need a fair bit of context.Share the gift of context with all your friends!What was the Roman Republic?The idea that any state could go from a “republic” to an “empire” makes it seem like it must necessarily have been a democracy overthrown by some evil regressive autocrat, but this was unlike any democracy we would recognise in today’s world.The fact is, the Roman Republic was an Oligarchy, albeit a kind of elective one.Rome was neither a direct nor an indirect democracy, and had no such pretensions. It had no elected legislative assembly composed of the people’s representatives, and no ideological political parties that competed for power. The voters did not choose between a failed leader and a successful one, or between one political platform and another, but between candidates who were all drawn from a select group within the citizenry which held the exclusive right to compete for the various positions (ius honorum) in line with a set of rules established over the years by both tradition and legislation.Roman Elections in the Age of Cicero, by Rachel Feig Vishnia (2012)Although the system was better at self-correcting than the Empire would be later, and was still more representative at the end of the day, it was not by much. It was also viciously aggressive, expansionist, and imperialist beyond anything the Roman Empire itself would ever be.For its entire 482-year existence, it had spent 466 of those years at war; as such, the famous doors of the Temple of Janus - which were kept open during war, and closed during peace - spent a measly 16 years closed prior to Augustus. Most of Rome’s wars were of conquest; though this is quite possibly one of the reasons the Republic managed to survive for so long.So this idea that Augustus replaced sunshine-and-rainbows democracy with aggressive imperialism is outright nonsense.At the same time, there really is no answer to the question “Was the Roman Empire a good thing?”It was just a thing. It existed. It had a profound influence on the world, both in positive and negative directions. The weight of each of these influences will differ from person to person. They are necessarily subjective, and our assessment of it is not only limited by the historical records which have survived and what archaeology manages to reveal, but it is also tainted by the context of our own times.Up until relatively recently, Empires in general were commonly seen as civilising forces for good in the world. Today, however, we know all too well the harm they are capable of.Okay, great, so how does Augustus fit in to this story?I’m getting to that!Gaius Octavianus (a.k.a Octavian), later known by his adopted name Gaius Julius Caesar, and then later by the name Augustus (but we will call him Octavian for now), was just 19 when he first set out from the military camp in Illyria - where he had been training - over to Italy in order to learn the contents of his great uncle’s will. His great uncle, of course, was the one and only Julius Caesar, who had been assassinated on the Ides of March.Since Julius had no legitimate children, he had adopted his nephew Octavian as his own son - as was common practice in Rome - posthumously, bestowing to him via his will (kept safe by the Vestal Virgins) all his wealth and property, but most importantly: the name of Caesar.That name was the equivalent of a super weapon in the Roman world by this point. It gave Octavian instant legitimacy among the Roman army, plus the instantaneous and total personal loyalty of Julius’ legendary veteran legions, those that had been with him throughout the conquest of Gaul: the “Caesarians”.All of a sudden, this province-kid’s life went from normal Roman province-kid stuff, to being the inheritor of all that was Julius Caesar, at the very moment when the Republic itself was imploding.In Roman politics, military glory was everything.No, really. I don’t think you fully understand, so allow me to emphasise: EVERYTHING.If you wanted to have a political career in Rome, to leave your mark on society and on history, you had to get out there and lead some troops into battle. It didn’t matter who you fought or why you were fighting them, you simply had to fight and win, and be seen to win - or, at the very least, have someone write that they saw you winning.Julius had managed to pull off a fairly spectacular political career for the time, before making a real name for himself on the battlefield, and this was a feat of its own; he made very smart, very timely alliances with all the right people, riding up with them in power and prestige. After a stint as Consul, however, and some serious political defeats (he became very unpopular among Senators for having several of them beat up by street thugs for opposing him), he was effectively exiled away from Rome’s centre of political power, and made Governor over the border province of Transalpine Gaul.Being governor of a border province was the traditional way that men could build power, status and personal wealth. They were typically assigned a certain number of legions - the standard unit of the Roman army, like a division - who were supposed to assist in “maintaining order” in the province.Instead, what they usually did with these legions was to expand the borders of Rome, by invading and conquering neighbouring territories. This could be a brutal process, to varying degrees. Most of the time, after defeating whatever resistance there might have been, instead of simply slaughtering all the people that had been living on those lands, they would be assimilated as Romans; although much land would also be confiscated and redistributed to the families of the troops.The tricky thing is: this was technically illegal under Roman law. You could be charged with very serious crimes. Nevertheless, as long as you were outright victorious - successfully expanding the borders of Rome and subjugating any and all peoples in the way - everyone would simply forget about trifling details like the illegality of the act; furthermore, you were likely to be granted a Triumph: a massive parade through the streets of Rome herself, where you would be painted up to represent Jupiter Optimus Maximus, King of the Roman Gods, and driven around in a grand chariot with all the slaves and booty captured in your conquest marched along behind.If you were not outright victorious; even worse, if you lost territory; and even worse than that, if you actually survived: your name would be tarnished, whatever fortune you may have had would be decimated, and in the political climate in which Caesar was living, you might even lose your life.In Rome, the ends justified the means.Existential DreadFor a long time, Romans had an unusually visceral, even primal, fear of barbarians. Not just any barbarians, but one very specific group of them: they were called the Gauls.Roman mothers were said to use that fear as a way to straighten out naughty children: “You better behave, or else the Gauls will get you!”This fear stemmed from the one time that Rome herself was ever completely overcome by an outside force: the 390BC Sack of Rome by a Gallic warband. Rome’s great Legions appeared utterly impotent against them. The Romans never forgot, and never forgave.So, in this context, becoming governor of a province up alongside the borders of Gaul - more commonly known today as France - with a mere handful of legions was probably not an ideal scenario for those seeking easy victories.Julius Caesar, as noted earlier, was not exactly known for any special military prowess at this point, either, and the Gallic tribes were thought to have some of the best warriors in the known world. It turns out, however, that Julius understood tribal armies the way most Roman commanders did not: he realised they are easily divided, and thereby more easily conquered piecemeal.Divide and conquer.So that’s what he did: he marched into Gaul, and arranged things in such a way that he could fight one tribe at a time. It was a strategy he employed with ruthless efficiency, and within 4 - 6 years, he had conquered the whole of Gaul - a territory spanning today’s Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemberg - and had even made initial excursions into the British isles.Yet it was not simply the conquest itself which made Caesar the most powerful name in the history of Rome; it was the fact that he himself wrote the history of it, in letters he sent back to Rome, regularly chronicling his exploits in heroic and vivid imagery. Caesar was a propagandist of genius, and his “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” was then and is still today considered a master work of written Latin.The Roman people were enthralled by Caesar. Ultimately, his name would become immortal in ways that even he could never have imagined.RubiconJulius Caesar did eventually return to Rome under threat of arrest and prosecution for his conquest of Gaul - something which had almost never happened before to a victorious General - and in order to protect his name and legacy from ignominy and exile for political ends, brought one of his legions with him, which by definition was an outright act of treason and declaration of war on the Roman state. This lead to the civil war, which Julius won with great skill, and great tact; he made a point to show clemency to many of his enemies, especially those he defeated on the battlefield. He would offer them amnesty, and try to recruit many of them to join his administration. He let most captives go free, even when he knew they intended to fight him again.He refused to emulate victors from previous civil wars in Rome, who had famously drawn up lists of their opponents and people they disliked in order to have them rounded up and executed in an orgy of violence and bloodletting.Nevertheless, although Caesar stood victorious at the end of the civil war, and had gone out of his way to prove himself virtuous, compassionate and trustworthy, he did not turn down the copious honours, rights and extraordinary powers the Senate showered upon him. Yeah, rookie move. When you’re trying to be an emperor, you’re not supposed to look like you’re trying to be an emperor.His face began appearing on new coins, something which had never been done before. He sat atop a throne in all but name. He wore Royal colours. The only thing he turned down was a literal crown.It naturally freaked out a bunch of people, including several young ideologically-charged senators, who decided it was time for a bit of good ol-fashioned Tyrannicide.It was carried out on the Ides of March, and the great Julius Caesar, Conqueror of Gaul, Dictator of Rome, “tyrant”, was dead.Et tu, Bruté?Now we return to Octavian, our future Augustus (he wasn’t yet known as Augustus); he was also not known for any special military prowess, and in fact was too young to have commanded troops into battle; yet with the name Caesar, he was warmly welcomed by the old Caesarian veterans when he arrived at a garrison in Brindisium. That was the power of the name alone.At the time, it was assumed that Mark Antony - Julius’ right-hand man who had been by his side throughout the conquests and the civil war - would take the mantle of Caesar and assume power. This is, in fact, what Mark Antony had believed as well, and upon finding the body of his leader on the floor of the senate, carried it out to the public square and proclaimed his iron determination to bring the murderers to swift justice.When the young Octavian shows up, bearing Caesars last written will and testament, which stated clearly who the true heir to Caesar was, things became… complicated.Mark Antony was a capable military man, who had been steeped in blood and victory for most of his life. He had also spent time in charge of Rome when Caesar left Rome to chase down the last remaining resistance (and then got “distracted” by a young Queen Cleopatra of Egypt).His time in charge of the city, however, was nothing short of catastrophic and scandalous. He was drunk throughout most of it, mis-managed everything, screamed at everyone, and letters were sent by people of Rome to Caesar in Egypt begging for his return, to save them from Antony.Octavian, on the other hand, would turn out to be an intelligent and diligent administrator, a brilliant and subtle politician, and a very, very good friend.Friends ForeverSomething you learn from reading a lot of Roman history is that powerful people don’t really have good friends, because those that do are all too often either usurped by them, or will become so paranoid about such an eventuality that they will end up destroying everyone. See: Justinian and Caligula, for starters. There are few examples of total and unmitigated loyalty and devotion between someone of supreme power and any other human being, especially when unrelated by blood or marriage.However, Octavian (Augustus) had a most loyal and most capable best friend in a man named Marcus Vipsaneus Agrippa.The friendship between Octavian and Agrippa was something so special, that it is difficult for me to recall an example like it in history, though I know there must be some.They first met as boys, and bonded quickly. The teenaged Agrippa followed Octavian to his first and only meeting with his famous uncle Julius Caesar, and trained alongside Octavian at the camp in Illirya. When word was received about the events of the Ides of March, Agrippa was steadfast in his support for Octavian, agreeing to assist him in whatever way he could.Octavian needed the support: he was chronically ill throughout his life, afflicted constantly with severe gastrointestinal problems, migraines, a skin condition, and much else besides including several close brushes with death. This often prevented him from being able to command his own legions in battle; a story is retold by Suetonius in his “Lives of the 12 Caesars” that, on the moment of engagement during one battle against Antony at Actium, Octavian was hit by severe abdominal cramps which forced him to the ground, and he had to hand over command to someone else.He had miraculously managed to escape death in camp another time, after leaving his sickbed shortly before it was unexpectedly overrun, his tent being stabbed through by enemy soldiers believing he was still there.As such, he often had to hand over military control to others in moments of crisis, when even his own body rebelled against him.This would normally be a very dangerous thing to do for anyone seeking supreme power: victorious generals often gained the loyalty of the legions they lead, no matter who was supposed to be in charge. However, Octavian was not the typical political power player, and he had an incredibly competent and capable man whose loyalty was without question on whom he could rely.It was during the Civil Wars that broke out between Antony and Octavian that Agrippa’s genius for military tactics first came to the fore, both on land and at sea. Octavian, lying in his sick bed, doubled over with cramps, handed command to his friend, and charged him with dealing a decisive defeat to Mark Antony once and for all, at Actium.It was quite possibly the best decision of his life. Agrippa had already smashed the Naval forces of Sextus Pompey at Naulochus, in 36 BCE. This time, he was up against the combined navies of Cleopatra and Antony himself, with forces that were roughly equally matched on both sides.Yet, he was unstoppable: Agrippa routed the enemy decisively, causing Antony and Cleopatra to flee for their lives. Antony later killed himself (thinking that Cleopatra had already done so, but she was captured alive.)Every victory that Agrippa stacked up was a victory for Augustus, and every attempt at honouring Agrippa was politely turned away and redirected toward his friend. As the Principate became established, with Octavian - now Augustus - in supreme power, he showered Agrippa with titles, positions of honour, tasks of the greatest importance to the state. Agrippa became the one he turned to in every crisis, knowing there was no better man for the job, no matter what it was.When Augustus famously said “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” most of this enmarblification was carried out by the indomitable Agrippa. He consistently ensured things got done. One of his many, many infrastructure projects was the repair and maintenance of Rome’s main sewer system, the Cloaca Maxima - it’s still in use to this day.Agrippa applied his talent for assessing a problem, determining the solution, bringing together the required resources and then getting the work done.Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus, by Lindsay PowellAugustus had been so sickly for his entire life, that it was assumed he could not possibly out-live most of his friends. Only 12 years following the smashing of Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s combined fleets at Actium in 31 BCE, Augustus became convinced of the need to ensure the succession of the Principate - the word used for his position of great power in the state, chosen deliberately to avoid anything resembling monarchy - and that there was only one man on Earth he could entrust such a responsibility to: his best friend.Thus, he elevated Agrippa once more, this time placing him - politically at least - on equal footing to Augustus himself. Should Augustus die, Agrippa would carry on.Yet, in an unexpected twist of fate, it was Agrippa who would die long before his friend took his last breath. Few things in Augustus life devastated him so much as this loss. Cities and towns all across the vast Roman lands raised monuments to the memory of Agrippa. The people had loved him for all the work he had done to build and repair public amenities, roads and infrastructure, all across the land. Augustus minted so many coins bearing the profile of Agrippa, that they circulated throughout the Roman world for a very long time, and are today a common collectors item. Augustus wanted to ensure the continued memory of his best friend.Agrippa was not forgotten.It can honestly be said that this duo was one of the most significant friendships in all of human history. Between the two of them, they defeated their enemies in the civil war, and proceeded to conquer the hearts and minds of the Roman people. Together, they created a legacy so enormous, so overwhelming, and so enduring, it has stood tall like a beacon of achievement for over 2,000 years.I’ve not heard great things about Mark Zuckerberg’s ability to form close relationships with others. Like most men of power and wealth, he seems to enjoy standing alone. His creations might also one day be regarded as a net-negative to society in general, having helped to foster much polarisation and division, rather than unity and shared values. In these and many other ways, he is nothing like an Augustus, not even with a bad haircut.He should have subscribed to A Chemical Mind instead ;)This is Part 1 of a 2-part series, profiling two very different people in supreme power whose illnesses and disabilities had profound impacts on world history. Next, we’ll be taking a look at one Kaiser Wilhelm II, and how the black sheep of the family with insecurities beaten into him, and only one properly functioning arm, was forever branded by the world as a warmonger, when he was nothing of the sort.See you then! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t remember the exact day when he died, or when we heard the news.Memory, for me, has always been a very fuzzy thing. Ill-defined. Blurred. Time gets away from me, and I am rarely able to estimate the time distance between memories.I do remember what I did: I went out with my buddies to skate the day and night away, to flush the initial emotional turmoil out of my system, and then drink heavily. That was usually how I handled heart break: physical activity, followed by alcohol. The emotions had this strange effect of boosting my skill and confidence level on the skateboard. Most likely, it was due to becoming less inhibited, less afraid of pain.I didn’t cry. Not at first.It wasn’t until I was standing at the rostrum of the tiny little funeral chapel near his home in Queensland several days later, fumbling with the papers on which I’d printed out what I intended to say, that it all came pouring out. The tears made it impossible to read from my notes, so I set them aside and just spoke.Of the 5 people who attended, only 3 of them knew anything about my Dad, and I was one of them.My dad was born in Germany, and emigrated with his family here to Australia when he was 10. Coincidentally, he travelled here on the very same boat at the very same time as my Mum, but it would be another 20 years before they’d meet each other for the first time. My mother and her family were coming from France.My dad had 3 brothers, one of whom had severe cognitive disabilities. Being the eldest, he protected them from their brutally violent stepmother, who used to beat them with all her strength, at every chance she got, for no reason. Dad would physically place himself in the way, and take the blows meant for his disabled brother.As he grew up, he took numerous different jobs, all generally within his areas of interest: he once drove freight trains across the nullabor, and later became a hospital pathology technician. Sadly, he didn’t get far into his independent adult years, free from his sociopathic stepmother’s beatings, before he became stricken with a chronic, incurable, and awfully painful illness.Crohns Disease is auto-immune. The body’s immune cells detect a foreign invader, and set to work to destroy the invader and cleanse the body of all traces. The only problem: the supposed invader is not an invader at all. It’s your own intestines. For whatever reason, the immune system no longer recognises those cells as your own. Gradually, over time, more and more of the intestinal wall is wiped out.The disease is rarely fatal on its own. You can live a long time with it, especially with modern treatments that have come about during the past 10-20 years.In my dad’s lifetime, though, it was yet more pain and suffering; the kind that you can’t even defend yourself against. He required regular surgical interventions to cut away destroyed tissue. He wore a colostemy bag. His food intake was necessarily restricted. He required strong opiates and sometimes morphine to ease the pain. This would be how he’d have to live his life, for as long as it lasted.I am his only child. None of his brothers had children of their own. Although their relationship didn’t last long, my mum and dad remained friends. She would try to have dad spend more time with me, but it was sadly rare for me to actually see him. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. I don’t think mum could, either.A lifetime of pain surely must effect the human psyche in profound ways. Long after his death, I came to realise that he hadn’t really been living: he’d mostly just been existing.Life in his case was simply a matter of the next go round through surgery. If you lived, then you had a bit of time until the next one.When people say “live your life as though today could be your last”, they usually mean something very different, but this was his life: each day, you were never quite sure if he’d survive it, but somehow, he did. Day after day. Waiting.Breathing because his body made him do so. Eating for the same reason. Allowing the heart to beat merely as so he would need not be bothered fighting it. He thought. He sometimes continued doing mathematics, concocting formulas in theoretical physics, studying electrolysis and astronomy. He loved his car, a classic and very rare Mercedes, which, like him, was always in the shop. His wife kept him company. He followed along.His accent still had a faint hint of his German boyhood.If there was more going on underneath, it was utterly concealed.He was almost never visibly angry. The one time I can remember, his anger was like a snapping spring: very briefly in rapid motion, but then gone just as quickly. That was it.He didn’t have any strong friendships. He rarely engaged socially with people. He was quiet, nerdy, somewhat unkempt. For reasons I simply cannot figure out, women found him irresistable. He left very few markings on the world in general. It has made me feel a kind of responsibility, a duty, not to let him be forgotten, because I suspect if it weren’t for me, he almost certainly would be.But those times when I did get to be with him, just Dad and me, formed some of the strongest memories I have. The times we went camping out in the bush near railway tracks, recording the numbered engines of the massive freight trains that criss-cross the state of New South Wales. The times we visited some of Australias most famous telescopes and observatories. The days he taught me chess on an old German electronic chessboard. Reading to me from his highly technical astronomy and physics textbooks, which I never understood a word of, but I loved it because they were things that he loved.When I was in my mid-teens, he and his wife moved a long way away, far up north, almost on the opposite end of the continent. From that time on, my only contact with him would be by phone, or the internet.I resented it. I resented the woman he married, choosing to believe that she was the one taking my dad away from me. I still carry some of that resentment to this day.By the time I gave his eulogy at the rostrum in the tiny little chapel, in front of the only 4 other people in attendance, I hadn't seen him in person in over a decade. It had been planned for me to visit him that year. Some things just don't go to plan.Yet, my dad was never bitter about his circumstances. I never heard him complain. Unlike most people, I don’t see that as a virtue, but it is an indicator of his character. Through all that pain and trauma, he became effectively numb to the world. He dismissed it with nonchalance. He owed it absolutely nothing, and that’s how he lived.We are tempted to believe in the idea “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”. Based on my experience, I don’t know if that really holds water anymore. What is clear to me, is those tempered in fire can be made brittle, despite the appearance of great solidity. Others have already been shattered, and there is nothing left to break. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Authors note: I wrote this post shortly following the attempted assassination of Trump, in an attempt to explain that hoping or cheering for such events, regardless of who the target is, does not bode well for any democracy; at the same time, I wanted to put “learning from history” into perspective, especially when it comes to some of the worst acts of evil ever committed.Learning from history is far more challenging than we’d like to think.I never posted it, in the end I was worried about the potential for misunderstandings. Now that some time has passed, I think it might be useful to finally share it.Enjoy!Imagine yourself an average German, in February of 1933, barely a month away from Adolf Hitler achieving power. You have been transported there from the future, bringing with you the knowledge and hindsight of events to come.How do you stop him?I already know your first answer: shoot him, of course. Adolf Hitler must die. There is no alternative, he is simply too dangerous to be allowed to live. You proceed to dedicate every fibre of your being toward the singular objective of eliminating Hitler.That would be the obvious response; and I would agree with you, knowing what savage and barbaric crimes he would go on to commit, and lead his country into committing. Any and all means for bringing the swiftest end to his project and his person are justified.If we were to remove your knowledge and hindsight of those future events, but allow you to retain a conviction of the threat Hitler poses: does your answer change? Is it still essential to stop him with any means necessary? How much of what he has written and said about his plans can you take that seriously? Until now, the crimes for which he will become infamous - to which "Hitler" and "Nazi" become bywords for the greatest evils known to humankind - have not been committed. Not yet. How certain can you be that they will be carried out?Certain enough to risk setting a precedent for eliminating a political figure through violence? To bypass legal and constitutional norms by executing the head of the majority electoral party based on their mere possibility, or even probability of future crimes against humanity?Let's make this a little easier. It's 1939, and Hitler is ready to launch his forces into an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country. He has already managed to absorb 2 other sovereign states of Europe, though without bloodshed. He might still pull back from the precipice here, too. How certain are you that violence is justified in eliminating him now, considering he hasn't yet committed the crime of aggressive war?He changed the laws so that his every domestic act is technically sanctioned by it, regardless. His supremacy over the law had been certified post-facto following the summary roundups and executions on the Night of Long Knives. Is it enough to justify acting? What about the threat of imminent war, is that enough justification?We like to think we have the examples of history to protect us from repeating our worst mistakes. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."Even if we study it with acute intensity, can we really be sure we would know an Adolf Hitler coming if we saw it?Could we be doomed to repeat the mistakes of Weimar Germany and those later members of the 3rd Reich, who did not take their chances to stop him one way or another? Could we ever really be sure if the time had finally come, and that the cause was just?Even if you were in a position to take Hitler alive and arrest him, and have him put on trial, that alone could have enormous consequences for the future of the democratic process. That's exactly the kind of thing that happens in so-called Banana Republics, when the democratically elected leader is ousted by a military Junta; sometimes with a show trial, sometimes not, but almost always ending democracy in that country by way of a firing squad.If arrested, what crime could you charge him with? Once he has effectively placed himself above the law, not only through legislation but also through the appointment of sympathetic judges, on what legal basis could such an action possibly stand?Lastly... what if you got it wrong? What if, in the end, those most evil crimes would not have been committed?Such questions are only ever easy to answer in hindsight. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that had many of those people in a position to take action known for certain what was coming - and I don't mean having evidence for a prediction, I mean knowing with absolute inner certainty - they would have acted. Knowing, though: that's the hard part. Even when you have the words coming from the horses own mouth on a regular basis, how seriously should you take those words? The risks of unintended consequences from political violence, no matter how noble the goal, can be grave indeed.The entirely democratic seizure of powerIn 1933, Adolf Hitler was assigned the task of forming a government by the President of the Republic, Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg. It was a result for which Hindenburg and almost all other political parties in the Weimar republic had been trying desperately to avoid, even risking a possible constitutional crisis.The Nazis held a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, and had done so since July 1932. It wasn’t even all that close. The distance separating the Nazis and the next most populous party - the SPD - was a whopping 97 seats, or 16%. The Nazis held 230 seats in the Reichstag, a full 37% of them. The SPD only managed 133 seats, a meagre 21%. The Nazis held an outright majority of constituencies across all of Germany. If their system had been similar to the US Electoral College, that July election would have been a landslide so complete it would have rivalled even Franklin Delano Roosevelt's greatest victories.The election following that - in November 1932 - that majority shrunk, but only slightly, the distance narrowing to 13%; even so, both the Nazis and SPD had lost some seats. The SPD simply managed to lose fewer of them.This majority did not mean the Nazis were entitled to form government, but it sure made it a challenge for any minority coalition government to function. Ultimately, it was up to the President of the Republic to bestow the mandate of forming a government. Whomever he chose would still require the support of a significant proportion of the Reichstag.Worse still, somehow, the Nazis and the German Communist Party - the KPD - had begun cooperating around this time, not due to any sort of friendly feelings (the Nazis, you will remember, were ferociously and violently anti-Communist). It was a very temporary truce, and an alliance of convenience if there ever was one.As the old saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, however briefly.The KPD weren’t the ones barring Hitler’s way to power. They were a minority party, positioned 3rd behind the Nazis and SPD, with a total of 14% of seats after the July election (increasing to 16% after November). Together with the Nazis, though, they constituted just over half of all seats in the Reichstag, an absolute majority.Momentarily, their political objectives converged: by disrupting the existing power structure, making it impossible for anyone to govern effectively, they would shake its foundations, hoping to expose new cracks and fissures that could then be exploited. The depression had forced Germany in particular to its knees, and for any young Democracy, the scale of the economic catastrophe had more than enough force to drive a steak through its beating heart.The absurdist, almost dadaist alliance of the Nazis and the KPD allowed them to wield a constitutional weapon of great power: the Vote of No Confidence, enshrined in Article 54 of the Weimar constitution. With such a measure, they could sweep the legs out from under each and every minority coalition as and when it suited them, causing its immediate dissolution. Such motions required nothing more than a simple plurality of votes; a simple majority. With their combined 51% of seats, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.One by one, Chancellors were appointed, only to fall again in short order.Eventually, Hindenburg and his confidants began to see writing on the wall. With the chaos wrought upon Parliament requiring the President to rule by decree, and his fast-failing health, no doubt they would have been uncertain how long they could keep this up.This is when that infamous moment had arrived. One of Hindenburg’s most trusted allies, a favourite of the President and a recent Chancellor himself (who had also fallen to the dreaded No-Confidence vote), Franz von Papen had decided there were no further moves to make. They had tried to keep their enemies at arms length, only to have each arm sliced off in turn. Now, they figured, they only had one card left to play: they would attempt to co-opt the Nazi party and its hypnotic leader. They would dilute its radicalism, by offering Hitler the Chancellorship on the condition that he accepted a large cohort of moderate Conservatives into his cabinet.Spoiler alert: it did not work. Shortly after Hitler’s ascension, Hindenburg died, and the Nazis united the positions of Chancellor and President into the all-powerful Führer.His seizure of power was entirely within constitutional guidelines, step by step by step. There are those who question the idea that it was entirely democratic, suggesting that any system which was not identical to the American system could not possibly fit the definition of a Democracy. They expect that if one were to look up the word in a dictionary, they would find nothing but an image of Old Glory, the stars and bars.“Ain’t no one elected him personally”, they’ll tell you; and it’s true, no German was able to vote for Hitler personally in the Reichstag elections, since he did not personally stand for those elections. They voted in enormous numbers for the representatives of his party, of which he was the leader and chief architect.Every vote for the NSDAP was a vote for Hitler, and his appointment as Chancellor by Hindenburg was entirely within the rules.Since Germany’s surrender in 1945, every historian, political scientist, journalist, pundit, man, woman and child has - quite rightly - condemned the politicians of Weimar, the would-be coup leaders and plotters, and everyone else for failing to stop Hitler’s rise. Even in that inter-war period, surely the Germans had no need for a fortune teller to state what seems to us to have been quite obvious: that Hitler presented a clear and present threat to German democracy, to its social and moral norms, to whole swathes of German citizens categorised as "racial enemies", and moreover, to the stability and territorial integrity of all European states, in particular those sharing a border with Germany herself.He had boasted of it many times. He had written about the need for absolute dictatorship - the Leadership Principle, or Führerprinzip in Mein Kampf. In that utterly massive pile of pseudo-messianic, self-glorifying, hyper-racist psychobabble he vomited out from his typewriter while incarcerated at Lansberg prison, he describes repeatedly the shape of things to come in a National-Socialist "World Concept": that all Authority must be concentrated upwards, into the hands of singular men (and always men), who alone may choose to assign tasks to those under him and delegate portions of his absolute authority to underlings for the purposes of carrying out their designated tasks.He essentially described a kind of Authoritarian Darwinian-Technocracy, whereby Leaders would not merely be appointed from above, nor elected from below, but would fight their way to the top by whatever means, demonstrating their expertise and fitness for the role. How exactly the leadership authority would be then bestowed upon such "Überpolitiker" was never made clear, however what was made clear: it would not be through any kind of democratic process.He wrote about the need to seize territory and expand the borders of Germany herself, particularly towards the East. He was determined that only by such an undertaking could the German nation itself survive. On this point he was unequivocal. There was no middle ground to be had. Expansion - not colonialisation, but direct expansion of the mainland borders of Germany - was utterly indispensable to Hitler's worldview. There were few things more certain than that Hitler would attempt a significant Eastward expansion, at whatever cost.He spewed the most insipid vitriol and ludicrous absurdist accusations upon the Jews, designating them as the ultimate enemy of not only Germans, but of all humankind. He accused a secret Jewish "Cabal" of having inserted a knife into Germany's back during the Great War, by inciting the overthrow of the Kaiser at the peak of the German Army's territorial dominance in Europe, and installing men of weakness and timidity who simply signed the nation's death warrant without question or complaint: or, in Hitler's repeated phrase, the "November Criminals".These were merely the things he had written about: there was so much more that he spoke from his own mouth at party rallies and election campaigns. The same points were all continually re-enforced and made ever-more radical in every speech he gave - of which there were many, he loved the sound of his own voice. Despite committing himself to a legal takeover of power (following his failed attempt at a violent seizure of it), he stated in court that "heads will roll" under a National Socialist government. He saw it as his very destiny to remake the state in his image, of this there was no secret. He meant every word of it.Despite his utter seriousness, he was seen by his political opposition and foreign observers as no more than a clown. A remarkably effective demagogue and populist clown, yes, but a clown nonetheless. Nothing more than a rabble-rouser. Surely, they said to themselves, if he ever found himself in real power, the reality of governing a nation would land on him like a bucket of ice water and temper his radicalism. I mean, just look at him: he had a ridiculous moustache, shouted ridiculous and unhinged nonsense, and repeated conspiracy theories so stupid and absurd they could do nought but boggle the mind of any rational being. These were rhetorical tactics, surely.This was, in fact, the prevailing image of Hitler, both at home and abroad, for most of his political life prior to the seizure of power. In fact, it wasn't until he held total dominance over the state and its institutions, ruling with absolute power as the German Führer, that the wool began to fall from many pairs of eyes. Yet, even then, the seriousness of what was about to take place still did not properly register. Those that had discerned the coming storm by this point were few and far between, and most had taken the wise decision to run as far and as fast as they could, emigrating to places like Britain or the USA. Even among Jews in Germany, many were to continue to delude themselves with wishful thinking about the true intentions of this supreme Anti-Semite.They would not be given much time at all to make up their minds. Within a year of taking the office of Chancellor, measures directly targeting Jews were already taking effect, and the frothing mobs of Brownshirts roamed free, inflicting abuse of all kinds with total immunity.By now, there was no longer any "legal" or "legitimate" method of ousting Hitler. The old definitions of what was "legal" and "legitimate" as per the constitution were now dead. The law would become a Nazi instrument, and it was wielded to its full effect. It was followed almost immediately by the German Army. Both would display slavish obedience to their Führer, right up until he put a bullet in his own brain in that Bunker in 1945.Every single book I have ever read on the subject of Hitler and the Nazis - a lot of them, believe me - has included some denunciation of the people who let slip their chances to take action. Over and over, we point to figures like Hindenburg, Papen, the German General Staff, and many others for failing to act with the requisite resolution to stop an obvious megalomaniac.We tell ourselves that we've studied history, we know what such people look like, act like, and stink like. Surely, we tell ourselves, if such an individual does appear, saying similar things, making similar threats, launching into racist vitriol about foreigners taking every imaginable liberty (none of which is true), declaring themselves to be a coming dictator, declaring their intent to use the infrastructure of law and justice against their enemies, declaring an expansionist policy against neighbouring sovereign nations by force of arms if necessary, we would see them for what they were.However, those of us that would truly oppose such demagogues must simultaneously wrestle with the question: how can we stop them, while maintaining the principles which are necessary to the society we seek to defend?I am no expert in such questions. I am sure many others have done much better and more detailed research into them than I could ever hope to do. I am also radically opposed to political violence in all its forms.Regardless, I wrestle with this question in my mind all the time: what would it take before we could be certain of the measures to stop a Hitlerian figure, should one ever rise to the pinnacle of democratic power? The consequences of taking extreme measures can be catastrophic in their own right.A Chemical Mind is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve got like 6 drafts in the works right now, but I wanted to get this out today because, as a former grey-hat hacker, I feel a kind of responsibility to tell people when I see some crazy things going on in the world of information security.Right now, it is perhaps as crazy as I have ever seen.I’m constantly coming across sensitive data that is just wide-open to the public on the web. Only a tiny bit of curiosity is all it takes, and you can find yourself looking at mountains of personal data from institutions big and small, covering millions of individual people in all corners of the world.Just this week, I uncovered entire patient records and actual medication prescriptions written by doctors working at dozens of clinics and hospitals throughout India. I found where one Chinese communications company stores all the chat files sent by their users to one another, including pictures, videos, private documents, and more. I found the data for a Singaporean education consultancy, which had all their travel documents, receipts, and detailed information on all of their official travel, including pickup and drop-off locations (usually by taxi or uber) just sitting there in the open. I found personal income statements, tax documents, passports.Over 15 years ago, on a blog long defunct, I wrote an explainer detailing how I was able to do a google search for any subject - in my case, it was “pc computer parts store” - pick a result from the top 5, and I had a better-than-50% chance of exposing the secrets hidden in their back-end systems with minor effort. For my very first target, a small store chain here in Australia which came up as the second result in my search, their database had plain-text credit card numbers, names, and home addresses for every order in their system, it had personnel files for their employees, who was logged on at the register in the store, everything.The data took me all of about 15-20 minutes to obtain.Almost no one read it at the time, save for one curious black-hat group that contacted me out of the blue one day, telling me they could use a guy like me (think that early scene in the Matrix, “Wake up, Neo”, it was a little like that, though their pills had I chosen to accept them would have lead me into organised crime.)I said “thanks, but no thanks.”Subscribe? Yes please!Back then, although it didn’t take very long for me to gain access to it, it did require some effort. If you didn’t know what you were doing, much of what I was able to obtain would have remained a mystery to you. It required active knowledge, skill and sometimes patience.Before the rise of web-apps and cloud computing, hackers often targeted home and business PCs and devices. Why? Because that’s where the data was, although what data each PC had was mostly limited to one individual. However, over the last 10 years, everything has been moved onto the web. This shift has lead to unprecedented levels of consumer convenience. At the same time, it has lead to a massive centralisation of information on systems whose configuration most don’t really understand. This has made data-gathering by anyone with any motive and near-zero skill a whole lot more convenient, too.Imagine that your doctor is using a new fangled cloud-based system to manage their clinic. They store patient records, prescriptions, invoices and orders, and everything else using this unified, extremely convenient system. That system is also used by some 80% of the clinics in your area, and many local pharmacies, and even a major hospital.In fact, this is already the world we live in, and you might not have even realised it.In most cases, these companies that develop these systems don’t have their own data centres. Instead, they rely on a cloud storage provider, like Azure, Amazon AWS, or Digital Ocean. Most of those companies and software developers using cloud storage to hold data will either have no idea how to properly configure the security settings in order to prevent unauthorised access, or will deliberately spurn security settings in order to make it easier for themselves, so they don’t have to deal with the hassle of authentication.All of our data has been amassed on a handfull of cloud storage providers, which are used by mobile apps, web apps, backoffice systems, generative AI, smart home devices, law enforcement, government, education, healthcare, EVERYONE.What most people think of as a hackers daily fare is, of course, wrong, but not just in the CSI “I will track your IP address with Visual Basic” way. Many people think hackers target specific individuals, specific people. You have no idea the number of times those that learned what I do have immediately asked “can you hack someones facebook for me??”It’s not like that at all. Usually, it’s state actors that go after specific individuals. They have the resources and patience for that kind of operation. Individual hackers are either doing it for fun, doing it for personal gain, or doing it to defend against other hackers. For people like me, the fun is not in going after a specific target: the fun is in finding the holes in any system, holes that can make it do things the system was not designed to do or that it was designed specifically to prevent.Hacking is and has always been a kind of mental masturbation. You need no one but yourself.So you, personally? I can’t look up your personal income tax statement, your credit card details, your medical history, on a whim. However, those details might, right now, be sitting on a public storage server somewhere on the internet, along with millions of others, ready for anyone to scoop up and do what they will with it. Likely no one even told you that information would be stored, let alone hosted live on the internet. No one asks your permission, you’re just expected to read their “privacy statement” on their website, and assume that it’s even accurate and up-to-date (which it probably isn’t.)Now, I can’t just go and find out if your data is in there without actually downloading and then sifting through it. Going through all that stuff looking for just one person? That’s a pretty massive undertaking, even with automated tools. It’s like looking for a needle in the worlds largest haystack.However, that’s not what black-hats - people doing this for personal gain - are really interested in. They just scrape up whatever they can find on anyone, and see how they can make use of it, for identity theft, fraud, blackmail, etc. It’s like fishing with a giant net.It’s also getting easier.Every day. Automated tools have made exposing these wide-open storage buckets so easy. There are many SaaS providers that will give you access to such tools.So, then, what is the solution?That’s the real problem: I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really knows. So far, I’ve been much less likely to find data managed by companies based in countries with more stringent data security laws and enforcement: this weeks haul was mostly from China, India, Singapore and Russia, and only a small amount from the UK, EU and US.Still, though, there is a lot out there. The whole world runs on software. Every company is technically a software company in some shape or form. To ensure everyone is getting properly audited is an enormous task that never ends.So, if I have no solutions, why am I telling you all this?To give you the most important advice on this topic that I can: assume everything you give to anyone, in whatever form, will likely be found one day by someone with malicious intentions on an open data bucket somewhere on the internet, and act accordingly. * Spend the time and effort to learn the basics of information security practice. Use password management tools like Lastpass, 1Password, or my personal favourite, Bitwarden, so you never use the same password twice. * Use 2-Factor authentication for anything you wouldn’t want someone to hack into, and assume anything that isn’t 2-factor enabled will be hacked eventually.* Think about what information you send over chat/instant messenger systems and emails* For the love of god and all that is holy, don’t open file attachments unless you know what they are, even when sent by people you know well* Wherever you live, campaign for stronger data security laws, to keep companies accountable and ensure they’re spending the necessary effort to secure your stuffThat’s all I got for now. Hopefully, returning to regular programming for the next one. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

There's a mushroom, Amanita Ocreata, also called the Destroying Angel. It's one of the most toxic fungi known to man. It contains toxins whose specificity targets the enzyme responsible for reading and transcribing your DNA: "RNA Polymerase II".Most cells in your body are constantly replenishing themselves; they have to. A single cell doesn't often last long. This is particularly true of organs like the liver and kidneys. That's what the Destroying Angel breaks. Your cells lose the ability to read your own DNA. You don't even know death is coming for many hours after it's already too late. It's slow, and awfully painful. It's also utterly inevitable.Such toxins - like those produced by poisonous mushrooms - have been used to carry out murder for as long as recorded history. Hemlock, a plant of the same family as Carrots and Parsley (yes, really), has historically been a choice toxin, and it is said that Socrates in ancient Greece was sentenced to drink a mixture made with Hemlock as punishment for "corrupting the youth". Arsenic, a heavy metal, is another, as is Cyanide.Cyanide is the default "Suicide pill" for spies and secret operatives in order to avoid torture if captured, however we know today that Cyanide is such an awful way to die, one might be better off going with the torture. It was also the substance used by the Jonestown cult in the mass murder-suicide in 1978. Don't drink the kool-aid.Murder on the small-scale is one thing. What about on the large-scale? The idea of having a single weapon which can wipe out a whole army on the battlefield has captured the imaginations of leaders at war; especially when they're losing. Before the invention of the atomic bomb, there had been much experimenting with chemical means of inflicting mass death. This was particularly the case in the First World War.The Germans have been masters of industrial-scale chemistry since forever, and it was on the battle fields of the Great War that they sought to make use of their supremacy in this field.The question was simple enough: how can we make an area uninhabitable to the enemy for a period of time? To most people, there seemed to be a simple answer: Fill the air with chemicals that the human lungs can't handle. The French had been making use of Capsaicin - Pepper Spray - in some locations, to limited effect. The Germans decided they'd one-up the French, and put the might of their chemical manufacturing industry to work. They would release clouds of Chlorine gas from enormous drums, which would be blown by the wind across the French and allied lines.Did it work?Not really.Although the use of Chlorine and other such things could have severely debilitating effects on individual soldiers unlucky enough to be caught up in particularly dense clouds which often formed at the bottom of trenches, the promise of mass casualties at the scale needed to turn the tide of war in favour of the Central Powers was never realised, for many reasons, not least of which was the difficulty in controlling the area of dispersal. I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but the earth is relatively big; as a consequence, the atmosphere covers an enormous area. It's hard enough keeping a helium balloon from floating away out of reach and into the sky. Imagine trying to do that with a gas. Even a heavy gas like Chlorine was hit and miss.The Allies, seemingly liking the idea of more death-by-chemistry, tried their own mixtures, like Hydrogen Cyanide. Unlike Chlorine, HCN is lighter than air, and just floats away.Although the basic idea behind CW [Chemical Weapons] is simple, in practice, a chemical attack against a modern military force is an extraordinarily challenging undertaking. One might think that, in this modern industrial era, there must be hundreds of toxic chemicals that could be effectively used as means of warfare. In actuality, though, few are effective enough to be used in a battlefield setting. During World War I, for instance, traditional poisons such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN) failed to produce mass casualties.Weapons of Mass Destruction: an encyclopedia of worldwide policy, technology, and history (2005, p. 86)All sides worked to develop ever-more-potent poison gases, as well as delivery systems. This lead to the development of some terrifying substances like Phosgene, and the infamous Mustard Gas (which was more of an oily liquid than a gas, and rarely fatal, but most certainly debilitating). At the same time, all sides quickly developed highly effective defences to gases in the form of masks with filtration systems.Although total deaths from gas weapons on all sides by the end of the Great War are estimated to be about 90,000 (much of this was guesswork, due to many incomplete records), this was a very small proportion of total deaths from the war as a whole (I know, imagine something so catastrophic that a figure of 90,000 lives was merely a drop in the bucket!).It wasn't until the terrifying industrialisation of death by the Nazis that someone found a method for inflicting truly large-scale murder with the stuff, in the form of Zyklon B.Using this new and powerful formulation of Hydrogen Cyanide, the Nazis went on to kill over 1.1 million people - mostly Jews - inside the infamous "gas showers". Squeezing hundreds of Jewish men, women and children at a time into purpose-built brick buildings at Auschwitz, for example, they would shut and lock the doors tight and release the deadly poison. The victims were packed in so tight, they could not move. After about 20 minutes, the bodies would be excavated from the room and dumped into mass pits, or incinerated.Strangely enough, the Nazis never saw fit to use Chemical Weapons on the battlefields of WW2, save for the unintended dropping of a Mustard Gas bomb by the Luftwaffe on Poland in 1939. There has been much speculation about the reasons, but one thing was clear: all of these chemicals were mostly effective within sealed chambers, rather than in the open air.You would think this same lesson had been learned by all sides more or less during the first World War: mass-poisoning of human beings on an open-air battlefield just isn't all that effective. It was much more reliable to use conventional explosives, or even the Atomic Bomb, which was now a thing by the end of WW2.Some ideas die hard.Primarily driven by eye-watering theoretical capabilities, chemical weapons continued to be developed both during and after the war, in the hopes of finding something with all the right attributes to overcome physical reality. When the Allies conquered the last German hold-outs, they found something very interesting: the Nazis had further advanced Chemical Warfare beyond anything they had ever seen before. There were stockpiles of a new substance which seemed able to paralyse within seconds of exposure. Even Cyanide took up to 20 minutes to cause death, and required relatively high concentrations. This new stuff could do it in seconds.It was properly scary.For more properly scary things in your inbox, try this:Breaking BiologyWhen you move an arm or leg, or expand and collapse your lungs to breathe, or your heart beats in your chest, the muscles are caused to contract by the action of a little chemical compound called Acetylcholine. It is the neurotransmitter that connects a nerve with a muscle, allowing electrical signals from the brain to activate and control bodily movement and function. When an Action Potential from the brain reaches the relevant nerve ending, the neuron releases Acetylcholine at the synaptic connection point, which binds to special receptors on the muscle fiber. Voila, the muscle contracts, and movement occursGreat, now what about when we want to release the muscle? Y'know, un-tense it? Relax? Chill?In order to do that, we need an enzyme. For whatever reason, the binding of Acetylcholine to the receptors is unusually strong. Most other neurotransmitters just wiggle free after a short period of time. Acetylcholine, however, does not wiggle free. If it's not actively removed, it will stay in place permanently.When we need to let go of the tension, it's not meditation or tantric massage that does it; it's an enzyme.Thankfully, we have one: Acetylcholinesterase, or AChE for short. (I like to call it "Archie.")AChE is a very potent enzyme, and a single molecule of AChE can deactivate 5,000 molecules of Acetylcholine in one second [1], which is ridiculous. So, losing a few isn't the end of the world.What if, suddenly, all of the AChE in your body stopped working? Or even just one part of your body, like your lungs, or your heart?It turns out the Nazis had found a way to achieve exactly that, though entirely by accident.It came out of a civilian project in the 1930s, where a team at German chemical giant IG Farben was developing insecticides using organophosphates, a common type of chemistry for pest control applications. When the Nazi government decreed all patents with possible military use be sent to the Ministry of War in 1935, the Army Weapons Office were given a sample of the stuff by its inventors, later being summoned to give a full demonstration. It was quickly classified Top Secret.The Germans gave it a name that seemed well suited to the monster they had created: they called it "Tabun", or "taboo" in English.Tabun - this new and highly-secret chemical the Nazis had developed - was capable of seeping into the skin and wreaking havoc within 30 minutes. If inhaled, effects began within seconds. With the Acetylcholine in your throat no longer being cleared away from the neuromuscular junctions, the first signs upon inhalation is usually a weird fruity smell, followed by the rapid constricting of the oesophagus. The lungs stop functioning shortly thereafter.Although highly toxic, Tabun is extremely difficult to manufacture in large quantities. It is not a chemical that can be produced continuously, rather it can only be done batch by batch. There are so many steps to go through, and each step produces many other extremely toxic chemical by-products which have to be dealt with somehow. Every single stage of production could kill a worker or 3, despite taking every precaution.Could anything be scarier?It turns out yes. The Germans were really good at this crap. Alongside Tabun, they'd developed something called Sarin.Tabun was not an easy chemical to fabricate, but Substance 146 proved fiendishly difficult to produce. It had tactical advantages, however, and the benefits were justified as being worth the work if the engineering and industrial obstacles could be overcome. In conjunction with IG Farben, Substance 146 acquired a new name, just as Tabun had. Henceforth it would be called Sarin.Dan Kaszeta - Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents from Nazi Germany to Putin's Russia (2021)The Exposure Dose for toxins and nerve agents dispersed in air is typically measured in the form of milligram-minutes per cubic meter, or mg*min/m^3. To get a sense of the difference in scale for nerve agents, Washington University has a handy website called "Neuroscience for Kids", with a page on Nerve Agents. Kids these days...While both Tabun and Sarin can kill from skin exposure at relatively low concentrations, they have roughly the same lethal skin-contact exposure dose. The inhalation exposure-dose, however, is markedly different. Sarin can be 4 times more potent when inhaled than Tabun.Then, in 1944, yet another form of this new line of Nerve Agent was discovered by the Germans: Soman. Ratcheting up the difficulty level even further, this one the Germans didn't even bother to attempt to make in large quantities, because it was just too difficult (and in 1944, they were running out of resources and territory very quickly). Somans potency was twice that of Sarin in the air; but when exposed to the skin, it was nearly 200 times more potent than both Tabun and Sarin.When the Allies conquered Germany, they found what the Germans had made. It shocked them. It wasn't that their morality was offended, no; they were shocked that the Germans had this stuff sitting around the whole time and never made use of it on the battlefield. The theoretical lethality was eye-watering. The Americans were on the cusp of developing the worlds greatest super-weapon, having ploughed their massive scientific, technological and industrial resources into the project in what they believed was a race against the Nazis, who were thought to be seeking the same objective. It turns out - or so the Allies thought - the Germans already had super weapons, of a different and much scarier kind.This has been Part 1 of the story of Chemistry and the Doomsday Weapon idea. Thank you so much to my paid subscribers, you make all of this possible, and to everyone who has donated to the coffee fund, you fuel me with continuous caffeine! If you enjoy my writing and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription or a donation to the coffee fund here:Stay tuned for Part 2!* Purves D, Augustine GJ, Fitzpatrick D, et al., editors. Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates; 2001. Acetylcholine. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11143/ Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript:I like to make a point of getting along with as many different kinds of people as I can. I have very few outright boundaries in this regard. Nazis (and neo-nazis, and white supremacists generally) are not part of my get-along-with group, of course. The rest are a case-by-case basis, but it’s safe to say, I get along with more people than just about anyone would be comfortable with.This has obviously lead me to have many cordial discussions with folks from all kinds of interesting political backgrounds. I am what many on the left might call a “radical leftist”, while simultaneously being radically pacifist. I know, strange combination. Despite this, I can absolutely see there being pros and cons in most political ideas. I am able to put myself in the shoes of a person with other political ideals, most of the time.Recently, I had a conversation with someone about my support for Healthcare as a Human Right. To them, the idea of Universal Healthcare was a form of socialism. In their opinion, introducing such a socialist measure into the United States would inevitably lead to the subjugation of the society, and loss of freedoms and rights.I soon discovered other people who held very similar views to this one, too.The thing is, I live in Australia. We’ve had Universal Healthcare since the 1970s, and it’s a thing in most of the developed world, too. It has lead to lower healthcare costs for everyone, higher quality of treatment, overall healthier societies, and a massive boost in life expectancy. As such, it is nearly universally-popular in this country, on both right and left.We have also remained a free society.The USA is one of the few places in the developed world without Universal Healthcare. Consequently, the USA comes dead last in almost all categories of healthcare among all these nations. In some measures it’s not even close, it’s a distant last, according to the Commonwealth Fund which does yearly reports on this.The following two charts taken from the Commonwealth Fund’s yearly Mirror, Mirror report illustrate the point:https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024Yet these points were not persuasive to any of the individuals I’ve spoken to so far who disagree with me on it.It took me a little while, but I did finally start asking the right question: what did they feel was wrong about a Single-Payer System?The answer: Taxation.Taxation as “Theft”The view was put to me in the way of an old French thinker and author on Economics, Frédéric Bastiat, who wrote a book called “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen”, about the visible and invisible effects of policy decisions. Bastiat’s main point was about protectionism, but the individual who shared this with me was using the same analogy to say that taxation is wrong, because it takes hard-earned money from one person and gives it to another person who has done nothing to earn it, resulting in unseen impacts on the rest of the economy.The "other person” isn’t a reference to the tax collector themselves, nor the politicians necessarily. It was in reference to ones neighbours, the other people who share the space in which one lives and works, as well as their children. Those who make use of the infrastructure and services made available by the state through tax-funded programs. (A little ironic, considering everyone benefits, not just “other people”)Taxation is a sticky subject for the right-wing, and always has been. Even in the most moderate conservative, there is an undercurrent of Darwinian social thought: each human achieves worth through the value they are able to obtain for their labour on the open market. People who are poor are more often than not - according to such a view - lazy and burdensome. People who are wealthy are - according to such a view - industrious, innovative and enterprising. Their circumstances are dictated by their choices.That’s not even a hot take, that’s just the way they see it. It’s not even a view that is exclusive to those that have “made it”: it’s quite common among the lower echelons in economic terms. They see their equally-poor neighbours as just lazy and burdensome, while they see themselves as merely temporarily embarrassed, momentarily unlucky.There’s nothing necessarily wrong with having this view. To a certain extent, we are our own engines of value. We can choose how and when to make use of ourselves to produce our own value. That’s the whole premise on which capitalism is based, right? Well, sort of. There are some exceptions.Actually, a lot of exceptions.The vast majority of exceptions come down to health, and a lot of it is not necessarily a result of any choices one could have made knowingly.Genetics plays a more important role in our lives than we can ever imagine.Even still, here’s perhaps the key question to answer, which I feel would reveal a lot about ones personal value system: should someone that has no money be refused life-saving care?We should ignore entirely the reasons for their economic circumstances, and instead focus on the value of that human life in general terms. To rephrase the earlier question: should they be allowed to die because they could not afford the treatment that would save their life?In previous iterations of this debate over the years, one of the most common responses to this is that we should let charities step in to help. However, if that were an effective measure, the average person in the United States should have better access to healthcare than they do today. Instead, they are a distant last among developed nations. Another common response has been “well, they made the choice not to get insurance, so it’s really their fault.” This assumes of course that an individual with no money can afford health insurance, which makes no sense.Then, their eyes inevitably turn toward the reasons for that person’s economic circumstances. The question then becomes: is this person worthy of life?By what measure such worthiness can be determined is not clear. However, let us assume for a moment that such a person were deemed worthy, by whatever measure one might choose to use. Is that enough to then justify providing them life-saving care paid for by the collective society?If the answer is “yes”, then you must support some form of taxpayer-funded healthcare program.Here we can make better use of the analogy of Bastiat: Some see only their money, and do not see the human life. It’s not that they necessarily favour money over the lives of other people, it’s just that they have not yet become aware of this particular choice.The fact is, the United States has had their private Healthcare system in place forever. If it were the right system, they wouldn’t be dead last in almost every single metric. If it were the right system, it would be working. It is not, and as a result, people are dying younger and more often from treatable illnesses than in any other developed nation on earth.I am not naive to the human ability for cognitive dissonance. In fact, my conclusion must be that it is due to cognitive dissonance that such views can become established in the minds of good people. Those I have been having discussions with are, as best as I can tell, genuinely good people. They don’t want anyone to die just for being poor. They don’t want their neighbours children to die from treatable illness because their parents didn’t have the money.Of all the vast constellations of political thought we can agree or disagree on, very few of them are ultimately tied to ones moral compass. This is, unfortunately, one of those few.The fact is: healthcare is a human right. There is no way around it. All human beings should be given every possible opportunity to live. Without universal healthcare, poverty can mean death.If providing healthcare to all, and paying for it with taxes - or “theft” if you like - can prevent death-by-poverty, then it is extremely difficult to argue against it save for questioning the value of a human life.So long as a person is alive, they have the opportunity to improve their circumstances. Such opportunities are not available to the dead.Thank you for indulging me in today’s side-quest into this age-old political issue. Meanwhile, my post on the history of chemical weapons is still in progress. It will be a long read. Stay tuned for that in the (hopefully) very near future.An extra special thank you to my paid subscribers, and those who have donated to the coffee fund. You’ve made it possible to continue to provide these articles for free to everyone. I truly don’t have the words to express how wonderful that is. Thank you.Until next time. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Ever since computers have existed, humans have wondered what it might be like if a computer could host their own mind and consciousness. Inspired by experiments with Fruit Fly neural networks, Neuroscientist Tommy Blanchard and I sat down to chat about the practical challenges involved in simulating a brain, from the simplest of all nervous systems like the 302 neurons of the C. Elegans Nematode, to more complex ones like the Fruit Fly, all the way up to the 100-billion-neuron Human brain.We got into detail about why it’s so hard to capture the essence of an individual creature, even one as simple as a Nematode, with brain-maps alone.We also have a lot of fun talking about thought experiments like the Star-Trek Teleporter problem, and its implications for continuity of consciousness.Thank you to everyone who tuned in and shared your interesting and thought-provoking questions and comments! Make sure to subscribe to Cognitive Wonderland for more of Tommy (and Cow art) Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

TLDRIn my own flurry of baseless* speculation, I invent my own conspiracy theory: that a KGB Active Measures operation (a kind of propaganda) from the 1980s called Operation Denver (a real thing) - meant to convince the world that HIV was somehow created in a US bio-warfare lab - has continued in various forms up to this very day, expanding and evolving since the Soviet era, and is fuelling the modern anti-vaccine movement.Furthermore, I suspect the Russian Security Services, notably the SVR, - successor to the KGB - along with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), used the Covid-19 emergency to blast the English-speaking world - primarily the United States - with a fire-hose of anti-vax, virus-denialism, and 5G-paranoia, for the purpose of destabilising the US and the western world in general.Lastly, I suspect it’s working perfectly.The Long VersionDescribed by Major General Oleg Kalugin, the KGB’s highest ranking defector, as “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence,” these “active measures were well integrated into Soviet policy and involved virtually every element of the Soviet party and state structure, not only the KGB.”Steve Abrams, Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s Russia (2016)Question: Are Russian intelligence services helping to amplify conspiracy theories around science denialism and vaccines in order to sow chaos, confusion, and political extremism?Answer: Sometimes, conspiracies are real.Here's another real one: During its entire existence, the KGB conspired to destabilise the "capitalist" west using specialised forms of propaganda.We know this because there are copious archives, documents and defectors that managed to sneak out from under the Iron Curtain, as well as after its collapse. There is still much archival material hidden away, and likely a vast quantity which was destroyed before it could be published.According to defectors from the old Soviet Union, a major proportion of the KGB's efforts were spent not on traditional espionage, but on something they called Active Measures, a kind of long-term agitation propaganda (agitprop).They would find existing cracks and fissures in a target country, typically related to domestic politics, and do everything they could to amplify it.The purpose: to destabilise targeted governments and societies by sowing chaos and confusion, stoking rage and alienation internally, and distrust externally. Sometimes, as these myths spread, they would reveal even more fissures and cracks that could be exploited, sometimes for more specific geopolitical purposes; for example, dissuading developing nations from cooperating with the United States or United Kingdom militarily, as was the case with opportunities that presented themselves when African governments began to distrust the US thanks to the KGB’s AIDS = Bioweapon propaganda in the 1980s.We also know that today, the successor to the Soviet Union - a state called The Russian Federation, ruled by the short-statured former-KGB-man Vladimir “squeaky little mouse” Putin - has continued to evolve its security services under new names; among them, the SVR, the FSB, and the GU, along with new-style digital-media arms such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). As part of this evolution, they have embraced the digital information age at an industrial scale. The troll farms that have been uncovered so far are vast in size, but there is likely so much more yet to be found.The hacker groups are there, too; years ago, I even observed one such group as they developed and deployed a series of gradually-more-sophisticated supply chain attacks, by breaching developer accounts in NPM and other package managers. Early on, their code was littered with Cyrillic code comments. Eventually, they must have wisened up, and at some point the comments were no longer being included.This is a story about the long shadow of the Cold War and the KGB’s Active Measures operations. We will explore how these operations worked historically, look at conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and HIV which were co-opted by the KGB and amplified, and then speculate with wild abandon how modern-day Russian Active Measures could be the driving force of today’s anti-science paranoia in the Western World.Sign-up for more A Chemical Mind! We’ve got cookies!The Soviets and JFKAt their peak, it is estimated that the Soviet active measures campaign employed up to 15,000 people – more than the number of diplomats serving in the post-9/11 US Department of State.Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s RussiaIf you live on planet Earth, you've no doubt heard at least one conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. (If you do not live on this Earth, please contact me, we need to talk.)However, did you know that some of the earliest speculation about that event was part of a Soviet Disinformation program?The thing about the Soviet Union throughout its entire existence: the leadership was continually obsessed with conspiracy theories. Not only did they actually believe a whole lot of arbitrary speculative crap that they often came up with, they used this very same skill-set to generate conspiracy theories they knew to be false, for various purposes; sometimes it was used to distract others from things the Soviets were up to, or hide their involvement by creating a cloud of doubt and “alternative facts”. Most of the time however, they ran ongoing operations generating disinformation for the purpose of destabilising other countries. An entire department of the KGB was dedicated to this task: Service A of the First Chief Directorate (FCD).So when the news came out of Dallas about the assassination of JFK, at first, the Kremlin was in a state of utter shock. They had developed an enormous respect for the young President, and were legitimately shaken by his murder; after a rocky start with the Bay of Pigs, they’d seen his incredible leadership, courage and patience during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They began to see Kennedy as a man that would not be so brash as to launch a first-strike, while being strong enough domestically to ensure no rogue elements in the US military industrial complex would do so, either.The Soviets were genuinely frightened by the idea of a US first strike, probably more than the US was afraid of a Soviet first strike. Every time the presidency changed hands in the United States, the Soviets were sweating bullets.Therefore, as was tradition for them, as soon as they heard the news, they immediately began to speculate: was this a coup d'état? Were the ultra-right-wing war hawks (as the Soviets believed) attempting to overthrow Kennedy and place their own man in power? Were they going to accuse the Soviet Union of masterminding the killing, then use that as a pretext for launching thermonuclear war?Khrushchev seems to have been convinced by the KGB view that the aim of the right-wing conspirators behind Kennedy’s assassination was to intensify the Cold War and “strengthen the reactionary and aggressive elements of American foreign policy."Cristopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin: The Sword and The Shield (1999), a.k.a The Mitrokhin ArchiveTo divert the United States away from any focus they might have on the Soviets, the Kremlin tasked the KGB with implementing Active Measures in order to muddy the waters as much as possible, and in the process, they hoped some of that mud might even stick, and uncover the "real plot" they believed must exist. According to the Mitrokhin archive, they began by seeking out American authors and independent investigators who were receptive to these conspiracy theories. Some had already begun working on their own theories in books and articles, which was perfect for KGB purposes: they could simply hijack and then amplify these existing theories, further obscuring their involvement.With the assistance of the Italian-American Communist and long-time Soviet agent Carl Marzani (codename NORD, who ran a book publishing agency), the KGB were able to secretly provide funds and additional documentary materials - some real, some forged - to various authors in order to encourage their efforts, while simultaneously shaping the narrative direction. This included Mark Lane, the New York Lawyer who would go on to write some of the most commercially successful books on the subject, such as "Rush to Judgement" which became the best-selling paperback of 1967.Today, theories on the JFK Assassination are an entire cottage industry. The vast majority have expanded on the idea of an internal US government or military plot, sometimes relying on KGB-forged "source" materials which aimed to place the blame on various right-wing and corporate figures such as Texas Oil magnate and all-round nutcase Howard Hunt. Despite there being no shortage of conspiracy theories about Soviet involvement, it is notable that the most popular and well-known all tend to point inward, rather than outward.All in all, while no specific objectives were achieved, the operation was still seen as a remarkable success, and much was learned: the KGB found they were able to substantially shape the narrative regarding major world events, even in a place like the United States.…forgeries were used to promote media campaigns: among them, in 1987, a forged letter from the DCI, William Casey, on plans to overthrow the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi; in 1988, bogus instructions from Reagan to destabilize Panama; and in 1989, a fabricated letter from the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, referring to a sinister but non-existent secret agreement with the United States.The Mitrokhin ArchiveOperation DenverOn July 17th 1983, as the coming AIDS catastrophe was first emerging in the Western press, a little-known English-language newspaper in India called "The Patriot" ran a story on the front page of their Sunday edition under the headline “AIDS May Invade India.” Purporting to be a Letter to the Editor, from an anonymous “well-known American scientist and anthropologist,” it begins: AIDS, the deadly mysterious disease which has caused havoc in the US, is believed to be the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.It goes on to mix known facts and recent news and events with conclusions seemingly plucked out of thin air, though described in terms which suggest “everybody knows," as though their veracity could not be in doubt.The thing about the Patriot newspaper: it was a well-known KGB propaganda outlet. The story went almost entirely unnoticed for several years, until further propaganda efforts in the mid-1980s cited it as a way to add legitimacy; yes, KGB-manufactured news articles and other propaganda often cited other KGB-manufactured news articles for this very purpose.The idea that HIV was an invention by some American Biological Weapons program wasn’t entirely new. Some of the earliest speculation in this direction can be seen in Boston’s Gay Community News in June of the same year, more than one month before the Patriot article:There is, however, a frightening likelihood that AIDS has been funded all along by the federal government. If the theory of Jane Teas (Harvard School of Public Health) is correct that AIDS is caused by a virus related to the African Swine Fever Virus, then there is evidence that the CIA itself is responsible for introducing the disease in the western hemisphere.Charley Shivley, “The CIA-CDC-AIDS Political Alliance” - Gay Community News (9th/6/1983)In this case, it seems the KGB may have picked up on this existing conspiracy theory as well, amplifying it far and wide. It was a particularly powerful conspiracy theory on the African continent, where the KGB played it up to sow distrust of the Western powers. In doing so, they made use of allied and subject nations intelligence services, like the East German Stasi and Bulgarian State Security.We are conducting a series of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS” [...]The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.KGB, Information Nr. 2955 [to Bulgarian State Security] (1985)As part of this operation, they recruited and used a Russian-born East-German biologist - Jakob Segal, along with his wife Lilli Segal - to manufacture their own “proof” for their AIDS conspiracy theory. The Soviets, being what they were, produced written plans which were shared with cooperating agencies in East Germany and Bulgaria detailing their intentions and the assistance to be provided by these agencies. In fact, most of what I’ve written here could probably be replaced by the KGBs own analysis of the Operation’s progress up to 1987:The AIDS issue A complex of [active] measures regarding this issue has been carried out since 1985 in cooperation with the [East] German and to some extent the Czech colleagues. In the initial stage, the task was resolved of spreading in the mass media the version regarding the artificial origin of the AIDS virus and the Pentagon’s involvement in by means of the military-biological laboratory at Fort Detrick. As a result of our joint efforts, it was possible to widely disseminate this version. Independent of us, it was picked up by a number of bourgeois newspapers, in particular, the English “Sunday Express,” which gave it additional credibility and authority.* The articles and brochures of Jacob Segal, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin**, attained great renown. The aforementioned version gained considerable resonance in African countries, which have persistently rejected as racist the theory propagated by the Americans that the AIDS virus originated in African green monkeys.KGB, Information Nr. 2742 [to Bulgarian State Security], p. 4 (1987)*emphasis added**correction addedAlthough late in 1987 the United States told Gorbachov in no uncertain terms to stop promoting the AIDS-bioweapon conspiracy theory - and they subsequently did - the damage was already done, and the theory still floats around to this day, notably having appeared in the lyrics of a Kanye West song, and feeding into the overall HIV/AIDS denialist conspiracy landscape. In 2005, polling showed that 50 percent of African Americans still believed that AIDS was a man-made virus. That claim featured in a 2005 Kanye West hit song, perhaps unsurprising given “Ye”’s more recent airing of conspiracy theories.Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West - Simon and Schuster (2023)It continued to mutate, particularly forming into the claim that, as a bioweapon, it was designed to eradicate African and Hispanic populations as well as homosexuals. Such claims fed off of distrust due to the immoral, unethical and racist Tuskegee Syphilis experiment run by the US Government between 1932 and 1972, only halting after it was exposed by the press.Putin's Active MeasuresMuch of the world believed that things would change after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a "Democracy" - though it had only barely begun to resemble one by the time Putin arrived and cut it off at the knees. The world was sorely mistaken. In 2014, we discovered just how mistaken we were, when the Russians unleashed the disinformation fire-hose in an attempt to protect themselves from the charge that they had shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 as it crossed the skies over Eastern Ukraine. They had, in fact, shot it down, with their own 9M38 anti-aircraft missile.It was almost certainly a tragic accident, resembling the shooting down of the Korean Airlines 747 by the Soviets in 1983, which they had mistaken as either a spy plane or a deliberate provocation; however, like clock-work, in the immediate aftermath of both events, the Russians deployed Active Measures disinformation to obscure Russian involvement and divert blame anywhere and everywhere else.Vladimir Putin is a small man indeed, measuring in at 5 foot 7 (I am somewhat taller than he is, a fact of which I am quite proud). His ambitions, however, reflect the all-too-common insecurity with such small and weak men who wish to be seen as big and tough: they are expansive. It has been speculated that his objective is to recreate the territorial empire of the Russian Tzars, by gobbling up most of the former Soviet Bloc territories, by force if necessary. This is despite the fact that Russia, even without those former Soviet territories, is still the largest nation state by land-mass on Earth, and it’s not even close. At over 16 million km^2 (squared), you could almost fit the entire land-masses of both Australia and Canada inside it at once.Which just goes to show: it doesn’t matter how much they already have, it’s never enough for little mouse-man Putin.Today, he continues the Russian information war in all spheres, across many modalities. Social Media and the ease of the re-post has made it so much easier to reach audiences the Soviets could never have dreamed of. One critical thing has changed in Russia’s approach to Active Measures: they no longer seek to promote one side of any argument.Today, they typically promote many sides (though not to equal measure), while directly tying-in one particular side of an argument with a particular political issue. They turn things like pro/anti-vaccination into a left/right issue, for instance. It has been extremely, monumentally effective. Despite my political leanings not having been disclosed, one Russian troll called myself and other pro-vaccine pro-science commenters “alt-leftists”, whatever that means.Modern-DayNow, although I said this would be unsubstantiated speculation on my part: I lied.It’s not.They really are behind a lot of today’s anti-vaccine and 5G-paranoia content.Research has found that not only do known Russian twitter bots and trolls tweet vaccine-related content far more than the average twitter user does, they commonly make a point of stoking outrage on all sides. Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots post content about vaccination at significantly higher rates than does the average user. Content from these sources gives equal attention to pro- and antivaccination arguments. This is consistent with a strategy of promoting discord across a range of controversial topics—a known tactic employed by Russian troll accounts.Broniatowski et al., Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate. (2018)What’s additionally fascinating is the finding that traditional spam-bot networks - not associated with Russia or Intelligence Services - also promote anti-vaccine content almost exclusively, suggesting that real people with an anti-vaccine agenda are making use of marketing tactics to promote their nonsense.Then, there are the hybrids: suspected “cyborgs”, accounts that seem to be both controlled by a human sometimes and a bot other times. These are by far the heaviest proponents of an anti-vaccine agenda, and it is not well known whether these are affiliated with Russia:The highest proportion of antivaccine content is generated by accounts with unknown or intermediate bot scores. Although we speculate that this set of accounts contains more sophisticated bots, trolls, and cyborgs, their provenance is ultimately unknown.Broniatowski et al., 2018There is a fun little fact we can close this article out on. A little bit of s***s and giggles.Russia is clearly not all-powerful, even on the anonymous internet. In fact, Russia is keen for its chaos-causing Active Measures propaganda to disseminate among its enemies, while spreading truthful messaging (when the truth is useful) to its own people and its allies. In such an interconnected world, however, that becomes ever more difficult, and may have distinctly backfired during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Russia having had very low-rates of Vaccine uptake during 2021. VOA (Voice Of America, traditionally a US Propaganda outlet itself) published a piece on the subject:For more than a year, Russian-aligned troll factories overseeing thousands of social media accounts have been accused by Western countries and disinformation experts of spreading anti-vaccine messages in an aggressive campaign to spread conspiracy theories and cast doubt on Western coronavirus vaccines.But the year-long offensive appears to have backfired.Jamie Dettmer, Russian Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Backfires (2021)Poor little mouse Putin. Quite literally having the taste of his own medicine, and he does not like it.Thank you so much for reading! This post took a spectacular amount of effort to research, write, and illustrate. I think, for the most part, we are done with looking at science-denialism and conspiratorial thinking. I want to get back to writing about the history behind actual scientific discoveries on the mind and brain. As always, I’d be so very grateful if you would share this with everyone you know.Please help me keep posts like this free of paywalls and support the production of A Chemical Mind: consider donating to the coffee fund or signing up for a low-price monthly subscription (with some extra benefits). Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

I'm sorry that this is the first post of 2025. I was hoping to give you all some more interesting stories from history to kick start the year. Sadly, I've been overwhelmed by a need to raise the alarm over something I'm seeing more and more recently. Something which can no longer be ignored.There is a spectre haunting medicine. The spectre of anti-vaxxers; a minority subset of whom are becoming ever more emboldened and radicalised, openly calling for the execution - by hanging - of doctors, scientists, and public health officials, for imagined crimes and misdeeds, allegedly by staging a great "hoax" - the Covid-19 Pandemic (and other infectious diseases) - in order to poison everyone with injections supposedly full of mind control, autism, and nanobots.This twisted, narcissistic, self-righteous group of ultra-fanatics froth at the mouth, calling for a "Nuremberg 2.0".Nuremberg, as in, the Trials of the Nazi War Criminals.Some make a passing reference to the "trial" part, to make it feel less like an outright plan for murder and more like something with seminal legitimacy: like a legal trial, where you might imagine reasonable and rational judges preside and a jury (maybe) deliberates over the evidence, and renders a verdict. The vast majority I have seen simply skip over all that and go directly to their final objective: "short ropes, long drops". Not even a presumption of innocence; the guilt has been pre-determined. They'd prefer to cut to the chase and just kill them all, one by one, ropes around their necks.Some of them include graphic descriptions of the process of execution.It is downright shocking and disturbing just how numerous these voices are here on Substack alone. You can see it for yourself: do a search for "Nuremberg 2.0", and filter by notes. The stench of bloodlust is overpowering. A few of them come across as severely mentally ill, and some of them certainly are; but that can only be a minority. Some of them, no doubt, are bots. However, many of these accounts calling for violence show ordered thinking, logical construction, and clarity of purpose. They do not strike me as unwell.Some of them are listed as Substack Best-Sellers.They are clearly deadly serious.Let me give just a very small example of exactly what I'm talking about, taken from Substack Notes alone. Take special note of the language used:Nuremberg 2.0 = the summary execution of Bill Gates, Antony Fauci, doctors, nurses, medical scientists, hospital workers, and anyone else they feel like pointing their finger at, proclaiming them all to be part of this made-up conspiracy.The following ones don’t attempt to hide behind the façade of a “trial”. They make it as explicit a call to murder as it gets, clear as day:“Remember what happened to those found guilty?” - Karen is referring to execution by hanging. Also note that she includes pharmacists and “mainstream media” in her death list.This next one includes some explicit descriptive language for the style of execution intended:Another substack “best-seller”, promoting the murder of healthcare workers:And it goes on……and on…Apparently, these specific anti-vaxxers are also just the nicest, sweetest, kindest folk you’ll ever meet. Just see for yourself:And then there are the supposed moderates. They sort of side-step calling for outright execution, they merely want to lock people up and throw away the key:Rand Paul seems especially excited by the idea, and posts constantly on this theme:This is often how terrorists are indoctrinated. Eventually these calls for violence go on for so long, that someone decides it's time to take matters into their own hands.We cannot, we must not, allow this to be normalised.Doctors and nurses are some of the hardest-working people on earth, driven mostly by altruism and a desire to help heal the sick and ease people's suffering. They are often severely under-paid for what they do. They don't have personal body-guards that can keep them safe when they're out and about, or going to and from work. They are forced to rely on the general good will of the public at large. They rely on us to stand with them. They rely on us to be unequivocal in our stand against violent threats.We must declare to the would-be murderous vigilantes that these threats of violence will not be tolerated and will not go unchallenged.To be clear: this is a minority of the anti-vax movement in general. The majority do not support violence. I often have long and quite cordial discussions and debates with all manner of people, some of whom are sceptics of vaccines, others who question the existence of viruses. I warmly welcome anyone merely looking for discussion and debate, whether on science topics or otherwise.However, I have zero tolerance for those who should threaten any sort of violence, especially against healthcare workers, scientists, or public health officials. Such behaviour is nothing short of barbarism.The fact that some of these people are Substack Best-Sellers makes me feel physically sick: there are a large number of individuals paying good money to be fed this continuous stream of vicious lies and hatred, and to have it pumped out into the public consciousness. Part of the reason there is such an overwhelming quantity of this junk is because supporters are actively funding it in large numbers.That's because hate sells. Rationality and reason - not as sexy as the titillating rumours and conspiracy theories - struggles against this onslaught, this firehose of conspiracy content and rage-bait.Especially since the US Election, this can only get worse. The next 4 years are going to be an uphill battle for all of us around the world. Those of us who are dedicating time and energy to combating disinformation on science and medicine really need your support. If you can, please consider signing up as a paid subscriber to one or more of the following publications:* Immunologic, by Dr. Andrea Love * Under the White Coat, by Dr. Amber Hull * Beyond The Noise, by Paul Offit (No paid option, so just subscribe for free anyway!)* Biododo, by BioDodo (Full disclosure, this is a good friend of mine)* Lessons on Drugs, by fellow Australian Lauren Cortis * The Thoughtful Intensivist, by Rafael Olivé Leite Also, if you appreciate my work and content, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber for 2025. It's very cheap, and if you sign up for an annual subscription, I will send you a free A Chemical Mind t-shirt! Use this link to get 50% Off, valid until 1st Feb 2025!I hope the reasonable majority of the anti-vax crowd will also join us to stand up against these extremists and violent fanatics.None of us is perfect. I acknowledge that I have not done enough to stand up against other calls to political violence, whether on the left or on the right, in previous years. I am determined to do better in 2025.Let's make an effort, together, to stamp this stuff out while we still can. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Edit: BEFORE YOU COMMENT, READ THIS!I am, at times, flabberghasted by the responses I get to this article, usually suggesting that the response was made before the article was read, or perhaps only the first few paragraphs. If you read nothing else of it, then read this, the definition of Conspiratorial Thinking:Conspiracy theory, an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group.Or, in greater detail, from the paper quoted later on:Broadly, conspiracy theories refer to causal explanations of events that ascribe blame to a group of powerful individuals (the conspirators) who operate in secret to form hidden plans that benefit themselves and harm the common good.“YES BUT CONSPIRACY IS A THING THAT HAPPENS YOU KNOW?!”Yes, I know, but just because conspiracies sometimes do happen does not mean that all events are caused by conspiracy. I would have thought this to be obvious, but obviously not. The world is chaotic, and humans are more independent and less individually powerful than they might seem. To prove a conspiracy, you need concrete evidence. For example, even if you were to somehow prove it physically impossible for the twin towers to collapse the way they did when hit by passenger jets, that by itself is not evidence of a conspiracy by the government to bring them down with dynamite.At the same time, simply being unable to prove that something was not the result of conspiracy is not proof of a conspiracy having occurred, or even that one is likely to have occurred.Conspiratorial thinking, therefore, is the tendency to jump to the conclusion that conspiracy is behind any given world event, with or without concrete evidence of a conspiracy, and regardless of whether it’s actually true.Ok? We done? Good, now you can comment.We all know holiday season means having to suffer through the mad rantings of that one particular relative. You know the one. The one that thinks the Sandy Hook shootings were staged, that the Covid-19 vaccine is full of mind-control nanobots, that Trans people are systematically violating the sanctity of public toilets, that there is this evil cabal of paedophiles lead by Hillary Clinton who run a Pizza place as cover for their satanic child sacrifices.You usually rock up to the family gathering hoping that they won’t turn up. But they do. They always do.Today, I want to try and give you some idea of what’s going on inside the mind of these individuals. Knowing how some of them think might help you get through the ordeal, and maybe - just maybe - be a bit of fun.Lets see where we end up.I have a confession to make.I was once a 9/11 truther. I was also once a “moon landing skeptic.”I was bought in to Alex Jones and his documentaries, had seen "Loose Change” like 20 times, and believed the End of Days were upon us. I “knew” all about the Bilderberg group and the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and Skull & Bones. I believed US Presidents were picked by a tiny shadow group of elites, bankers and oligarchs.I even believed that the giant flag pole which sits atop Parliament House was some kind of secret antenna, and that western governments were in contact with extra terrestrials.Speaking of Parliament House, I have some fun stories of my teenage years evading Australian Federal Police on a skateboard at 2am, but that’s for another day.Of course, like just about everyone else, I believed there was something to the Grassy Knoll theory of JFK’s assassination.I even briefly denied the reality of Climate Change.I used to spout these beliefs and theories to just about anyone and everyone, with total confidence. The sky was blue, water was wet, 9/11 was an Inside Job. I was a True Believer™.I’ll admit, I had a bit of help. When I was young, I was exposed to a fair bit of religion. Religion takes the idea of centralised and invisible control and makes it your entire world-view, so steps 1 through 5 on the road to plausibility are already pre-filled: * we live in an intelligently-designed universe* there is no such thing as coincidences* there is a universal, pre-determined moral code (set by God)* there exists only “Good” and “Evil”* my tribe is “Good”, and anyone outside of my tribe is “Evil” by defaultSo that was easy.How did I make my way out of this mindset, though?To be honest, it’s difficult to say for sure. It was a process that took many years, but I do remember quite clearly when that process began.Let’s take a trip back to early-2007.As we in the rest of the world watched the 2008 US Election season with bemusement, I had been getting caught up on predictions from folks like Alex Jones and other tin-foil hatters. The prediction was given with complete conviction and certainty: Hillary Clinton had been chosen by the shadowy Illuminati group as the next US President. The Democratic Party primaries were still months away, but there were no doubts about it. It was all pre-determined. Simple as that.I don’t remember exactly who it was that made the prediction, whether Jones himself or some other related personality. If anyone can find more about it, let me know.I repeated this prediction to a friend who was sceptical. He didn’t buy in to my conviction. I couldn’t understand why, but I actually made a bet with him and said “you’ll see, it will be Clinton.”News flash: It was not Clinton. I lost the bet.After the results of the Primary, it was Obama who became the Democratic candidate. I once again tuned in to my conspiracy shows and blogs to help me make sense of what just happened. I felt humiliated at having repeated what they told me, only to be spectacularly proven wrong.If I recall correctly, their excuse was this: apparently, the “elites” just… changed their minds.That was when something snapped in my brain. I didn’t sense it at the time, but that was the moment when I really began to scrutinise what I was being told. There are not a lot of things in this world I actually hate, but “being wrong” is very high up on that short list.Early on in Barack Obama’s Presidency, Alex Jones came out with a new documentary: “The Obama Deception”, with the following blurb:Watch the Obama Deception and learn how:* Obama is continuing the process of transforming America into something that resembles Nazi Germany, with forced National Service, domestic civilian spies, warrantless wiretaps, the destruction of the Second Amendment, FEMA camps and Martial Law.* Obama’s handlers are openly announcing the creation of a new Bank of the World that will dominate every nation on earth through carbon taxes and military force.* International bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government.* Obama plans to loot the middle class, destroy pensions and federalize the states so that the population is completely dependent on the Central Government.* The Elite are using Obama to pacify the public so they can usher in the North American Union by stealth, launch a new Cold War and continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.An Article in Newsweek about the Tea Party movement of the time also described its dark prophecies:This world view's modern-day prophets include Texas radio host Alex Jones, whose documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama's candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to "con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery"[…]According to this dark vision, America's 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.By this point, I was beginning to pay close attention to the many predictions of doom and gloom being fed to me by conspiracy theory “alternative media” which I had long been following. If they were so wrong about Clinton, what else are they getting wrong?I realised there was one sure fire way to know: observe what happens, and see if the predictions are borne out.So, Obama had 2 terms in office for a total of 8 years. Did the United States at any point resemble Jones’ apocalyptic vision?Nope.Only one of those predictions - all of which were somewhat vague, and open-ended enough they could have been stretched to suit a bunch of scenarios - even came close: Iraq and Afghanistan were indeed occupied for most of Obama’s presidency.Everything else was about as accurate as a drunk throwing knives.That fact ended up dragging me out of my strange conspiracy stupor as the years went by. I had been wrong about so much for so long, and I was tired of it. I was tired of the flaws in my arguments being so obvious to everyone else but me. It wasn’t enough anymore just telling people to watch this documentary on YouTube or read that blog article or whatever. I couldn’t answer the obvious challenges brought up by people I spoke to. I realised I didn’t even understand the material that I was parroting.If I can’t even defend the viewpoint, why do I believe it? Why do I repeat it?I felt intellectually bankrupt.The Turn-AroundI hate being wrong. However, this required the ability to realise that I was wrong. It required insight. Many folks in Conspiracy Theory land simply don’t have that ability. Many simply accepted the rationalisation that the “elites” had simply “changed their minds” about Clinton and decided at the last second to go with Obama as their “Manchurian Candidate”. They kept declaring with righteous indignation the “beginning of dictatorship” and the “setting up of FEMA camps”, over and over, as if they were trying to will it into existence.I’d been debated by all manner of very intelligent people on my beliefs, and despite being unable to answer many of the challenges raised, I nonetheless stuck stubbornly to my guns. Simply presenting me with the evidence and analysis wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until I put my entire identity as someone who “knew things they didn’t want you to know” on the line with that bet that a breakthrough finally occurred. It was a very subtle breakthrough at first, but over time, that crack grew and grew, eventually shearing off not only my conspiracy theories but my religion and magical thinking as well.If Clinton had indeed won, I might still be a conspiracy theorist.I watched on with mounting distrust as the prophets of apocalypse twisted themselves into fantastical distortions and mental gymnastics in a blatant attempt at reconciling their original prediction with the actual outcome.My trust in their word unravelled as they continued down this road: making yet more failed predictions. Obama was supposed to be the literal Antichrist. He was supposed to implement martial law, establish a dictatorship, herd people into concentration camps. It was absurd in the extreme, and none of it came true. Then, there was the “Birther” thing, one of the most pathetic and blatantly racist political attacks I have ever seen.I slowly disconnected myself from those sources and communities, and began floating around in a kind of fugue state, ready to be imprinted anew.I realised I needed to stop pretending that I knew anything, and accept that I honestly knew nothing. I had to begin again on a journey of self-education and discovery, and challenge any world-view put to me by anyone, no matter how much I might believe them, or want to believe them. More than just “doing my own research”, I had to figure out who to trust, and why, and accept that I could not personally verify the entire universe of human knowledge. That meant finding the people who were making more reliable predictions, and seeing what they were about.Validate your assumptions, as we say in Software Engineering. Lastly, I had to treat the admission of being wrong as a virtue in itself. No more making bets on things I didn’t understand thoroughly. Once you start making bets, you make your own bed, and will have to lay in it. Now you are stuck with your choice, and anything other than that outcome is a loss, whether materially or reputationally. To accept defeat is to lose something valuable. I had to curb my habit of speaking in absolutes.Not everyone is so ready to accept being proven wrong. Sometimes, the failure of a prediction to pan out just makes individuals dig-in even further, for whatever reason, either for the integrity of their identity, their connection to that community, or greed.That’s what drove Tobacco companies to play down the risk of cancer. That’s what drove Standard Oil, Thomas Midgeley, Charles Kettering and GM to ignore and deny their own internal research and 2000 years worth of other research on Lead toxicity. That’s what drives the American NRA’s insistence that guns don’t kill people.“From my cold dead hands.”Use those cold dead hands to subscribe today!What does the science say?In 2023, an incredibly comprehensive multi-layer meta study was done, traversing the tidal wave of more focussed research into the topic of conspiratorial thinking and its neural and psychological correlates. It found some amazingly detailed results.From Bowes, Costello, and Tasimi, The Conspiratorial Mind:Complexity…conspiratorial ideation appears to be related to inflexible cognitive styles, including reliance on intuition, identifying patterns and agency in their absence, and maintaining one’s views while being closeminded to alternative views. Still, individuals prone to conspiratorial ideation may also lack the cognitive abilities to evaluate information accurately and critically.It’s this reliance on intuition which seems to be one of the core and consistent pieces to this puzzle. It’s all about gut-feel. Anything which affirms their gut-feel is amplified. Everything else is ignored or denounced as biased.The reason for this reliance on intuition may be due to an aversion to mentally-effortful thinking and analysis. That is to say, they defer to their mental short-cuts to avoid having to think.The paper has a lot to say about a relationship between conspiratorial thinking and the avoidance of complexity, and the inability to cognitively comprehend complexity when required to do so.Also not terribly surprising if we’re honest.The ability to comprehend a technical subject and to really analyse it for what it is requires something called effortful thinking, which, as should be obvious, is a more energy-demanding type of thinking. Brain fog is the feeling of being unusually incapable of energy-demanding thought processes. I wonder how often people with extreme conspiratorial thinking habits experience brain fog (or are aware of it).Social MotivesAt the same time, we might assume conspiratorial ideation would be related to the need for closure and definite explanations of the world and its phenomena, however this was not found to be a strong factor. Instead, it may be driven by a need to feel unique, or “special”, especially among their peers. They want to stand out, and to feel like only they perceive what’s really going on while others remain blind to it.These results point to the possibility that people who endorse conspiracy theories are motivated to stand out among their peers and feel entitled to special recognition. That is, those who endorse conspiracy theories may feel they possess secret knowledge about “the truth” that others fail to see or are not knowledgeable enough to possessSimultaneously, they exhibit a consistent mistrust of others, “from peers to politicians to institutions”These data converge on an image of conspiratorial ideation being linked to needs to valorize the self, as conspiracy theorists may perceive that they are in possession of special talents and knowledge while simultaneously feeling skeptical of others.It’s not just the individual, though. We’re all social animals, and have our “in-groups”. One of the strong correlations with conspiratorial ideation is the perception that one’s in-group is special or exceptional, while also seeing the “out-group” as an overt threat with active malicious intent aimed at the in-group specifically.In short: us-vs-them is a big one. Whoever the “us” is defines the polarity of the conspiratorial thinking, and it’s not exclusively a “right-wing” thing, either.I have to be constantly vigilant against my own left-wing biases. One recent example was an article that declared RFK Jr was going to send people on ADHD medications to “labour camps”. The article was almost a complete re-invention of a quote taken from one of RFK’s appearances on some random podcast, where he had mentioned the idea of opening voluntary “wellness farms” as one option for helping people suffering from addictions.As everyone knows, I find RFK Jr to be a dangerous nutcase and conman, but he doesn’t need to be taken out of context to find examples. He spouts so many absurd ideas and theories that can just be quoted verbatim. This kind of article was clearly designed to appeal to my leftist “in-group” types, and it did spread around in those circles, even among folks who are not normally inclined toward conspiratorial thinking.However, the study found a weak-to-moderate correlation between a Right-Wing Authoritarian political bent and conspiratorial thinking. So, despite being a phenomenon across the political divide, it is certainly more heavily-weighted toward the Authoritarian Right.Paranoia and SchizotypyHere it is, the bit I know you were all dying to know: to what extent does conspiratorial thinking rely on paranoia and schizotypal personality disorders?This is where the study found perhaps the strongest of all correlations: Indeed, a recent meta-analysis on the relations between conspiratorial ideation and paranoia indicated that conspiratorial ideation was strongly positively related to paranoia (k = 11, N = 2,006, r = .36, 95% CI [.30, .46])It seems almost necessary for a conspriacy theorist to be quite paranoid (high levels of distrust and assuming malice in others), and in a lot of cases, they are.When thinking of Paranoia, one might also think of Paranoid Schizophrenia, a kind of penultimate example of the genre. However, one can exhibit several of the symptoms of Schizophrenia - such as paranoid thinking - without being fully Schizophrenic: this is usually called a Schizotypal Personality Disorder (STPD), or Schizotypy.Schizotypal traits contribute to holding anomalous beliefs (e.g., paranormal beliefs) and exhibiting decision-making biases (e.g., jumping-to-conclusions) germane to conspiratorial ideation.STPD is mainly differentiated from Schizophrenia by the absence of actual hallucinations, and is typically accompanied by a mood disorder (which is rare for actual Schizophrenia). This makes for a difference in overall classification: Schizophrenia is defined as a psychotic disorder, while STPD is a Personality disorder.Unsurprisingly, but still interestingly, the study found:conspiratorial ideation manifests medium-to-large positive correlations with total scores on schizotypy measures as well as scores on lower order schizotypal facets, such as odd and bizarre thinking styles.There is still a question as to exactly how common the schizotypal facets they mention are in the general population, and therefore how “normal” they are, but there is little doubt of a connection here.Conclusions?Conspiracy theorists tend to see everything at this weird “other level”, a quantum level, where you look super closely at a single leaf on a single tree, down to its atomic structure, and proceed to make immediate conclusions about the entire forest, despite never even looking at it. Something like this seemed to be going on quite literally here on Substack, where some people went out and bought themselves microscopes and looked at various blood samples and other things which are supposed to have quantities of Covid-19 vaccine in them; one of these publications shared some videos they’d taken of lipid spheres and microbubbles in a sample, and said “if you look closely at this video, you can see the nanobots moving around in the sample.”Indeed the video does show the tiny bubbles jiggling around in the sample. However, they’ve assumed that the movement must be controlled, and therefore, the bubbles must be nanobots. They cannot conceive it to be natural in any way, shape or form. In reality, they’re simply observing the phenomenon of Brownian Motion, which can be observed in anything microscopic that is suspended in a liquid, like pollen grains.So, while there are no great answers for how to help someone escape from these modes of paranoid and conspiratorial thought (it might not be possible for many of them), at the very least we can try to understand where it may be coming from; there are consistent themes and correlations, from the need to feel recognised and special, to schizotypal personality traits, and the avoidance of complex and effortful thinking.Regardless, it is sometimes possible to escape, as evidenced by my experience and many others.We will end this post with a quote about what happens when people stare too closely at anything: they’re likely to find all sorts of weird happenings.If you put any [historical] event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.- Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in DallasThis is the last episode of A Chemical Mind for 2024. Thank you all so very much for being on this journey with me. We’ve recently seen a big surge of new subscribers over the last couple of months: welcome! I’m so glad you’re here with us, because 2025 is going to be our biggest year yet! From the Birth of Chemical “Doomsday” Weapons, to Smallpox, the long-promised last episodes of Deliver Us from Evil, and even more collaborations and special guest interviews are still to come.If you enjoy reading, I hope you’ll consider signing up as a Paid Subscriber: I’ve introduced a number of additional benefits, like being part of a special super-group in the Discord server (with special powers), and access to my body-doubling sessions where you can watch me working on new posts live on-screen, with more benefits to follow in the new year!All Annual Plan subscribers will receive a free Limited-Edition A Chemical Mind T-Shirt, sent anywhere in the world. 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This is a special Side-Quest edition of A Chemical Mind, where we leave the world of Medicine, Chemistry and Neuroscience entirely for one brief moment, to look at some random part of the universe, either from my own reading or experiences.Today, I have a personal experience one for you: my memory of what it’s like to survive one of history’s most powerful natural firestorms.A Chemical Mind is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Note: Check out the audio edition for a special format, including an original mini-soundtrack made for this episode! A Pine tree doesn't burn. It vaporises. Eucalyptus - Australia’s Native tree - is explosive in its own right, but they’ve got nothing on Pine, which can suddenly flash-ignite, creating instant flame the entire height of the tree, as though the air itself was on fire.Now try and imagine hundreds of thousands of densely packed pine trees, stretching for tens of kilometres, abutting a suburban street at the edge of a capital city, in the midst of a drought that had been going for years leaving everything bone-dry.I'd just closed the back of the car after throwing in our evacuation stuff and looked up. The sky that had been pitch black minutes before was now red.Furious, malignant red. The smoke was rushing over my head at a speed that seemed impossible. The air was thick with ash and embers. My hair was covered in soot. My eyes stung.I was living a reality I could never have imagined when I woke up that day, and it was only 3pm.Little did I know even then that it would become a new normal for the country. Despite the utterly unprecedented power of this firestorm, having shattered our understanding of what should have been physically possible, literally forcing a complete re-write of every textbook on fire behaviour from then on, this would not turn out to be the freak once-in-a-century event we had been naively calling it.6 years later, Victoria would experience Black Saturday, 8th February 2009, which killed over 140 people.So much of what we've seen happening more and more regularly here in Australia, and in places like California in the USA, and in Canada, over the past 21 years since that day, really began in earnest here. Australia's National Capital.That day, the Earth unleashed her full force upon humankind, showing us that there is a price to be paid for our greed.For more on science and brains, sign up today!The morning of 18 January 2003 was like most I had known since we returned to Australia: hot and dry. The lack of moisture in the air made almost any level of heat bearable. One could sweat it off.None of us living in Canberra really understood the complaints of our Melbournian or Sydney-side cousins about 30°c. That was nothing in our bone-dry air. Summer in Australia is often marked by days of pale smoke haze hanging over populated areas from the great bushfires that would burn many kilometres away from any major city or town, out in the deep bushland and national park areas. As for the bushfires, we're not known as the Sunburnt Country for nothing. You learn to expect them every summer. In fact, you’re distinctly surprised when they don’t happen.Our native elders, the Aboriginal People, have known and cared for this land for 30,000 years. Fire has always been a necessary part of the cycle of life, clearing out old and dead biomass, releasing nutrients, and clearing way for new growth.Life. Death. Renewal.Rarely in Australia's history has a bushfire ever struck at the populated city centres, which are few and far between. Australia is utterly enormous in size, with a population today of only just above 25 million people, most of whom live in the Eastern coastal cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Its capital, Canberra, is perhaps the most inland city, some 2 hours drive from the nearest coastline.It was summer school holidays, so I went out to see friends. We talked about the faint white smog, the fires in Namadgi National Park, and girls (Jessica Alba was the muse of my male friend group). The smog early on in the day was pretty light. Some summers, the air could be thick with the stuff.No one felt under threat. A bushfire had never had a direct hit on a city like Canberra in our nations long history of natural disasters: as far as we knew, there was no reason for one to hit now, either.But there was. In fact, there were several, all coalescing together. We just didn't realise it. No one did until it was far too late.Around about 1pm, I'm making my way home from Woden shopping centre, only 5km away, when I see it.The most enormous pitch-black cloud hung over the westerly sky, in the direction of home. The image is burned in my memory.You cannot forget something so surreal. The air was already full of white smoke, yet this black cloud, as black as a void, stood out in that scorching sky like a terrifying threat. Like God himself was screaming at you to run, to turn back now.I had to get home, so I got on a bus. You could feel it now, among the passengers, the driver, the people on the street. This isn't how it was supposed to happen. Weren't they supposed to have it under control? Fires don't come down this way, it's just not the way of things.I got off at my stop and rolled on my skateboard to the house. Mum had the hoses going. Above us, the black void opened its jaws and swallowed the Sun, killing it almost instantly. A faint red glow existed briefly where it used to be, before it, too, was snuffed out.ABC Radio was on, the TV also on the ABC. Up until now, the messaging had been clear: there was no threat to the city from this fire, despite it jumping containment lines, despite the wind blowing directly Eastward (towards us), despite the charred ash and small embers that were beginning to fall on us. None of us knew the black mass of smoke was a product of one of the most explosive natural firestorms in recorded history, produced when the 4 major bushfires which had been burning in our great national parks for weeks made contact with the tens of kilometres of thick pine forest and merged to become a single fire front.Rivett is a smaller suburb sandwiched between Duffy and Chapman. Most of my friends lived in those two neighbouring suburbs. The utterly enormous Stromlo Forest, a plantation of mature and giant pine trees, stretched for some 60km to the west, with the tree-line directly abutting our 3 suburbs, separated from the houses by a single 2-lane road, no more than 30 metres.I knew that forest well. I had spent many, many days riding my mountain bike along the many dirt tracks that cut between the trees. It was a place where sunlight never touched the ground, the tree cover was so thick. Years worth of fallen pine needles littered the forest floor in a brownish mush, sometimes making deep piles.At the top of the hill, deep within the forest, was the famous Stromlo Astronomical Observatory, a place my father used to take me to visit sometimes.By this point, the enormous telescope at the top of that hill was already burned to the ground.I got up on the roof of the house to hose it down and looked to the north in the direction of Duffy. It looked like the whole suburb had been absorbed into the cosmic void. Consumed by divine rage. New shoots of black rose as it progressed ever forward like a pyroclastic cloud.No one had been prepared for this. Bushfires simply don't move that fast. We thought we had time. We thought it would take another few days to cross the tens of kilometres distance. We thought it would be stopped long before it reached us. We said as much to ourselves right up until the polytonal siren that marks the Emergency Alert System's bone-chilling wake-up call.It wasn't until 3pm - a bright and sunny afternoon overturned by a midnight darkness - when suddenly the TV flashed to the Emergency Alert System broadcast.Although it's been over 20 years since then, and no recording of the television version of the alert is available, this is what it sounded like on the radio.Then, the power went out.“It was a bit of a shock. There’s nothing in the literature which suggests a fire should spread that fast, or could spread that fast.”Dr Jason Sharples, UNSWThe sound of a bushfire at full tilt is like if thunder were continuous. It's not the sound of the wind, though the wind was at gale-force already.It's the sound of hundreds of thousands of years worth of tree life being converted into energy, by way of a chemical reaction. It's the sound of rage, pure and visceral, from the depths of the Earth herself.The smoke from the fire formed dense pyrocumulus clouds - normally caused by volcanic eruptions - that became electrified, creating lightning. Oxygen was being burned up so fast, it caused more air to rush in to the fire system at gale-force, from all directions. Every 10 seconds, more energy was being produced by this fire than the 15-kilotonne atomic explosion in Hiroshima.Every 10 seconds, another atomic bomb’s worth.6 bombs every minute.60 bombs every hour.In its all-consuming rage, it spawned a brand new monster: a Fire Tornado.Such an event had never been recorded, or seen, by human beings before. It had not even been thought possible. Yet, there it was. Rated an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, it uprooted trees right out of the ground, picked up police cars and trucks and dropped them kilometres away, and left a trail of destruction in its path.Mum and I knew we had to get out. There was no point holding ourselves hostage to the vicissitudes of this unfolding catastrophe. Luckily, we had long practised a drill, summed up as follows: "how to get the f**k out in a big hurry". We grabbed only 2 things: the box of important documents - birth certificates, house finance documents, etc - and the desktop computer tower. We’d chuck them in the back of the car and go. If we could, we’d get the cats in the carrier and take them as well.We couldn't find the cats. They were outside cats, and we just had to pray they would be alright.As we were getting in the car, I looked straight up above me, and I will never forget seeing the red and gold light of flame reflecting off the thick black smoke as it raced above us at speeds I could barely comprehend. My eyes began to sting from the soot, so I took one last look at the house, and wondered if we would ever see it again.Things can be replaced. Lives cannot.So we fled.Worried waitingFire crept over Mount Taylor as I watched from our Evacuation Point - a friends house in Torrens, only a few kilometres further in to the city. The power was out, and there wasn’t much to do but watch, and wait, and hope we wouldn’t have to evacuate again.We were safe that night, because of the heroics of our incredible, incomparable emergency services fighting the blaze that day, many having been fighting it for weeks as it made its advance towards the outskirts of the city.When night fell, conditions eased somewhat, allowing our exhausted firefighters a desperately needed reprieve; time to catch their breath and shore up the lines.By that point however, the fire front had already pierced the very heart of Canberra. Parliament House, standing like a capstone at the centre of this planned city - the locus of Australian political power - was separated by no more than a few kilometres from the raging inferno.Little Red TulipDays later, the fires were finally brought under control, having burned through most of the available fuel. It was deemed safe for those who had evacuated to return and survey the damage, hoping against hope that maybe - just maybe - they still had a home to return to.We drove slowly and carefully up our street. The white ashy smog wasn’t as thick as it had been, but its presence was undeniable. Ash and detritus littered everywhere. Burnt patches the sign of small spot fires in grassy front yards. So far, coming from the East side, no burned-out houses.We came up on our house.It was still standing. Surprisingly, so was the front garden: more or less untouched by any spot fires which - had they managed to take hold - would almost certainly have had more than enough fuel to destroy everything.We pulled the car onto the blackened and grey dust-covered drive way, the crunching sound of the ash and tree bark beneath us like the groans of party guests still hung-over from the night before.As mum went inside to check the state of the rest of the house, I decided to walk a little further up our street, to see where the fire front was halted. It didn’t take long to find.It had only been 4 houses away.The often surprising thing about even the most ferocious bushfires is how selective they can be. An entire street could be decimated, save for one or two houses, inexplicably left right alone. Sometimes it would take just one or two houses in a street, but otherwise bypass it almost completely.However, for most of the area of fire damage, it was near-total destruction. Few houses which lay within the fire’s final path were spared. The entire suburb of Duffy just next to us had been utterly transformed, from a leafy-green middle-class slice of suburbia, into a simulacrum or photocopier reprint of the surface of the moon.When I reached the top of my street, I noticed a house on the corner whose front yard - which had previously been a well-kept garden with native trees and colourful flowers - was reduced to an uneven pile of black ash.Yet something caught my eye.The tiniest splash of colour.I moved closer to inspect it.Sitting amongst the black ash, apparently untouched, was a single bright-red Tulip.Everything else in that yard - the grass, weeds, flowers, trees, everything - had been thoroughly burned down to a pure black ash, yet this one flower remained utterly undisturbed by the maelstrom.Despite its entire world ablaze all around, it stood tall, face turned to the Sun.An act of defiance against impossible odds.I’ve spent my whole life since then trying to be more like that little red Tulip.AftermathWhen the last embers were finally extinguished, the damage was counted. 400 homes destroyed. Another 500 significantly damaged. $1 billion worth of destruction. 4 lives lost.It was considered to be just a one-time freak event, until Black Saturday struck in Victoria only 6 years later.This was the beginning of the age of firestorms, fuelled by a changing climate and year after year of record-breaking temperatures. First we had 2003 setting the record for the most extreme fire event in our history. That record was broken in 2009 during Black Saturday. Then, it was broken again, multiple times, during the 2019-2020 fire season, now known as Black Summer; at one point, 3 states had declared a fire emergency at the same time.Things have been relatively quiet on the bushfire front the last few years, but we know that cannot last.The firestorms will rage on.A Chemical Mind is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Did you know that Einstein was swole af?No, you didn't, did you?"At close quarters, Einstein’s head was as I had imagined it: magnificent, with a humanizing touch of the comic," wrote C.P Snow about a meeting he'd had with the great Physicist in the 1930s;"What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat round the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle-age, but he was still an unusually strong man."This description has been repeated by others who were lucky enough to meet him after a day of sailing, which was always one of Einstein's greatest pleasures.When Einstein published General Relativity in 1916, the prevailing theory for describing gravity and other similar things was provided by Newton's Laws of Gravitation. You know, the story about how he was sitting under an apple tree and when one fell, he asked himself "I wonder why that happens?"The reason Einstein's theory was such a revolution was not that Einstein had somehow proved Newton wrong. In fact, if that was all he had done - pointed at the Laws of Gravitation and proclaimed "Look! It's wrong!" - he would quite rightly be laughed out of the physics community. What's the point of just overturning an existing theory that has worked so well for so many for so long, without an alternative that can be shown to be better in at least all the same areas covered by the existing theory?Newtons laws were at the time the very best tool for making predictions about the motion of heavenly bodies and the effect of gravity, and they worked exceptionally well in most cases. Everyone knew they were imperfect, the raw predictions were usually off by a little bit compared to measurement, but the discrepancies were so small as to essentially be meaningless for most use cases. It was only when approaching extremely strong gravitational fields, or extremely high velocities or energies, that Newton's laws broke down entirely.In fact, for a lot of things, Newtons laws are perfectly adequate and used regularly to this day. So, what happened? Why did Relativity become our dominant understanding of gravity?Forces and CurvesNewton's theory said that gravity was a force, which operated instantaneously upon two bodies at any distance. Newton himself admitted he couldn't adequately explain where this force comes from, and it bothered him greatly.Einsteins theory, in contrast, said no: gravity was not, in fact, a force. Einstein had found an explanation for the effect of Gravity, nearly 300 years after Newton's work, and it turned Newtons thinking on its head.The effect of gravity is produced by the curvature in the fabric of 4-dimensional space-time, a distortion produced by mass. Like stepping onto a trampoline and trying to roll a ball across its surface in a straight line, the warping of the trampolines surface simulates the warping of space itself, and you realise that a straight line means different things at different points along the ball's journey.I'm sorry, a what? A straight line is not necessarily... straight? What is this absurd nonsense?!Relativity invokes the principle that everything has a frame of reference, and every event is seen differently from different frames of reference.If one person is on a train bouncing a ball up and down so that it moves in a straight vertical line, and another person is on a platform watching the train go by, you can see how this works: for one person, the direction of motion is straight, but for the other, it's curved.That's relativity.But it isn't just that: space itself is a fabric that can stretch and squish. Heavy things stretch space inwards. A straight line is a bit like a piece of thread that is stitched into the fabric in a straight line, but when you stretch the fabric, the thread seems to bend with it, despite maintaining its position within the fabric, returning to place when you stop stretching. Your frame of reference can be quite different depending on whether you're in a stretched part of space or not.Seems sensible, right?It’s surely sensible to subscribe now!Ha! You Sheeple!!Nope, according to Einsteins detractors, it was all utter nonsense. Like he was "bringing dadaism into physics".“The reality of the fourth dimension could not be directly seen, but that wasn’t a reason not to believe in it." wrote Matthew Stanley in his 2019 book Einstein's War;"Imagine that you are looking at a circular object with a flat portrait on it, and someone else on the other side sees a different flat image. A third observer sees only a thin rectangle. These disparate points of view can all be reconciled if the observers are all looking from different angles at the same three-dimensional object—a penny. No reasonable person could doubt that the penny is real, even if it looked different to different people.""Doubting the forth dimension was like doubting the penny."Yet, random people on the street in Germany and in the coffee houses and on the trams of Berlin were found doubting the penny, and as Einstein wrote in a letter in September 1920:“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”By "Political Party Affiliation", he meant that it tended to be one particular side of politics which were most vocally opposed to his theory: The extreme right-wing, especially members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, a.k.a the Nazis.It wasn't just the uneducated coming up with all manner of reason to doubt the pennies of Special and General Relativity - although there was plenty of that - you had gatherings of physicists who seemed particularly nit-picky about it, saying his entire paper was based on math tricks, and didn't prove anything at all.One compendium of low-effort critique was called "One Hundred Authors Against Einstein" published in Germany in 1931, and contained only 28 actual author quotations (mathematics, I suspect, is not the strong suit of this group).I think it only apt to quote verbatim and at-length from Hans Reichenbach, one of the great debunkers of the Anti-Einstein crowd, many of whom were writing in defence of what was later called "Aryan Physics", which became the defining mantra of science under the Third Reich.The following is taken from passages re-printed in Hans Reichenbach Selected Writings 1909–1953 Volume One (Maria Reichenbach, Robert S. Cohen, et al)The allegations made in this volume are truly astonishing.Einstein is said to have made mathematical errors - unremarked, apparently, by the hundreds of mathematicians who have been checking over the calculations in his theory for the past fifteen years. The theory of relativity is supposed to contain contradictions.One author, who is evidently ignorant of the elementary facts of optics, explains that the speed of light in a vacuum must be infinite.Another asserts that Einstein postulates the speed of light to be infinite.Light speed is a hoax.Supporters may appeal to empirical confirmations of relativity theory, but, as one of the one hundred authors informs us, "It is the height of folly for relativity theory to seek confirmation in experience."Empirical confirmation is a hoax.Another of this company accuses relativity theorists of downright deception: “The photographs were carefully chosen so that they would tend to confirm Einstein's hypothesis [concerning the deflection of light]."Photographs are also a hoax.In the eyes of most of these authors, the whole sorry affair is to be laid at the door of mathematics, for there we can explore all sorts of things which have nothing to do with reality: "Relativity theory is a mathematical masquerade", and the square root of a negative number is not [so they claim here] in the least imaginary, contrary to the opinions of mathematiciansMathematics is a hoax!!In fact, yet another attempt to repeat this junk yet again came around in the 2000s, when a tiny "cabal" (heheh) of individuals in Germany had felt so personally oppressed by the teaching of Relativity theory, they compiled a compendium of every single piece of criticism ever made about it over the previous 100 years, into a book, called “95 Years of Criticism ofthe Special Theory of Relativity (1908-2003)”, by G. O. Mueller and Karl Kneckebrodt.They apparently sent it out in a mass-mailing (physical mail), which included an "interactive CD-ROM" (it was the 2000s), and an "open letter", to newly elected members of the German parliament, to the press, and various other individuals in German-speaking countries. The purpose?To inform the general public about the existence of this documentation and to give rise to a public discussion about the problems brought to light by the documentation.This is called "Science by Debate". It's a remarkably common tool used by those who feel incapable of challenging a theory with concrete facts and measurement. Instead, they appeal to the public: "We have the proof right here! They don't want you to know about it!"Ok, so they think Relativity is a big hoax: what about the obvious evidence to the contrary? You know, like the measurement of the bending of light in an eclipse in 1919, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, the Global Positioning System and time dilation, and the ever-increasingly-accurate measurement of the absolute speed of light in a vacuum?They were "pretend confirmations", so we're told.There were no experimental confirmations for the pretended length contraction and time dilatation.Ohhh but it gets worse:The secret of this successful strategy was the combination of two lies: that general relativity had been overwhelmingly confirmed, and that this pretended confirmation of a theory with gravitation was at the same time - because of the pretended unity of the two relativities - a confirmation of special relativity, a theory without gravitation.And most interestingly:The year 1922 marks the seizure of power of the relativists in German physics.As Wolfgang Pauli is reported to have once said: "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!" (It's not only not right; it's not even wrong!)That is to say: it's just bonkers.So they threw down their "knowledge-bomb", and waited for the press to do their thing. Instead of the success and acclaim and praise and glory which I am sure they had imagined, they were met by silence. No one cared. Their righteous crusade against this science stuff was thwarted! How could that be?! Surely everyone on earth would be DYING to know that Relativity Theory is all made-up! Where is the Silent Majority?!Well it's obvious: they're being censored! Censored by the RELATIVISTS!In a 2006 re-attempt at getting the word out about the great conspiracy of Relativity, the same group lamented:In sharp contrast to the liberality of the Internet, after four years of distribution of our documentation, none of the printed media, none of the corporate bodies in politics and none of the journalists and none of the prominent persons has forwarded the information about the existence of our Project to the general public.The strong impact and censorship exerted by academic physics on the public and the media and their prominent figures is a success story of 80 years.So, because no one chomped on their obviously irresistible lure, clearly they're being censored. Yes. They're being censored by the "relativists". The Relativists are the ones controlling the media, and government, and education. Like puppet-masters.So far, the list of people that seemingly own the global media and mainstream public opinion grows ever-longer and more bizarre. It includes, but is not limited to:* Relativists, i.e all physicists throughout history that accept relativity theory as current best-practice* Virologists, i.e everyone that accepts germ theory as current best-practice* Vaccinologists, i.e everyone including the people that literally eradicated smallpox that believe vaccines work (gosh, maybe smallpox just went away by itself?)* Leftists (obviously)* Wokeists (wokeism is also just leftism, apparently)* Trans-humanists (?)* Paedophiles (?!)* Satanists (also leftists)* The Deep State (did we say leftists?)* JewsWhy do we even care, though?Because it's a game that just goes on, and on, and on, and on. It never ends. Every time a crank comes out with something new, and is shown to be wrong, what is the response? "You're controlling my speech! Let the people decide!"As I responded to one particularly irate YouTuber the other week: "Science is not done by debate". Thank god for that, too. Science is about the weight of evidence, about accuracy of prediction relative to measurement, and reproducibility. You can debate all day long, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who says what: you gotta prove it, and prove it again.Imagine if Einstein had merely convinced us all that Newton's Laws of Gravitation were wrong, a big hoax, and should be just thrown out. What would we have been left with?Ptolemy's Epicycles, developed by Ptolemy, who lived from the year 100 - 170 C.EIf the Germ Theory is somehow shown to all be one big hoax, what will we be left with?Humoral theory (460 - 370 B.C.E) and Miasma theory (400 B.C.E).This is the great secret that such claims don't really want you to understand: they have no ground to stand on, because they have no coherent alternatives to these theories which have worked so well for us for so very long.The whole point of science is to stand on the shoulders of giants of the past and go further, to extend on their work and find greater heights. That's why the Einsteins of the world, who usher in true revolutions in science, actually get through: they are constructive. Einstein never once intended to show Newton to be wrong.As far as Einstein was concerned, Newton was right for the most part, there were just some missing pieces; pieces which Einstein was able to illuminate, which brought the most incredible clarity to some of the most mysterious aspects of the universe - like gravity - which no one had ever managed to piece together until then.The same is true in Medicine: Miasma could be thought of as a very rough approximation of the germ theory of infection. Miasmas were essentially "diseased air", which if you breathed them in, were likely to cause you disease. It got close to the idea of airborne infections, which was otherwise a complete mystery until Louis Pasteur nailed it in the 1860s with the “quanta” of infectivity: germs. This discovery enabled us to investigate treatments and cures in a way we could never have imagined before, and all of the success we've had with advances in medicine is built on it.There are many individuals, however, who would have us believe that we should just kick out these theories. They're all pretend. Hoaxes. Fake. Let's forget about them, and just go back to the way things were before.Y'know, when average lifespan was about 40 years old.Yeah, right. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Update: Deliver Us from Evil Pt 4 is delayed, so in the meantime, please accept the first in a new series, Life Before Medicine.Inspired by 🌈⃤Ani and her note:This series is a chance for us to have a little chat about what being sick was like in a time before modern medicine. We - particularly those of us in the "developed world" - seem to forget just how great it is not to die of diarrhoea, smallpox, or measles.So let us take a look at how people experienced these diseases, and the various treatments and preventatives from the benign to the downright toxic.Starting with, of course...Then I looked and saw a pale green horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. They were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth.Revelation 6:8Yersinia Pestis, known variously as "the Angel of Death" and "the Scourge of Mankind", the cause of various forms of the disease known as Plague, is a vicious and deadly bacterium. It is so self-confident, humans aren't even its intended target. Before modern medicine and sanitation, it kept finding its way into human populations and decimating them entirely by accident. Yersinia Pestis much prefers a good rat to a stinking ape-man.For most of recorded history, outbreaks of plague have been a well-documented occurrence. In Europe, they were quite rare, but seemed to increase in frequency as global trade increased. Sometimes a plague outbreak would be heralded by the coming of a "plague ship", whose crew would start dying mysteriously after coming ashore.On occasion, a "ghost ship" would run aground, its crew already long dead.Nevertheless, even with the crew long gone, the disease could remain. Not even if God himself smote those poor sailors before landfall could the spread be stopped. Within days, bodies begin to hit the floor, so to speak. The outbreak has begun. It might already be too late to escape it.As human agriculture became more advanced, and we became adept at stockpiling grain supplies, we continued to gain ground over an ancient foe: starvation.We had no idea we were simultaneously creating the perfect breeding grounds for rats, which carried fleas, which spread the great pestilence which would come to be known as The Plague.Plague comes in 3 forms, depending on how it enters the body and which system it infects. Each type increases in the overall severity of the disease, and a Yersinia infection can in fact start in one system and progress to others later on.Subscribe today to avoid plague! 100% guaranteed success rate maybe!The most common and well-known type:Bubonic PlagueMost cases of plague are transmitted by the bite of an infected flea.The flea’s gut is so full of bacteria, it blocks anything from entering the digestive tract, causing the flea to starve slowly. This drives it to bite everything it can in a desperate attempt to feed. When it bites you, and tries to swallow your blood, it just vomits it back out again immediately, along with some of the bacteria, back into your blodstream.Usually your immune system manages to round up these unwelcome visitors, taking them to your lymph nodes where they would normally be disposed of - if this were any normal pathogen.Yersinia Pestis is no normal pathogen.Once the plague is in the lymphatic system, it just replicates, and replicates, and replicates. This proliferation turns your lymphatic system - your body’s most powerful defensive system against pathogens - into the Plague’s home base, where it can spread out to the rest of the body.It's hard to describe just how insulting this is; it's like if the ancient Gauls were to conquer Rome by just walking into all the Roman army camps, garrisons and quarters, setting themselves up in the Roman tents and fortifications, and making themselves at home, eating the Romans food, wearing their clothes, while the Roman legions could do nothing but stare, slack-jawed, immobilised by the sheer audacity of these barbarians.From there, it expands exponentially, the enormous population of bacterium causes the lymph nodes to swell like balloons, causing the infamous physical signs: dark lumps protruding through the skin, called “buboes”. Eventually, it can swell up so much it literally bursts open through the skin, and quantities of pure liquid plague pour forth from the god-forsaken body of the victim, spilling onto everything. The stench alone could induce anyone not firm of continence to faint, throw up, or both.It is possible to survive bubonic plague. Some such stories have been shared down the ages. It is estimated that the mortality rate for Bubonic plague was between 50% and 80%, so more than 1 of every 2 people infected were likely to die. That alone is a terrifying mortality rate, worse even than smallpox.For the other two types, in the time before antibiotics, your chance of death was roughly 100%. To survive these forms without antibiotics would have been miraculous.Septicaemic PlagueThe rarest and most exquisitely lethal to the infected host. Sometimes, when an infected flea vomits bacterium back into your bloodstream, the immune system can’t round them all up for whatever reason, and it stays in your bloodstream, proliferating endlessly until you end up with more bacteria than blood in your veins. If that happens, and it's the 18th century or earlier (so there are no antibiotics), you are dead. It might just take you a bit of time to realise it, maybe less than 24 hours, or at most, a couple of days.If you do somehow survive beyond 24 hours, and a time traveller appears out of nowhere and gives you a shot of the best antibiotics of the modern day, you're still almost certainly dead.Not a lot to go on. Luckily, you still need fleas to spread it around.That brings us to our third, and final form: Pneumonic PlagueIt swallowed up many good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes became weak. The entire inhabited world changed.Ibn KhaldunThis is the only form which no longer requires a flea bite: it can spread directly from person to person, through the air. When Yersinia Pestis reaches into your lungs, it turns the very air you breathe into a vector for spreading the pathogen.Not only does it spread with astonishing rapidity, it kills rapidly, too. Often it would burn itself out, killing victims too quickly before they could infect new hosts with the airborne bacterium.Sometimes, population dynamics, density, and average prognosis seemed to fit together in such a way that the most perfect storm would emerge, where Pneumonic Plague could explode across an entire continent. One such perfect storm broke across Europe in the 14th century.It was forever known as The Black Death.Black DeathIt is believed that the Black Death, which first landed in Europe in 1346 and peaked around 1350, killed 25-30 million people, or 1/3rd of Europe’s estimated 75 million population. It is also estimated that the total human population of the Earth at that time was less than 470 million. Worldwide, it is believed to have wiped out anywhere between 75 million and 200 million people, or between 1/6th and one-half of human kind on this planet.The scourge was intercontinental. It raged through Europe, the Middle East and Asia around the same time, and may have originated from the Mongolian Steppes.The Black Death only lasted 2 - 4 years, but managed to depopulate cities and towns across the settled world. Although relatively quick, these weren't good deaths, either. Plague infection, no matter the type, is an agonising way to die. If you caught Pneumonic plague, you coughed up blood and liquid bacteria until your last breath. Septicaemic plague blocks up your circulation, due to the overwhelming proliferation of plague bacteria simply out-numbering red blood cells, and starves your organs of nutrients and oxygen, turning your skin black and gangrenous and sending you into seizures.Bubonic Plague left you with horrendously painful lumps that would burst open and spill plague onto everything around you.Some people could end up with all 3 types at once.Cause?Religious fanatics asserted that human sins had brought the dreadful pestilence; they roamed from place to place, scourging [whipping] themselves in public. […]There was panic everywhere, with men and women knowing no way to stop death except to flee from it.George Childs Kohn, Encyclopaedia of Plague and Pestilence (2022)No one had any idea how Plague actually worked, what it was, or where it came from, nothing, so attempts to cure it or improve disease outcomes were literally just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.They ranged from the benign to the downright deadly: all too many so-called cures could be fatal in their own right.Many causes were proclaimed in that time. Here’s a list borrowed from the Encyclopaedia of Plague and Pestilence by George Childs Kohn:* corrupted air and water,* hot and humid southerly winds,* proximity of swamps,* lack of purifying sunshine,* excrement and other filth,* putrid decomposition of dead bodies,* excessive indulgence in foods (particularly fruits),* God's wrath,* punishment for sins,* the conjunction of stars and planets,* cripples, nobles, and/or Jews poisoning the wellsCure?With such a wide range of theories came an even wider array of folk remedies and arbitrary concoctions. For example:* Blood-letting, which was the medieval cure-all used for all manner of ailments, by using leeches or simply slicing open a vein;* Rubbing of chopped raw onions on the swelling buboes, which was thought to draw out the toxins somehow;* Rubbing ones-self with vinegar (this one may have actually had a minor protective effect, but certainly not a curative effect)It gets worse, though; and much more bizarre.Vicary MethodSo in medieval times, it was believed chickens breathed through their buttholes. Yup. So, obviously, what better way to cure plague than to use the suction power of chicken butt to draw out the evil toxins?I’m not kidding. You’d take a live chicken, pluck out all the feathers from its behind, and press its now de-feathered buttocks to the patients buboes, making sure to hold it in place with rope or fabric.Did it work?Uhh, no.WhippingNot in a kinky way, either. Well, maybe a little. Groups of people would wander down the road, stripped to the waist, and would whip themselves thoroughly as they went along. It was a kind of public penance, believing that sinfulness had caused the plague; so if they simply punished themselves hard enough, maybe God would forgive them and they would be healed.Did it work?Ouch. No.Smearing faecesOk, you may want to skip this part if you’re squeamish.Some people sought relief in the form of a paste made from human excrement mixed up with… I dunno, lilly root and tree sap, apparently. After slicing open the buboes with a blade, this foul paste was smeared into the open wound and bound tightly with a strip of cloth.Y’know, to really let the faecal matter sink in to the bleeding, pus-infused open sore.This would be left for several days, until the patient presumably died from frikkin everything.Did it work?Oh my god, no!Urine-bathsCan we just skip this one please? Yes they did this, too. Some folks were paid well to collect enough urine to bathe in. Some people drank it. From “healthy” persons, of course. Ew. Ew ew ew.Prevention?The Arabs placed a great emphasis on anatomy, which was beneficial to the medical profession. Catholic education in general emphasized philosophy and was only mildly practical, so scholars relied on Greek and Arabic medical treatises.Joseph Legan: The Medical Response to the Black Death.The first thing that was typically attempted: prayer and repentance. This, unfortunately, didn't help, as was quickly proven when the reapers visits did not discriminate on the basis of religion. Plague is an equal-opportunity pathogen.Throughout the medieval and enlightenment ages, the prevailing theory of disease was Miasma. Essentially, the idea is that disease is the result of inhaling bad or foul air, known as "miasmatic air". Such miasmas, it was thought, could be deflected by pleasant air.It was a nice thought.You know the song “Ring-a ring o’ Rosies"? A “pocket full of posy” was a bundle of flowers you carry to ward off the pestillence. Sometimes also called a "nosegay". As in, "happy nose".This didn't help a whole lot either, but it must have smelled nice, and that has its own benefits.Then again, garlic was used to extract evil spirits from the body of a person, so some folks - especially the early-day physicians, and later on, plague doctors - would constantly chew garlic as they went about their day; just in case.Toothpaste is only a recent invention, so try and imagine that smell.The only thing that helped? Quarantine.The most effective prevention to have been tried through most of history was to quarantine anyone who was trying to enter a town from the outside. Simple as that. Introduced initially in the town of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast in 1377, it was far from perfect, as people had a dislike of quarantine back then just as much as they do now, and were often reluctant to abide by the rules.It was also mainly effective against person-to-person spread. Rats, however, do not understand human rules, and were thus prone to completely ignore quarantine.We seem to think it’s a modern thing, but throughout history, “You can’t tell me what to do!” has been a common refrain by fully-grown adults against most sensible public health policies. How dare you inconvenience me for the purpose of saving lives? Do you know who I am??There was also lack of standardisation, even within the same state. Some towns had a 30-day quarantine, others had 40-days. Some towns built special plague quarrantine facilities, located either on a nearby island, or with a man-made moat around the entire building and armed guards. Some towns refused entry to Jews, believing they were somehow special carriers of plague. Although implemented in parts of France, Italy and the Middle East in times of plague, they were rare, haphazard, and rarely implemented with the rigor and honesty such a policy required to be truly effective.The Revolution in Public HealthWe close out this episode with a note on how humanity finally wrested control of our destiny out of the hands of a bacterium over the last 150 years, and it comes down to 2 things: Sanitation, and Antibiotics.Clearing the cities, towns, farms and merchant ships of rats and other rodents proved to be essential to preventing plague. Getting rid of these rodents also got rid of the fleas, which were the main vector of transmission.Early treatment with antibiotics once infected also reduced your mortality rate against Bubonic plague from 40%-60% to about 10%, a big drop. Very early treatment against Pneumonic plague or Septicaemic plague could reduce mortality form near-100% to roughly 50%.Now, if you still think modern medicine hasn’t absolutely revolutionised humanity for the better (yes I know you are out there, I see you), just take a look at the following chart. Edward Jenner discovered Smallpox variolation (precursur to vaccines) in 1796, and that could arguably be considered a point which marks the beginning of modern scientific medicine. In 1820, Quinine was discovered as effective against Malaria. Asprin was discovered in 1897. Penicillin was discovered in 1911. Watch how the graph responds.In the end, the data speaks for itself. That’s the whole point of science.Fun side-note on Plague DoctorsPlague Doctors in Italy were quite well paid individuals, who provided services to all classes, especially the poor and destitute, free of charge. They were paid by the state, and because their mission was so insanely dangerous, they were sometimes paid more in a single month than the average artisan might make in a year.Their task wasn’t really to cure patients, because no one knew how to do that. Instead, it was to try and make them comfortable as best they could, and to record mortality statistics and demographics.What was unique about plague doctors wasn’t their expertise - which was often limited or entirely lacking - nor their amazing beaked-nose masks - although they helped somewhat - it was their dress.A plague doctor was almost always covered from head-to-toe in leather and waxed-cloth garments, which essentially prevented fleas from being able to reach the skin to bite.They also used a wooden stick to push infected people away if they got too close, and to point at things and move clothing of patients.They were also protected from infected blood and lymph splatters.Of course, no one knew of this protective effect at the time. It wasn’t until much later that scholars managed to tease this out mainly through deductive reasoning. Also, records weren’t kept on the survival of plague doctors. They were a fairly rare sight overall, but made it into the public imagination when their likeness began appearing as characters in the theatre.Stay healthy my friends. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Video edition is now available!Hi, I'm Nicholas, the author of A Chemical Mind on Substack. This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series of special podcast interviews with great scientists and science communicators. To start us off, I had the absolute privilege to interview the great and prolific Dr Paul Offit (Substack:Beyond the Noise). He's a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA vaccines Committee, founding member of Autism Science Foundation, formerly on the CDC Immunization Committee.He's also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus. He's a prolific author of books on science, medicine, and a great debunker of misinformation. His latest book is Tell Me When It's Over, all about Covid-19 topics. I've edited out some of my waffling moments. I'm clearly lacking in practice, and he's a personal hero of mine, so I was supremely nervous.I've cut out some of the time lag of being on the other side of the world from each other. I've also asked him questions sent in by subscribers on the Substack chat thread, so stick around for those as well as a few shout outs. If you enjoyed this, please make sure to like, subscribe and share it around.Without further ado, let's get on with the show.You know you want more great interviews. Subscribe today!Let us begin!Nicholas:I'm here with Dr. Paul Offit. It is an absolute pleasure and honor to be able to talk with you. Thank you so much for doing this with us.Dr. Paul Offit:That's my pleasure. Look forward to it.Nicholas:You've done a lot of things. You're the professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine and University of Pennsylvania. You've also been on the FDA and the CDC, you're a founding member of the Autism Science Foundation, and you've done so many papers and books and even created a vaccine.What inspired you to take on misinformation, especially health misinformation and vaccine misinformation?Dr. Paul Offit:I think the first thing was I was on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices to the CDC. I came on in 1998 and was on for five years or so, and that was a rough time for vaccines. There were sort of like the big one-two-three hit. One is in 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet claiming that the combination measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism, which wasn't a study, it was just a case series of eight children. You might as well have published a study showing each of them developed signs and symptoms of autism within a month of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It didn't make biological sense, nor did it offer logical sense. And nonetheless, it was published in arguably one of the oldest and best respected medical journals in the world, The Lancet.And it set off a firestorm. There were many people in the United Kingdom that chose not to vaccinate their children. There were a lot of children who were hospitalized. There were four children who died from measles, really because of that paper. Then it spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.Thousands and thousands of parents chose not to give that vaccine in order to avoid autism, which made no sense. At the ACIP, we were asked to vote on whether or not that vaccine should be divided into its three component parts, because that's what Andrew Wakefield said. He said that because you're giving it in one vaccine, that's overwhelming the immune system.If you divided it up, you could avoid autism. There was a congressman named Dave Weldon from Florida who was on the Appropriations Committee. CDC, like all government agencies, gets money from the Appropriations Committee. And he was a friend of Andrew Wakefield. He asked us to actually vote on this ridiculous notion, which basically means they win because then the paper says the CDC was suggesting this like it was in any sense debatable.So that was number one. Then RotaShield was a simian-human rotavirus vaccine. It was on the market for about ten months before it was withdrawn because of safety issues, which was really the first time a vaccine had been withdrawn for safety since the Cutter incident in the mid-50s when a polio vaccine was made badly.And so that scared people because it had been routinely recommended to be given to all children at less than six months of age. And then you had thimerosal, this ethyl mercury-containing preservative in vaccines. Basically, the Public Health Service put a gun to the head of the pharmaceutical industry and said, "You've got to take this out," even though all the evidence to that point was that at the level contained in vaccines, it wasn't harmful. Which is what they said, by the way, in the American Academy of Pediatrics missive - that all the evidence is that thimerosal at the level contained in vaccines is safe. To make vaccines "even safer," we're going to have to take it out.Well, if it was safe, then taking it out doesn't make it safer. What struck me was that although the pediatricians were good - they got out there and said vaccines are good, vaccine-preventable diseases are bad, we vaccinate our own children - I didn't see any scientists standing up and saying this doesn't make a whit of biological sense in terms of thimerosal, the MMR story.And so that's why we created the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital. That's why I wrote the book "Autism's False Prophets," and then later "Deadly Choices" and "Bad Advice," and a variety of books that I think take on this notion of how we perceive science.Nicholas:Your points about separating out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines - Andrew Wakefield actually patented his own measles vaccine. He did this two years before his paper came out. He was essentially setting up a whole scheme to cause pressure to be placed on governments to separate the vaccine into its three parts by saying this ingredient is dangerous and, "Oh, here's a vaccine I've prepared earlier that's safer. You should buy it from me."Dr. Paul Offit:Right. And in addition, of the eight children who he described in that paper, five of them were in the midst of suing pharmaceutical companies. And he got money, roughly the equivalent of 800,000 USD, to basically launder legal claims through a medical journal, which is also a conflict. Eventually those conflicts became clear. He also frankly misrepresented biological data and clinical data. By 2010, that paper was retracted.You really got to work hard to get your paper retracted. There's a lot of bad science published out there every day. You have to really not only be wrong, but frankly fraudulent and wrong, which is what he was.NobelitisNicholas:And it's amazing how long it took for that paper to be retracted. It took quite some time for an entire investigation to go through. By 2010, the writing was really on the wall. It was a surprise just how much effort it required before that thing was formally retracted.I myself have autism spectrum disorder. Both my kids have autism spectrum disorder as well. I still hear to this day continuing claims stating, "Oh, but the vaccines probably did it." It's remarkable that even when the science is demonstrated to be so clearly fraudulent, these things still seem to come up.What is it going to take for honest science and science-based medicine to continue to push back against these claims? And how do we help people to know who to trust as well?Dr. Paul Offit:That's really the seminal question. That's the hardest question to address. Andrew Wakefield was an accomplished researcher. He was smart. He did interesting work on the basis of Crohn's disease and intestinal disease, showing that it was in part a vasculitis. That was breakthrough work. He was a smart guy, well-spoken, published previously on Crohn's disease.And so he was an expert in many ways. When he says something, that means something. And that's really interesting because we're fighting that in this country now. You have people like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who believes that Jewish people created space lasers that cause California wildfires each year, that the shootings in Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were just staged.So she's a little bit of a nut, and she's not really trustworthy. You could feel the same way about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - some lawyer who's basically a conspiracy theorist. But it's the people like Robert Malone who's a brilliant guy, did important work on mRNA back in the late 1980s. He arguably could have been in line for the Nobel Prize for the work he did on mRNA.And yet there he is in front of Congress saying that these COVID vaccines could cause cancer, without any evidence. So these are the people I worry about - the ones who are credentialed and accomplished. Peter McCullough is another one. He's a cardiologist, I think he was chief of cardiology at a midwestern hospital.And he gets up there and says the COVID vaccine spike protein is dangerous. And by the way, just to your point, he also sells COVID rescue kits which include ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.Nicholas:Yes of course he does (all you can do is laugh)And this seems to be a really fascinating phenomenon. You mentioned it in one of your books as well - Pandora's Lab - "Nobelitis," where sometimes you get a legitimate Nobel Prize winner who decides that because they've had such a history of being right, because they've had a lot of success in their career, that they're infallible. And once they come up with a pet theory that turns out to be wrong, they can't accept that. There have been quite a few examples of this, haven't there?Dr. Paul Offit:Sure. There are four Nobel Prize winners who believe that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, including James Watson of Watson and Crick, who figured out the structure of DNA. Or Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor. And they never backed down, no matter how much evidence showed that wasn't true.They never backed down because - why, I don't know. It may be narcissism or omnipotence or omniscience or whatever. It's hard to win a Nobel Prize. You have to work hard to get there. And when you're there, it's hard. And so you think you're just always right.Linus Pauling believed vitamin C not only could prevent or cure colds, but could prevent or cure cancer. And when study after study showed he was wrong, he never backed off. I mean, when you discover the alpha-helical structure of proteins like Linus Pauling did, and when people are saying "Well, that doesn't make sense that it would look like this kind of spiral staircase or corkscrew," and you prove you're right through these X-ray diffraction studies, you believe you're just right about everything.And I think because we're often taken in by these people - you have AIDS denialists who really believe that HIV was created by the CIA. I mean, Nobel Prize winners like Wangari Maathai or Kary Mullis. Kary Mullis invented PCR.Knowing whom to trustNicholas:And this is the thing as well. One of the things that I've done a little bit of writing about is that sometimes really smart people can come up with ideas and theories, or can back and support ideas and theories, that are just outside of biological reality or physical reality. And it's especially hard to combat that because it means that you can't just sort of trust, on faith, any authority figure just because they have a Nobel Prize.You can take what they say seriously, but you can't take it on face value. And especially for laypeople - I mean, I myself am a layperson, but I read a lot of Wikipedia. Being a layperson, it is hard to really nail down whether what I'm reading is really sensible. Andrew Wakefield's paper, if I had read that before it was retracted, when it first came out, I could very easily have been taken in for sure.Dr. Paul Offit:I think that's asking a lot of laypeople. You want to trust experts. And the question is, how do you know who to trust? People who really are experts - take for example somebody like Joseph Ladapo, who's the Florida State Surgeon General. He's MD, PhD from Harvard. Now, that's a good school. It's not Penn, but it's a good school ;)And here he is sending a letter to every healthcare worker in Florida saying that the mRNA vaccines are contaminated with fragments of DNA that are going to insert themselves into your DNA and cause cancer and autoimmune diseases and a variety of other diseases, when that patently is just false. First of all, we're exposed to foreign DNA all the time.If you live on this planet and eat anything made from animals or vegetables, you are going to ingest foreign DNA, some of which will end up in your circulation. You have mechanisms in the cytoplasm to recognize and destroy foreign DNA. That DNA doesn't have a nuclear access signal, so it's never going to get into the nucleus.Even if it got into the nucleus, it doesn't have an integrase to be able to insert itself into your DNA. So it's just nonsense. Utter nonsense. And frankly, any vaccine that's made using cells as starting material - because viruses grow in cells and that's how you make your vaccine - measles vaccine, mumps vaccine, rubella vaccine, rotavirus vaccine - any of these vaccines are going to have fragments of DNA at levels in the picograms level, which is not in any sense harmful.But you know, it sounds bad, right? Foreign DNA, that can't be good, right? Although it's always interesting - these people never think it makes you smarter or gives you superpowers.Nicholas:That's right. It's like it's never got the positive attributes. And there's a lot of that emotive language, isn't there? A lot of questions came out when it was announced that there was an mRNA vaccine. "Oh, mRNA - that's genetic code!" You know, it's kind of like that old prank, dihydrogen monoxide.“Dihydrogen monoxide is a dangerous chemical, because if you breathe it in, you'll die!” But it's water; of course if you breathe it in, you'll die. When you change the language, you can create a narrative, positive or negative. When people were talking about 5G spreading COVID, my wife and I would often joke with each other after we got the vaccine, "Oh, my 5G reception is really good right now. Really glad that Bill Gates was able to give us better 5G right now."Dr. Paul Offit:Penn and Teller, comedians in the United States, did a thing on this where they went to a California State Fair and they had a petition. They never lied - they said they were looking to ban dihydrogen monoxide from the face of the Earth. They said, "You know, it's in the water we drink, as a result it's in our urine, it's in our tears."And you know, we just have to get it out of there. And so they got 300 people basically to sign a petition to ban water from the face of the earth by using its chemical name.Nicholas:And that just will never cease to blow my mind.Choices between risksNicholas:You talk about choices between risks, and I think this makes a lot of sense especially in the context of vaccines, because nothing - not even water - has absolutely zero risk. But there's a choice: you can either drink water and continue to live, or you can choose not to drink water, ban it from the face of the earth, and you will probably die in about 3 or 4 days. Those are very different risks. If you're only ever hearing about the risks of, say, inhaling water and things like that, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh well, there's so much negative around that choice."Dr. Paul Offit:I think that's right. But I think we rate those risks differently at some level, that we rate the risk of something that we do that ends up in harm as being different than the risk that comes with not doing something. I mean, I just don't think we see it the same way. A choice not to get a vaccine, for example, is a choice, and it's not a risk-free choice.For example, if you get a vaccine, you get an mRNA vaccine and you develop myocarditis, which happened at a rate for males between 16 and 29 at a rate of roughly one per 6,600 - so not that rare. Generally myocarditis of the heart muscle was short-lived and temporary and self-resolving. But nonetheless, you basically have an inflammatory reaction against your heart.But if you choose not to get a vaccine and you get COVID, the incidence of myocarditis is much higher. It could be as high as 50% for people who have so-called MIS-C, multisystem inflammatory disease - much more serious disease. But I think it's the sin of omission versus the sin of commission.The sin of commission is seen as greater than the sin of omission, which is ridiculous because they're both bad. It's just a matter of relative risk is what it should be. But it's not perceived that way. If I give my child a vaccine and they have a negative consequence, that's seen as different than not doing anything and having them get sick - that's just seen as bad luck, right?Nicholas:You're right, because it's seen as like I'm making an active choice, as if my personal agency is the only thing that influences the world or my circumstances. Sometimes things just happen to us, but there are choices we can make to make those things that happen to us less likely to happen.One really interesting case as well is just how throughout history, there's always been a tendency to look back at incidents where there were bad outcomes, like for example some of the polio complications in an initial batch way early on in the polio vaccination campaigns, or when a particular batch of smallpox vaccination goes bad. In the early days of inoculation, sometimes it would develop into full-blown smallpox.So people look at those cases and say, "Well, here I can show that something bad has actually happened when I've gone and made that choice." The difference between the active choice and then an event you can point to, versus an active choice and an event you can't really point to - something that could have been chance or coincidence.Dr. Paul Offit:I lived through this. I was fortunate to be part of a team at Children's Hospital Philadelphia that invented the rotavirus vaccine. But there was a vaccine that preceded ours that came onto the market in 1998 called RotaShield. And it was found to be a rare cause of intussusception, which is intestinal blockage where the intestine sort of falls in on itself, gets stuck, and then there's a decreased blood supply.And so there can be bleeding which can be fatal. And then there's often an entrance of bacteria into the bloodstream causing sepsis, which also can be fatal. It was rare - it was about 1 in 30,000 babies who got that vaccine had intussusception. And there was at least one death associated with that.So it was taken off the market. When I was on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I got up in front of that group and tried to make a case for it, because you were still, even in the United States, 5 to 10 times more likely to die of rotavirus than to die from a rotavirus vaccine.So on balance, the benefits outweigh the risks. But there was a risk and it was a serious risk. What ended up happening is that vaccine came off the market here. The virus in the United States kills about 60 children a year before that. But in the world, it would kill 2,000 children a day. I mean, it would be 500,000 deaths a year from that virus.And so the World Health Organization, to their credit, tried to save that vaccine. I actually went to this meeting in Geneva in February of 2000, and country after country stood up and said, "Look, if it's not safe for America's children, it's not safe for our children."Even though the risk-benefit ratio was dramatically different in those countries where rotavirus would routinely kill. And so therefore, there wasn't another rotavirus vaccine for seven years because of that. Do the math - seven years of 2,000 children dying a day, because those countries believed that if our notion of safety should be exactly the same as theirs when the benefit-risk ratios were even worse.But I would even argue that even in our country, the benefits outweighed the risks. But that was just not - nobody wanted to hear that because it had a serious side effect. That was the end of it.Nicholas:So my uncle-in-law was Dr. Frank Fenner. He led the last eradication program of smallpox and was the one who got up in front of the WHO in the 1970s and announced to the world that we had finally eradicated smallpox.Smallpox vaccination continued for a little while after that. But eventually, once we were confident that it was finally gone from the Earth, vaccination was able to stop because, of course, there are risks to smallpox vaccination.They're very small, but those risks do exist. But then smallpox - people don't remember what a scourge to humanity smallpox was. It would still be killing millions and millions of people if it weren't gone from the earth because of vaccines. We all too often forget these diseases that used to absolutely terrorize us, and used to kill so many people. Now that they're kind of in the background or out of the picture, or they're a problem for developing countries, first world countries don't really care.Dr. Paul Offit:I was on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in 2001. The George W. Bush administration wanted us to give smallpox vaccine to all frontline responders because the fear was that it would be used as a weapon of bioterror by agents in the Middle East, because we were about to enter into a war with Iraq.I voted against that. I was the only person that voted against immunizing frontline responders because there hadn't been a case of smallpox in the world for decades. Why were we giving this vaccine, which did have side effects like myocarditis - inflammation of heart muscle - or pericarditis - inflammation of the membrane around the heart?I argued against it because you can also give that vaccine post-exposure. Post-exposure prophylaxis works because it's a long incubation period disease. And so I said, why don't we just wait till we see one case somewhere on the face of the earth before we do this? Because this is a vaccine that has side effects.It was a short-lived program. We vaccinated maybe about 40,000 people in the United States, but it wasn't the right thing to do because it's always a matter of risk-benefit. And if the benefit's not clear, the risks become more marked.Questions from SubscribersNicholas:I could talk with you forever, but I better get to the questions from the subscribers. Otherwise, they will all be upset with me. (true story)I will start with this obscure little event you might have heard happened in the United States recently - I think it was called the US presidential election?Dr. Paul Offit:I think I read about it ;)Nicholas:Jack Cooper, who's the host of the History vs. Hollywood podcast - really good podcast - he asks: is it too soon to ask what you think of RFK Jr. having a role in the next administration?Dr. Paul Offit:Well, it sounds like he will play a role. Donald Trump has said that he will have a role. To quote Donald Trump: "I'm going to go crazy on public health." These are not phrases you usually see in the same sentence - public health and crazy. But that's what he said.RFK Jr. has stepped forward and said he will have a role. It's not clear exactly what that role will be, but it is a frightening thought. Here's a man who's a science denialist, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaccine activist who will have some kind of role supervising public health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institutes of Health or the CDC. It's a frightening thought.Do you really want a science denialist in any sense involved with science-based agencies? No. He worries me when he talks about taking fluoride out of the water, which is one of our best public health achievements. He talks about wanting to eliminate whole sections in the Food and Drug Administration, which he feels were unduly influenced by industry.He's an agent of chaos. And I think that's what will happen. So it's not too soon, but he hasn't really declared exactly what he's going to do or how he's going to do it. We'll find out after January.Nicholas:Yeah, he really is an agent of chaos. And it worries me too, even being in Australia. You know, the term they say about the stock market - when the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. Well, it might be much more literal in this case.So I've got another question. Thig (my number 1 fan) asks: How do we combat misinformation and pseudoscience, the kind of things that RFK would bring in at a federal level? How do we make science appeal to people who think magic crystals are a thing?Dr. Paul Offit:It's hard. I think the misinformation and disinformation business is far more lucrative than the information business, but all you can do is the best you can do. Try and make it clear that damage is being done. Try and make science fun and exciting and interesting and understandable and palatable.Tell a story and just keep putting it out there, doing the kind of thing that you're doing (hell yeah, he gave me props!)The number of groups in the United States - Science Based Medicine, Skeptical Raptor, Voices for Vaccines, I think our Vaccine Education Center - just keep pounding out good information. For the most part, the media is generally responsible in that they at least - mainstream media - they go to real experts for advice often, but they also often like conflict because that's what sells.And so that's what you're always up against. I've been asked now three times to debate RFK Jr. And I don't do it because I think all it does is elevate him. Five minutes into the discussion, people remember the fight far more than the facts. They don't know who the expert is. I might as well debate whether or not birds are real.Nicholas:You know, there is a Reddit community that's all about how birds aren't real. Thankfully, it is a joke - at least most of them, I'm pretty sure, know it's a joke. There's another one that's all about how New Zealand is not a real place. I quite like that one. As an Australian I don't believe New Zealand is a real place. (Big-Kiwi Conspiracy)Thomas asks - okay, so he's got a very long question. I'll try to summarize it: When there are tools and methods for deciding truth, things like Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit, when those things fall short, especially with adults who lack some scientific literacy - is there a productive way to communicate critically with them about things like vaccines?Dr. Paul Offit:I think in the end - I will try to find a nice way to say this - in the end, you do have to trust the real experts. I'll give you an example. When the chickenpox vaccine first came into use in the United States in 1995, I had a number of people who called me who said, "You know, I've done my research and I don't want to get this vaccine."But what they meant by research is they looked at people's opinions on the internet. That's what they meant by research. If you really want to do your research on the chickenpox vaccine at that time, you should have read the roughly 300 articles that were published on the vaccine, which would have meant you would have had to have had expertise in immunology, virology, epidemiology, statistics, which very few people have.And frankly, few doctors have that expertise. So what you do is you look to expert bodies like the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee or the CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee, which collectively have that expertise and have read those papers and have generally given us good advice. But that is not a message that sells in the 21st century.“Trust us, we're experts.” They're now “experts” because they have internet access - that's what you're up against. I'm on the FDA vaccine advisory committee. In December of 2020, we got about 400 pages to read on the Pfizer vaccine before we recommended authorization on December 10th, and another 400 pages on December 17th for the Moderna vaccine. It was 800 pages we read in that few-week period, and I read every word - we all did, because you want to make sure you got it right.I think I was an informed consumer. When that vaccine was offered to me about a month later, I couldn't wait to get it. I was an informed consumer because I'd read the 800 pages. Most people didn't even know you could read them. I mean, it was all online, but that's what you're up against.Nicholas:It was also open access as well, which was amazing actually. I was excited to get it as well because I thought, this is cool, this mRNA technology. I thought it was the coolest thing. I remember there were two lines - there was a line for AstraZeneca, which I think was the adenovirus vector, and then there was the line for the mRNA version. This was just after some news reports had come out about AstraZeneca having a connection with heart inflammation and all that kind of stuff.And nobody was in the AstraZeneca line. Everyone was in the mRNA line. But I was there merely because I'd always been planning to be there. And I was excited just to get this. See if I could get superpowers from the mRNA vaccine - I didn't get any superpowers :(But information, whether or not it's true, can really swing people in a massive way.Dr. Paul Offit:The AstraZeneca vaccine did have a rare side effect of clotting, including clotting in the brain. It was very rare - any clotting was like 1 in 100,000. But it ultimately drove the vaccine off the market in the United States because the mRNA vaccine was safer. Yet there were systems in place to pick that up because the Vaccine Safety Datalink or the VAERS system can pick that up fairly quickly. Pre-licensure studies are never going to be able to pick up very, very rare adverse events.You have to have those systems in place. And they were in place. But you have to know that medical innovations are always at some level associated with a human price for knowledge. That's always true.Nicholas:The last question for you is from Rafael Olivé Leite, and he's from Brazil. He is wondering whether being an anti-vaxxer is a luxury, first-world kind of opinion to hold - whether it's kind of a privileged opinion to hold. For him being in Brazil, he sees a lot of viruses and infections and things that aren't very common anymore in my country and in yours.So he's wondering, do you see that as kind of a privileged, first-world-ish kind of belief?Dr. Paul Offit:Yes, it is. And also, you get to hide in the herd. Most people are vaccinated, most children are vaccinated. And so incidence of measles is certainly way down from where it was in the early 60s. Same thing with German measles - actually gone. You hide in the herd. It's completely selfish. It's unfair.And if enough people make that decision, as is starting to happen with measles and with pertussis, well, you're starting to see those sort of come roaring back. So that's the problem.Nicholas:Absolutely. I could go on with you forever, but I think I will let you have your time back. Thank you again so much for coming on and having a chat with me. I hope we can do this again at some point in the future. Next time you have a book, let me know. I've been reading through your entire back catalog, and it's fantastic. So thank you again so much, Dr. Offit.And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and week and hopefully, a good next four years! (As long as you move to Australia, that is)Dr. Paul Offit:It was my pleasure. Let's do this again.A final massive thank you to Dr Offit, who has his own Substack and a ton of subscribers, but was kind enough to come visit our little corner of the internet here on A Chemical Mind. You should also look up his latest book, Tell Me When It’s Over, sold at all good book stores. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Part 3 of Deliver Us from Evil. This series is now expanding beyond José Delgado’s story, as we dive into the history of conspiratorial thinking during times of health crisis. You don’t need to read the first two parts this time; although relevant, they are not prerequisites.My goal in this series is not merely exploring the history for its own sake; I also hope to arm you with the cognitive tools that you can use to analyse extraordinary claims, no matter where they come from, so you can protect yourself from the increasingly sophisticated tactics of swindlers and grifters that seem to saturate areas of Health and Wellness.Let’s get started.Humans have an innate need to feel like they understand.This feeling of understanding allows us to pick sides, to assign blame, to justify, to conceptualise, to abstract, explain, critique. Whether or not we really do understand makes no difference, it’s the feeling which unlocks this suite of abilities for us.The feelings we feel, our sensory perceptions, are not perfect analogues for the world around us. Our experience of reality is a construction, a synthesis of various approximations./r/im14andthisisdeepOk, but seriously, conspiracy theories are rife, and you have almost certainly observed them, and known people who’ve tried to convince you of their veracity. Before we start feeling all smug and superior, here’s a small fact: every last one of us believes in at least one conspiracy theory.Maybe you believe one or more of the following:* Corporations are trying to control everything we consume by tracking everything we do,* Big pharma is trying to make us accept injections we don’t need by convincing us of the existence of viruses,* Capitalists want to keep us all subservient by convincing the working class to fight amongst themselves rather than their oppressors,* Communists are trying to enslave you and take over the world by taking away your free speech,* 5G transmissions are a plot by Satanists to kill off the human population,* Oil companies are trying to protect their profits by spreading lies about renewable energy,* Wind Farms are a plot to murder all the world’s Whales,Or, even that…a globe earth is a lie by governments to hide the fact that it’s really all just flat. Cuz, like, if everyone knew it was all just flat, then…. well…. I dunno.Hell, even I believe in a couple of those. Try to guess which ones ;)People that believe in conspiracy theories are not stupid. If they were, then I would be stupid, and we can’t have that (I just won’t allow it!)If you don’t believe in any conspiracy theory at all, that would likely mean you weren’t a believer in the ability for humans to conspire together, and that would be a whole other problemThe Nazis certainly conspired to commit Genocide and conquer Europe, for example. Sometimes people will conspire to murder others at smaller scales, too. Gangs sometimes conspire to rob, kill, and dominate. Corporate executives sometimes conspire to pull off some pretty spectacular long-running frauds, like Enron. Occasionally multiple companies will conspire together, in cases of price-fixing. Politicians conspire too, with Watergate being a most famous example.So it can be quite a task to separate fact from fiction, plausible from implausible.Over the next few weeks, my plan is to simply take a tour through the scientific literature and historical analysis of people’s propensity for believing in health-related conspiracy theories, along with their origins, without insulting or belittling those that might believe in them.I will also try to provide you with the cognitive tools for analysing claims about health, so that you can keep an open mind, while maintaining a grounded perspective. I will also try to show that it is OK to be wrong and change your mind accordingly. It is, in fact, a supremely courageous act, and goes against our instinct to simply double-down.Deciding who and what to trust is a normal part of being human: we can’t all do our own independent scientific analysis on every aspect of life.I choose to trust the overwhelming scientific consensus on vaccine safety, the dangers of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, and the benefits of masks, even if a tiny number of studies disagree on one or another aspect.On occasion, a paper comes out like this from Nature that suggests Vaccination status may be correlated with an increase in the incidence of anxiety and depression diagnosis within 3 months post-vaccination, while also being correlated with a surprising reduction in schizophrenia and bipolar diagnosis after 3 months.Does this make me gasp and think “Oh god, the vaccine causes mental disease”?No, it doesn’t.Does it make me jump up and shout “Oh my god, I’m vaccinated against Schizophrenia!”?No, it doesn’t.I mean, I kinda want to do that anyway because what an interesting finding, but no.The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.(Kim et al., 2024, p. 7)Seriously, this is a really cool finding, and I kinda want to keep going on that subject because there’s more in that article that makes it an example of really fascinating science, but we’ve got other matters to attend to.Let us begin with Cholera.The Devil’s IndigestionSeptember 14th, 1893.It was early morning, the sun still low over the horizon in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. The Roosters were feeling satisfied by that day’s crowing; a job well done.A Nightsoilman, finishing his rounds in the centre of town, was collecting his last few privy buckets and chamber pots and emptying their contents into his cart. In his mid-50s, it was likely one of the only jobs available for someone of his age and education: a job no one else wanted.The smell was rank, and the stink saturated every fibre of his clothing and his skin, maybe even his very bones.There were moments he wondered whether God would let him into the heavenly Kingdom if his soul carried the stench from this line of work.Surely in Heaven, he thought, there’s no need for chamber pots and privies; such foul things belong solely to the dominion of Hell.As he moved along the street with his cart full of excrement, his entire body was suddenly seized with a cold dread; his stomach felt very, very wrong. His whole abdomen began writhing. He ran to the nearest house, knocking furiously, apologising for the disturbance so early in the morning; it was an emergency.He didn’t feel much relief after emptying his bowels of all its contents. Everything still felt awful. Pain was setting in. Awful pain. By 9am, he set out for home, but collapsed in the middle of the street. He was found and picked up by another man with a cart, and arrived home at 11am.That's when the vomiting began: a pale white, translucent milky liquid came pouring out of his mouth.The following day, his face and his hands had become blue and shrivelled. The diarrhoea and vomiting had been going on repeatedly. He appeared utterly emaciated, drained of life, shrivelled like a prune. Eyes sunken into his head.By that afternoon, he was dead.This is just one of many, many stories of the awful deaths people would experience when Cholera strikes.The outbreak in the 1890s was the third major epidemic of Cholera in the British Isles during the 19th Century. It killed people by draining the very life force from their bodies: water. Death would come through sudden and acute dehydration.Cholera's first strike of that century ran from late 1831 to early 1833, and spawned with it an epidemic of paranoia, violence and hate so intense that it has been the focus of enormous research.It is a case study of mass paranoia in the face of a public health crisis, and has resonance for our own times.Letting the bodies hit the floor“Rumours and myths of elites and especially of physicians employing the disease or inventing it to murder the poor galvanized communities to assemble in crowds in the thousands to attack hospitals and ‘liberate’ neighbours and kin from what the rioters perceived as death chambers.”Samuel Kline Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (First edition)Oxford University Press (2018)Surgery in England was a burgeoning profession, thanks largely to the efforts of surgeons like John Hunter who pushed for training to be done on real human cadavers. Across Britain, the 1820s saw the rise of new Anatomy Colleges, and demand for cadavers rose concomitantly. These institutions were paying good money for supplies of cadavers, and this quickly led to some unintended consequences, as profit motives often do: two men, one William Burke and his partner William Hare, carried out a spate of murders over a period of 10 months in 1828. 16 people were killed for their bodies to be sold as cadavers to the Edinburgh-based Dr Robert Knox.It was never established whether Dr Knox himself had put the men up to the task of murder. The scandal took over the headlines in newspapers across the commonwealth.Then in 1831, mere months before the first Cholera epidemic of the century was to explode in full force upon the island, a similar scandal involving another two men murdering for cadavers broke in the newspapers."Burking", or "to Burke", was to enter the British Lexicon, as a term referring to murder for harvesting bodies.Cholera was well and truly established by November of that year, and the deaths came quick and fast. The populace, having been primed to be on the lookout for cases of Burking, saw bodies falling everywhere. For them, this could only mean one thing: the Anatomists were now resorting to mass poisoning to feed their insatiable greed for dead flesh.The Anatomists must be stopped.The rioting by the people began that terrible November. By December, they were burning down Anatomy schools, and the government resorted to calling out the troops in order to prevent a spiralling of violence. Less than a week later, a special Cholera hospital in London was attacked, its surgeons threatened with death by the mob. The crowd believed the Surgeons were "Burking the poor wretches who were admitted". Another riot in June also invoked the obsession with Burking, believing that "the doctors merely wanted to get the poor into their clutches to Burke them!"More riots followed. In August of 1832, “yet a fourth cholera riot erupted with a ‘mob’ forming outside the gates of Bristol’s cholera hospital: ‘a sailor, in a straw hat and smock frock, intoxicated and flourishing a stick in the faces of the constables’, declared he had been inside the hospital and witnessed the doctors ‘burking the poor people’. He yelled for the hospital to be pulled down.” (Cohn, 2018, p. 171)Burial services were stormed, with the crowd forcing gravediggers to open the coffins in order to prove the bodies inside were really dead. In Glasgow, March saw rioters attacking gravediggers and threatening surgeons. When word of coffins being exhumed and raided for corpses spread around - after some people discovered an empty coffin in a cemetery - a crowd gathered, collected makeshift weapons and projectiles, and marched through town, breaking the windows of all houses of known "medical gentlemen". They destroyed "everything connected with the hospital so far as possible". A rock thrown by one of the crowd struck a hospital patient, who died. A battle ensued between the Police and the enraged mob, who believed the sick were to be dissected.On and on it went like this. Merely trying to do the right thing by those suffering from a most awful and deadly disease made you a target for violence, even if you weren't a doctor. Sometimes, Cholera patients themselves were accused of being "Burkers" for some reason, and would have to make a terrifying escape.“it seems that the horrific lethality of the disease, combined with the need to bury the dead rapidly and the insistence that cholera bodies be buried in separate cemeteries without relatives in attendance, persuaded the poor to believe elites were weeding out excess populations.”Samuel Kline Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDSIt could be argued that newspapers - keen to sensationalise and scandalise, since it helped to sell more copies - were a driving force in amplifying the delusions of the crowd. It is indeed a plausible contributor. However, just as much of a force - if not more-so - was the community rumour mill, a system of information networks as old as human society itself.The example of the "sailor in a straw hat", who was drunk, yelling to the crowd about having "been inside the hospital" and having witnessed the "burking [of] the poor people", called for the hospital to be "pulled down", is particularly poignant, but was by no means the only instance of unknown community members whipping up a crowd with unfounded and unbelievable claims.There were the boys who found spades and a hook tool, which were shown to adults and were assumed to have been used for exhuming bodies from grave sites. A crowd formed, dug up an entire cemetery, inspecting coffins, and upon finding a single one empty, began a destructive riot, claiming that doctors were stealing the bodies for dissection purposes. Whether or not that empty coffin was in fact a case of grave robbers providing cadavers to surgeons and anatomists was never questioned: it was simply assumed to be.Cholera was not unique to the British Isles, of course; many countries around the world battled with outbreaks. Places with unsanitary water sources have long been its preferred target, and some developing countries still experience outbreaks to this day. Many countries that encountered Cholera epidemics had their own share of incredible rumours, usually related to an elite/masses dynamic, as in the rumours of "Burking". It and other infectious diseases are still today being proclaimed as hoaxes, conspiracies and plots of all kinds, and not the result of pathogens.The unfortunate fact: Cholera was, and is, very real, and very deadly.Stopping the SpreadSewerage systems and public sanitation were still pretty much unknown for most of the 1800s. The miasma theory of disease meant that people would carry "nosegays" (bundles of nice-smelling flowers in a pouch worn around the waist) around with them during times of pestilence, believing that having a source of pleasant aroma would limit the amount of "miasmatic" vapours being inhaled into the body. By logical extension, this would limit ones exposure to "diseased air".It was a perfectly logical thing to believe in the circumstances, really. We all feel repelled by foul smells, and no doubt we fear the potential for an illness, even if subconsciously. It made logical sense for most, and although factually wrong, it wasn't completely off base: some germs, as we know, spread through the air. Regardless of these resonances, the flowers would have been no more effective than placebo.For some people, perhaps that was enough.There was one other small problem: Cholera wasn't airborne. It was waterborne.In the London area, the Thames was a major source of drinking water for many people. It was also where the nightsoilmen dumped their loads of human excrement daily, in enormous quantities.The Thames was full of raw, untreated sewage.It was absolutely infested with Cholera.Ultimately, it took another couple of outbreaks, and a physician with an empirical mindset by the name of John Snow, to make the connection between tainted water sources and infection.Once this became widely known and improved sewerage systems - as well as drinking water treatment and filtration - were rolled out, Cholera outbreaks became a thing of the past. That simple fact was the final proof to the true origins of the disease.Information networks are often vectors both for pathogens of the body and of the mind.Like a mesh network with "primary nodes", certain popular figures in a community act as super-spreaders of misinformation, making a habit of jumping on the latest conspiracy theory bandwagon in their particular field of interest: UFOs, Mind Control, Health, and so on. Such individuals in the present day and age frequently have websites and blogs set up, with newsletters and a social media presence; and they always - always - have something to sell you. Everything they write, post, and talk about will have a way to tie in with their products and wares. Books, "detox" products, supplements, vitamins (always vitamins), healing retreats, crystals, you name it. This is a standard strategy for many businesses: producing free content that fits peoples interest, hook them with emotive language, then guide them towards your sales funnel.Many of these individuals - especially those prevalent in the Health & Wellness space - make sure to promote their credentials everywhere, affixing PhD and MD wherever their name might be found, in order to establish a sense of authoritativeness in their words and bypass your critical thinking.They actively target audiences who show a typically healthy predisposition to distrusting the government and educated "elites", or who are already interested in alternative medicines and other “healing” practices (often based in spirituality). They sell themselves as underdogs or mavericks in their field, discredited by their peers for sharing “secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know” (secrets which are contained in their helpful books, buy now!)They interview fantasists - people like the drunken sailor - who come wriggling out of the woodwork, claiming to have been eyewitness to all manner of incredible things. The citations and references they use in their articles more often than not point back to their own previous writings. Whenever citing a news item, it’s rarely ever from a mainstream news source: if the same event is written about in The Guardian and in somewhere like InfoWars, they will almost always cite the InfoWars version, as it is more likely to re-enforce the world-view they’re trying to sell you on.Then, there's the most insidious factor of them all: the human mind's propensity for confusing correlation with causation.Like the spades and hook tool found by those boys, the assumption was made that they had been used for stealing bodies from cemeteries for the purpose of dissection. It could very well have been true, but the trouble is that there are a million other possible uses for a spade and hook tool which have nothing to do with human cadavers.Forrest for the Trees"You have blokes like Burke going around murdering people to provide cadavers for the evil anatomists, and then when they're caught, suddenly everyone starts dying horrible deaths which can't be explained? That can’t be a coincidence."If you zoom in close enough to anything, you lose sight of the larger details which make up the actual picture. Let’s take the example of a famous prank from 1997 when a high-school student made a petition to ban what he claimed was a most deadly chemical: Dihydrogen Monoxide:Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.Nathan Zohner: Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide Webpage (1997)For those unfamiliar with this classic prank: Dihydrogen Monoxide is the Chemical Systematic Name for plain-old regular water. It’s also known as H2O.Everything he wrote was true in a technical sense: accidental inhalation of water can lead to drowning, the solid form of water is ice and can cause hypothermia, drinking too much water can cause you to urinate and sweat more frequently (and in extreme cases, can even kill you), and total withdrawal from water consumption will lead to certain death in a matter of a couple days.So, although water can be dangerous, context is everything. Here, we zoomed in closely to just these potential negatives, which is like focussing entirely on a single leaf while ignoring the whole rest of the forest.If we based all of our decisions and beliefs in this manner, humans might never have discovered the usefulness of fire: we would have been too consumed by its potential danger to even imagine it in any other context.However, any of us can fall for this way of thinking, including highly educated and scientifically accomplished researchers. Sometimes, a Nobel Prize winner in Science gets lost in the thickets of really strange ideas and beliefs. It happens often enough in fact that it has a name:Nobelitis.No one is safe!This has been Part 3 of Deliver Us from Evil. Thank you so much for listening and reading, I really hope you enjoyed it. Next week, we’re going to explore one of the more recent and infamous extraordinary claims made by a real scientist, how people were made to believe in it, and its enduring consequences to this day: the Vaccines and Autism theory.See you then! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Part 2 of Deliver us from Evil, the story of the Character Assassination of José Delgado and the origins of the Mind Control Chip conspiracy theory. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading/listening to Part 1, which can be found here:If you’re all caught up, then let’s dive in, shall we? It’s about to get weird.Admass is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man."Journey Down a Rainbow," J.B. Priestley & Jacquetta Hawkes (1955)A Place of Greater SafetyPsychiatric Hospitals were once known as Asylums. The word “Asylum” implies safety, protection, care, and it well suited the intent: their purpose was to “provide asylum” to people in the community who were unable to care for themselves. One of the earliest examples was a hospital built in Cairo in 872, as a place of healing for “the insane”.In most cultures, particularly in the western world, up until the 18th century, caring for the mentally ill was considered a “family duty”. They would be kept at home, taken care of by their relations, or allowed to wander the streets alone if this wasn’t possible.It wasn’t until the end of the 17th Century that the west would catch on to the idea that the mentally unwell might need a place of safety, both for themselves and others, where they could be cared for appropriately and - hopefully - one day be returned to the community.In England, the 1800s saw an explosion in the creation of such institutions to handle a marked rise in patient numbers during the industrial revolution (although much could be read into this correlation, there should not necessarily be implied causation, though wouldn’t that be rather poetic?)Many such institutions were also established across the United States; however, for most of their existence, providing anything in the way of effective treatment for the chronically mentally ill was simply not feasible. There were no effective treatments.So, when one day in the 1940s, a man named Walter Freeman and his propaganda train rode into town, dubiously proclaiming the end of mental illness by way of a “simple” procedure, these hospitals were ready to receive the message.Receive it they did.This “simple” procedure was a little thing Freeman called “Transorbital Lobotomy”.You’ve no doubt heard of it. It was derived from a procedure invented in Portugal called Leucotomy: the severing of the connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain.The frontal lobe is a large and complex combination of modules, bundles, and connections, just like any other large chunk of brain. It’s long been theorised to play some role in modulating and regulating emotions and sensations, swirling them around and around, amplifying some while dampening others, and sending the signals back into the rest of the brain for further processing and actioning.Pioneered by a Portugese surgeon Antonio Egas Moniz, it was then augmented by a pair of Americans, the notorious Walter Freeman working alongside his earstwhile partner James Watts. Only Watts was surgically trained - a true neurosurgeon, in fact - while Freeman was not. Though not the monster he is often claimed to be, Freeman was terribly flawed, and those flaws led him head-first into some of the worst malpractice in the history of medicine.Initially, it was Watts who performed the actual surgery, under some direction from Freeman. These procedures were done according to the typical standards of major hospital surgery at the time of the late 1930s. Years later, Freeman invented a modified “solo” version, called a transorbital lobotomy - in which he would insert a specialised metal rod into the eye socket and literally scrape the brain matter in the frontal lobe to destroy it - and began performing it by himself on patients in his consulting office, calling it a “minor procedure”. No safeguards, no monitoring, no gloves or masks, and no general anaesthetic (the patient was knocked unconscious by a jolt of electricity).This was just too much for Watts. He couldn’t be associated with the callous disregard Freeman showed for what he was doing. He had to cut ties, and disavowed Freeman.Operating on the brain for the purpose of treating a mental disorder - procedures that came to be known collectively as “psychosurgery” - was nothing short of controversial from the very beginning. When successful, the results could sometimes be utterly transformational, making it possible for the patient to live a relatively normal life. All too often, however, it was not successful in treating the underlying condition, and in too many people, it caused severe complications, and premature death.There are too many stories of significant intellectual deficit and eliminated personal spontaneity, of severe epilepsy and seizures, cerebral haemorrhages, bizarre repetitive motions, severe memory loss, and much else besides, resulting from the procedure carried out by Freeman and others.Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, was left with a severe mental disability following her procedure under Freeman.It’s estimated he may have performed as many as 4,000 such operations. When challenged on either the efficacy or morality of his work, it only caused him to double-down further. He actively sought notoriety, pursued controversy, using it to boost his profile.Despite being initially driven by an ideal to find a cure to mental illness, it was his ever-present careerism, his hubris, his need to stir the pot, and his dream to be recognised as one of the giants of medicine who overthrew the prevailing common wisdom which quickly took over. They drove him right off the cliff, and he took many, many patients down with him.His last operation was done in 1967, in which this patient also died, resulting in Freeman being outright banned from practising.For a procedure that was so often detrimental, how was it allowed to continue for so long? Why did it become so widespread in psychiatric hospitals during the 1940s and 50s, where most severely mentally ill patients were housed?There are a number of reasons, but perhaps one most significant: it usually had the side effect of making the patients easier for hospital staff to manage. The resulting docility and lack of spontaneity brought an era of calm to psychiatric institutions across the United States that had never previously been known.Having mostly been phased-out by the 1960s, procedures like lobotomy and leucotomy were replaced by a new “miracle drug”: Chlorpromazine.By the 1970s, Lobotomy was long considered dead and buried, as far as psychiatric hospitals and other institutions were concerned. It was seen for what it was: attempting to cure the mind by destroying very large structures of the brain, structures which we did not even begin to understand. By this point, pharmacology was the name of the game: when a medication didn’t work, you just tried a different one, as their effects were usually temporary. This made them far, far safer than just about anything you could do surgically anyway.This was the backdrop, however, of the cultural zeitgeist when José Delgado’s book - The Physical Control of the Mind, 1969 - made its debut. Without intending to, he provided a treasure trove of prose which could be freely misinterpreted and taken out of context.Then, one day in 1972, a United States Congressman by the name of Cornelius Gallagher managed to reach down into a pile of quacks, pluck out a man by the name of Peter Breggin, and give him a national stage on which to spread what would become a very special kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt.His message: Lobotomy never really went away! José Delgado and his army of psychosurgeons are coming for your brain!Oh no! Subscribe now to save yourself!Technologic Totalitarianism and the Mind Control ExpressTo approach a text with a rhetorical perspective focuses our attention on questions of persuasion and power. Who is persuading whom of what and for which reasons? What tropes, figurative language, definitions, appeals, images, or arguments are employed for which audiences? What is included, and what is left out?Johnson, J. A Dark History: Memories of Lobotomy in the New Era of Psychosurgery. Medicine Studies 1, 367–378 (2009)Today, if you google "Quotes by José Delgado", you'll find gems like this one:“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.”This one is cited everywhere as having either come from the 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind (where no such text ever existed), or from some mysterious Congressional Record, specifically "Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118, February 24, 1974", mysterious because the US Congress was not even in session on that Sunday, and doubly so because of the fact that Delgado wasn't even living in the United States in 1974, as he had returned to his native Spain.I searched high and low for the true source of this quote, in whole and in part.The very earliest place that this exact quote falsely attributed to Delgado can be found is in the wild fantasies of Mae Brussell, an old Conspiracy Theory hand and talk show host: it was originally was published in her newsletter "The Realist" (irony, much?), in a very long and rambling article from the July 1974 edition. It was about the tiny militant left-wing organisation called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that existed from 1973 - 1975, supposedly carrying out a CIA plot to start "World War 3" the same way that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kick-started World War 1 (though instead of the murder of the heir to the throne, the supposed SLA-CIA version was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst). The only other place I can find anything that looks maybe a little bit like what she's quoting comes from a Congressional Record, February 24, 1972 Vol. 118, Part 5 (not 1974), in submitted Extended Remarks by way of Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who used his congressional prerogative to insert a rant into the record from one Dr Peter Breggin for some reason.It can be found here: February 24, 1972 Vol. 118, Part 5, page 5567.This rant by Dr Peter Breggin - titled "The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery", a blatant attempt at equating all of "Psychosurgery" as synonymous with "Lobotomy" - is essentially a very long and rambling collection of denunciation-by-analogy and rhetorical hysteria. By combining quotes from a few advocates of Lobotomy and other strange things, and compiling them together with cherry-picked snippets and 100% made up "quotes" attributed to Delgado's book, he concocts a toxic brew, stirring them up in the same pot in order to equate them all as one great big giant "bad thing".What was Breggin's goal with all this? It seems, first of all, he was out to make a name for himself and become infamous. Second, to block further research into the workings of the brain, particularly by the groups at Harvard and Yale, and to stoke rage and hatred in the public and direct it toward both guilty and innocent alike in the world of Psychiatry. In all these goals, he ultimately succeeded.So who is this "Dr Peter Breggin" anyway?“Breggin reinforces the myth that mental illness is not real, that you wouldn’t be ill if you’d pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” says Susan Dime-Meenan, president of the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association. “His views stop people from getting treatment. They could cost a life.”"Prozac's Worst Enemy", Time Magazine, 1994Once upon a time, Peter Breggin was an obscure Scientology-ally, (not actually a Scientologist if you take the good Doctor's word for it, though he certainly married a devout Scientologist) who renounced the evils of Psychiatry after having obtained university degrees in the subject. He started practising near his home in Bethesda. Likely upset by the fact that he was so unacknowledged in his life, and having made no useful scientific contributions to the field of Psychiatry, he decided to make a career out of convincing people that mental illness doesn't exist, and that those attempting to understand and/or treat the human brain are evil tyrants bent on controlling your mind.For decades, starting around 1970, he led a crusade against practically all of psychiatry, and what he called the "Mental Health Establishment". Sometimes he rightly called out bad practices and practitioners, but then he would lump in people who have nothing to do with them, and use "denunciation by analogy" as a tactic to smear everyone all at once. He has a penchant of proclaiming that everything to do with Psychiatry is just a variation of Lobotomy.From then on, Breggin’s attacks on other forms of treatment would consist primarily of equating them with the long discarded lobotomy. All limbic system surgery was lobotomy. ECT was another type of lobotomy and treatment with neuroleptic drugs, “chemical lobotomy”. This adequately describes Breggin’s indiscriminate ideological agenda."José Delgado: A Case Study", Barry Blackwell, 2014From his 1972 Congressional entry, he proceeds to completely make-up the following fake "quotes" he attributes to Delgado’s book, stating:He then goes on to attack the notion that man has "the right to develop his own mind," to develop his own unique potential "while remaining independent and self sufficient." As he concludes: "This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal, but unfortunately its assumptions are not supported by neurophysiological and psychological studies of intracerebral mechanisms."The text he is allegedly quoting does not exist in any of Delgado's writings, anywhere.He called the technique of ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain, better known today as Deep Brain Stimulation) "partial lobotomies", and describes Delgado thusly:Delgado is the theoretician of the lobotomists, the great apologist for Technologic Totalitarianism, complete with an outright attack on "liberal" politics, meaning not the liberalism of the left, but principles of personal autonomy, independence and freedom, man's "inalienable rights" as annunciated in the Declaration of Independence.Let's compare this with what we actually find in the book Breggin seems so fond of "quoting", shall we?Here's a real quote from Delgado's book:[…] more conservative treatments were actively sought in order to provide a "less damaging, less sacrificial means of dealing with mental disorders than are lobotomy, leucotomy, gyrectomy, thalamotomy, and other intentional destructions of nervous structures". Among these efforts, implantation of electrodes in the brain offered promising possibilities.The fact that Delgado was against Lobotomy - apparent in all of his writings on the subject - did not matter in the slightest to Breggin.Delgado was also a proponent of improving ethical standards related to human experimentation, which were surprisingly lacking at the time:[…] research with human subjects has lacked traditional codes and has followed the investigator's personal criteria- which have not always been correct. According to Beecher (12), leading medical schools and renowned doctors have sometimes conducted unethical research.[...]procedures which represent risk or discomfort for the patient should be ruled out.He even predicted the potential misuse of technology like ESB as a concern to be aware of, though unlikely: "The possibility of scientific annihilation of personal identity, or even worse, its purposeful control, has sometimes been considered a future threat more awful than atomic holocaust," but qualifies, quite rightly, that "it could not be universally imposed."Like JD Vance ("Hatians are eating your pets!"), what mattered was not whether something was true, but whether it could be used to further an ideology. In Breggin's case, it seemed his ideology came from Scientology, and evolved from there.In 1982, he did publish a revised version of his 1972 Extended Remarks, with an introduction explaining that he had changed his mind on a few things, notably that he no longer supported outright federal bans on any medical procedure so long as it involved fully consenting adults. He also briefly mentioned that he had made an oopsie on the whole mind control thing:My major error was in naively accepting the reports on electrical stimulation of the brain which described the capacity to control specific kinds of behavior. Reports? You mean like, literally inventing and falsely attributing large swathes of text to an honest man who had never written any such thing? Is that what you call “reports”?It’s clear he’s trying to pass it off as a kind of “the dog ate my homework” scenario. Maybe it was the dog that made up the Delgado quotes?However, in the last 20 years, he has produced a number of works, some of them spectacular in their quackery. Most recently, he jumped on the "Covid-19 is a Bioweapon and Vaccines are Also A Bioweapon and Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci/Klaus Schwab/Joe Biden/China Are All Bioweapons Too" bandwagon (seriously, his book “Covid-19 and the Global Predators” is a rehashing of every conspiracy meme ever invented, and surprisingly one of the most unhinged examples of the genre I’ve so far come across, which is a high bar).He has been called as an expert witness - yes, I kid you not - in dozens of court cases, most recently on behalf of Michelle Carter, the girl who convinced her boyfriend to kill himself over text messages: he claimed that because she was on psychiatric medication, she was acting under “involuntary intoxication” (apparently taking medication of any kind is “involuntary”) so she couldn’t be responsible for her actions. The Jury saw right through him, and the verdict was guilty.The result of the firestorm of controversy around Delgado stirred up by Breggin and his tinfoil-hat kinfolk in the Church of Scientology and elsewhere?Delgado was pilloried in a vast array of publications, some of them mainstream, for decades, all of whom re-printed and further mutated the fabricated "quotes" which Breggin had invented.He was accused of:* having worked as part of the (legitimately real) MKULTRA program for the CIA (he didn't)* being funded by the CIA (he wasn't) * and NASA (???!?)* being "father of military-and-defense mind experimentation" (also a lie) * demanding a nation-wide education program to teach children to accept the mutilation of their own brains (one of the most bizarre lies made in Breggin's 1972 remarks)* and so much more.Mae Brussells insinuated that José Delgado was involved somehow with the "SLA/CIA plot" (because one of the members used the name "Ricky Delgado", which she says was not a coincidence, lol).He was also stalked by paranoiac strangers, accusing him of secretly implanting a chip in their brains to control them, calling him up at all hours demanding that he remove it. One such woman sued him and Yale, demanding $1 million.Over the years, his name became synonymous with totalitarian mind control, thanks to the lies Breggin was able to sell people on. His funding dried up at Yale, state laws were introduced across the United States placing restrictions on his and related fields, and the writing was on the wall.He subsequently returned to his home country of Spain in 1974, where he continued scientific work, publishing enormous quantities of material, mostly in Spanish.He died in 2011 at the age of 96, after having returned to the United States to live out the last few years of his life quietly in San Diego.Many of his peers and former colleagues were asked at the time to write an obituary on his behalf: all declined, likely out of fear of being targeted by the conspiracy theorists, scientologists, and Peter Breggin.ConclusionsJosé Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was one of the most prolific, interesting, and remarkable scientists of the brain to have ever lived, a true pioneer, genius inventor, who was human and imperfect, yet with a grand vision for the field of brain research, and hoped to allow each individual the power to “Construct Thyself”: completely at odds with those who accuse him of trying to control others, he wanted to give people control over themselves.With over 500 formal publications to his name, he is the great grand-father of today's Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) technologies, both of which are only just now seeing a resurgence, being used with greater care and selective consideration than ever before, with positive results.José Delgado deserved so much better. Patients and humanity overall deserved so much better, too. We should have been making such great strides forward in this field, both in understanding brain function and perhaps finding some superior treatments for specific conditions using DBS technology.Instead, fear-mongers, liars and conspiracy-pushers decided that you shouldn't have the right to your own mental health care, and held an entire scientific field back for decades with the power of their poisoned rhetoric.It’s a formula that others with similar ideologies have been attempting to repeat elsewhere: from vaccines, to public health measures like water flouridation, to mask-wearing (seriously), climate science, renewable energy, and more. Like a gaggle of angry geese, they charge at anything with great noise and fury, making it up as they go along. They spam Tiktok, YouTube, X-Twitter, Facebook groups, Substack, as well as your grandma’s emails. The sheer quantity of never-ending sciency-sounding psychobabble just on Covid-19 alone from all manner of people who affix “PHD” and “MD” to their online profiles is mind-boggling: M-RNA integrating itself into your own genome somehow (?), or that lipid particles and microbubbles in vaccines are actually robots that turn into mind-controlling microchips (?!), that PCR tests are completely made up (?!?!) or that 5G transmission really caused Covid-19 (#%@?%), the list goes on and on.These fear-mongers and merchants of chaos often cause more than just nuisance: the fear and anger they are constantly pounding into people’s minds can lead some to take action, such as burning cell towers to the ground and physically and verbally harassing telecommunications employees in early 2020.Meanwhile, they insist that they know the real "truth" - that doctors don’t want you to know - and are willing to share their secrets to “wellness” in their 27 different books, for only $29.95 each plus postage (order today!)If you buy that, I’ll bet they've even got a bridge to sell you.Next up in the Deliver Us from Evil series:I didn’t have time to make a special t-shirt drop for this week’s post, but if you like what I’m doing and wanna help me out, please consider a paid subscription, dropping a donation in Ko-Fi, or checking out the existing stuff available on my DopaMerch store. 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This is going to be one of the most controversial subjects I have ever written about, and my ultimate thoughts on it are probably going to be additionally controversial. It is broken into 2 parts, because otherwise it would have been just too long. Part 2 comes out next week.The more I travel up and down this rabbit hole of honest scientists doing honest work and living up to the best ethical standards of their time (note: not necessarily of our time), who are one day turned into some political target for someone else’s political gain, or mobbed and threatened for things they never said or did, the more I recognise our own times. It’s fascinating how there’s this repeating theme throughout the last thousand years or so.Alan Turing, J Robert Oppenheimer, Ignaz Semmelweis (lured into an asylum and beaten to death, because he was depressed, apparently).Hell, just one year after Einstein’s theory of relativity had its most spectacular experimental verification in 1919 with the measurable bending of light during an eclipse, Albert wrote in a letter dated 12 September 1920:“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”If this reminds you of the debates over Climate Science and Vaccines, where simply agreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus seems to be a polarising political statement, then you’re not alone.I agree with Einstein: what a strange madhouse this world is.Toro, Toro, ToroHis heart thumped.Fear. Adrenaline. Focus.El Toro, the Bull, was facing him down, perhaps 20 metres distant. A Toro of this pedigree could close that distance in an instant.His grip firmly on his cape in one hand. In the other, he held no sword: only a button.He was to play the Matador, yet without his sword, he would not fight. Instead, he would surrender himself to the only 2 possible outcomes such an encounter could offer: mercy, or death.To expect mercy from the ravages of a charging Spanish Fighting Bull was to expect the impossible; the beast grants none its absolution, only the horns. Why should this man of science, a man like any other, with his cape and his button, be treated any differently?A passing observer, asked to wager, would be a fool not to bet all they own on that Bull.Eyes narrowed. Hoofs scraped the ground, nostrils flared. The Andalusian sunshine bore down upon Bull, Matador, Spectators, and the hallowed ground under foot.In the blink of an eye, el Toro was galloping, a freight-train at full tilt. Unstoppable. Irrepressible. Dead-on target.Reaching a distance of no more than 3 metres from the defenceless Matador, right when death was all but a certainty and victory was to belong to the great Beast, the impossible indeed occurred:The bull hesitated.Don’t hesitate to subscribe!One of Spain's national past-times is the Bull fight: A lone Matador, with a cape and a sword, faces off against the might of a Fighting Bull, whose ancestors have for centuries been selectively bred to enhance their strength and their aggression. These are nothing like the average rather docile male bovine. One does not stand alone near such a creature unless very well trained, or possessing a death wish.Delgado, a native of rural Andalusia, was not new to this."My personal ability with the cape had been tested sometimes in the rural festivals of my youth and is limited, but an investigator must accept the responsibility of his own methodology," he wrote in a Spanish account of these experiments for an encyclopaedia on Bullfighting from the 1980s.Holding out his cape, he steadied himself as the beast - a great and powerful Toro named "Lucero" - charged, sharp horns piercing the air ahead of it. He held firm to the device in his hand, and just as it seemed there was no escaping a violent end, he pressed the button with his thumb.The bull seemed to slow, like it was hesitating, just for a moment. Then, abruptly, it changed direction, turning itself in a full circle.There, it stopped, apparently a little dazed, "surprised at its own conduct"; all its prior aggression and violence drained away as if through a plughole in a bathtub. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, satiated.Delgado, not eager to push his luck any more than was absolutely necessary, then backed away into a protected wooden shelter. Once secure in the shelter, he released the button. Instantaneously, Lucero returned to the attack, slamming against the outer wall where Delgado was hiding.A Spanish fighting bull will instinctively attack anyone who enters its arena. This is how they are bred and trained. It's not that they hold some sort of malicious intent, rather they are simply responding to emotions which drive their urge to protect and defend territory from invaders. A human is a clear threat, as far as the bull is concerned.Somehow, as if by magic, Delgado had found a way to simply turn off this drive at will, and to do so from a distance."The result seemed to be a combination of motor effect, forcing the bull to stop and to turn to one side, plus behavioral inhibition of the aggressive drive."The bulls were implanted with Delgado's new Stimoceiver, a device powered by a battery pack attached to the outside of the head rather than by tethered wires and cables. It received radio signals from a device held in Delgado's hand, which could transmit information about the frequency and intensity of the electric current to be delivered to the brain via the electrodes.In addition to receiving signals, the Stimoceiver also sent an ongoing trace of the natural electrical activity detected at the site of the electrode over a second radio channel.This was the first ever fully wireless neural implant. The year was 1963.To say that he was ahead of his time is an understatement.The Flippin '50sThe 1950s heralded what came to be known as the Cognitive Revolution.A strange follow-up to the Age of Extremes, a period lasting from the Great War up to the end of World War 2; the rise of Fascism across Europe, the institution of race hatred as law of the land, the systematisation of atrocity and crimes against humanity, the conquest and subjugation of sovereign peoples and states, the development and use of super-weapons.The Nuremberg trials brought home to everyone throughout the world the truly startling horror of what had just happened: The minds of men obsessed with wiping out entire categories of human being from the face of the earth, obsessed with conquering their neighbours with the most brutal force, had achieved dictatorial leadership over one of the worlds greatest economic and industrial nations, re-built it into probably the most formidable military superpower the world had ever known, and then proceeded to carry out their demented ideology with all the tools at their disposal.The industrialised genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Poles as the Nazis marched throughout Europe was meticulous in the extreme and recorded in great detail by the Nazis themselves, with a kind of efficiency and industriousness only a German could muster.Such minds, it was assumed, cannot possibly be healthy or sound. They are abominations. They are monsters. They are Inhuman.Would that such minds were so treatable, perhaps these atrocities might be avoided or made impossible.Would that it were so simple.As the worlds doctors, researchers and scientists returned from the battlefields of the world, it was this question which would play on many of their thoughts, and for some would become the basis of all their endeavours.They would set out to achieve by science what many thousands of years worth of religion had failed to do:Understand the mind. Deliver it from evil.The application of human energy to the control of natural forces is continually increasing, and perhaps it is time to ask if the present orientation of our civilization is desirable and sound, or whether we should re-examine the universal goals of mankind and pay more attention to the primary objective, which should not be the development of machines, but of man himself.José Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind (1969)The search was on for the genetic and biological roots of mental illness, pathological aggression, and violence. In order to find and bind the troubles which may be found in a persons psyche, two major competing methods were pursued: the pharmaco-chemical, and the electro-physical.Into the mix came a genial and gentle Spaniard of impeccable old-world manners and rural upbringing by the name of José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado.Delgado was born in Andalusia in Spain, part of the province of Ronda, in August of 1915, and was keen to begin the study of Medicine. His first formal research contribution was published in 1933 at only 18 years of age. By 1936, having only recently enrolled, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced him to halt his studies and he served in the Anti-Fascist Brigades of the Republican side as a medic. When the Fascists sadly attained victory in 1939, Delgado spent 5 months in a concentration camp.After eventually being released, he completed his studies, and migrated to the United States, joining the faculty at Yale University, where he would do some of his most ground-breaking work.It would also be during his time at Yale when his life's work would be misrepresented by charlatans and liars, his words fabricated from whole cloth, and turned into the basis of one of the worlds best-known conspiracy theories: Mind Control Chips.The 50s were known for a lot of really wild scientific discoveries, following on the heels of the decade that saw the invention of LSD (hard act to follow.)1952 in particular was known as a "watershed year" in neuroscience.The work of Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley on the now-iconic mechanism of Action Potentials; the publication of Sir Bernard Katz and Paul Fatt's observation that neurotransmitters are released at synaptic junctions in "discrete quanta" during neurotransmission.  Then, there was Chlorpromazine, the "miracle drug" which brought an era of calm to mental institutions and hospitals across the western world (by more or less tranquillising the patients).This was also when Delgado would publish one of his most famous papers, an initial study into the electrical stimulation of the brain via implanted electrodes."It distressed me greatly when I first came to this country in the early fifties to see so many patients without frontal lobes," he told a reporter for the New York Times in a story from 1970. He was referring to a procedure which was quite popular at the time for treating various treatment-resistant epilepsies and psychotic illnesses in the US: lobotomy."Of course, much psychosurgery has now been replaced by drug treatment, but there are still people with dangerous seizures which simply do not respond to medication."Lobotomy - the severing of the frontal lobe of the brain - had boomed in popularity in psychiatric medicine from the 1930s - 1950s, mainly because of the strangely tranquillising effects it could have on a patient, especially one who was prone to outbursts of violent unprovoked aggression. Mental hospitals and institutions across the USA performed them on patients in their care far more often than was actually necessary, both for violent and non-violent patients, and in the process, they caused many premature deaths; the majority of those that survived were permanently reduced in their intellectual capacity, along with other complications.Delgado believed there was a better way, a more direct way, that would allow someone to regain control over their own mind. He believed that only by probing the brain's physical constructs, mechanisms, and behaviours using electricity and directly-administered neurochemicals, it was possible to reveal its inner workings, make precise adjustments, repair dysfunctions caused by genetics, infections, or physical damage.The use of precisely implanted electrodes - a procedure he called ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) - could make lobotomy, leucotomy, gyrectomy, thalamotomy, and other such destructive operations entirely unnecessary."Among these efforts, implantation of electrodes in the brain offered promising possibilities."Regardless, this kind of experiment could not have been easy, for anyone involved.Typically, a subject had to have the electrode wires implanted through a hole drilled in the skull, and then buried down into the relevant part of the brain, with a socket sticking out of the side of the head. It would then be plugged in physically to wires routed to a seismograph-like recording device, along with an electrical generator. In this way, they could both record the electrical impulses naturally occurring in the brain, and input their own via the generator."Leaving wires inside of a thinking brain may appear unpleasant or dangerous, but actually the many patients who have undergone this experience have not been concerned about the fact of being wired, nor have they felt any discomfort due to the presence of conductors in their heads," Delgado wrote in the 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind; "some women have shown their feminine adaptability to circumstances by wearing attractive hats or wigs to conceal their electrical headgear."Uhhh-huh...?This was obviously not ideal. Anyone who has ever had to be hooked up to an IV, or monitors for a Sleep Study, knows this. That also vastly restricted the kinds of activities the subject could be doing as part of the experiments.The Yale faculty knew Delgado as a "Technological Wizard", who loved to hack together custom hardware for his experiments, and he was good at it. This he further proved when he came up with a device which would turn out to be his most controversial invention: The Stimoceiver.Over the next 17 years, from 1952-1969, Delgado was prolific, practically manic in his scientific output: 134 separate publications detailing research and experiments on cats, monkeys, and human patients, with the electrical and chemical stimulation of different brain regions and their resulting effects on healthy and psychotic subjects, their behaviour, emotions, and personality.Delgado's 1969 speculative-science book Physical Control of the Mind described 3 particular experiments he performed on human subjects which seem to suggest an interest in dabbling just outside the bounds of therapeutic medicine. This is one of the aspects of some parts to Delgado's research that I - and perhaps most people - find concerning, to say the least. Just reading his recounting of one particular experiment, where an 11-year-old boy - afflicted with "severe psychomotor epilepsy" - was implanted with a Stimoceiver in both temporal lobes:The patient had been silent for the previous five-minute interval, but immediately after this stimulation he exclaimed, "Hey! You can keep me here longer when you give me these; I like those." He went on to insist that the ongoing brain tests made him feel good.[...]Then LP was stimulated again, and the patient started making references to the facial hair of the interviewer and continued by mentioning pubic hair and his having been the object of genital sex play in the past. He then expressed doubt about his sexual identity, saying, "I was thinkin' if I was a boy or a girl-which one I'd like to be." Following another excitation he remarked with evident pleasure: "You're doin' it now," and then he said, "I'd like to be a girl."At initial glance, there is a lot that is worrying in this example. Like, a lot. We do need to remember, however, that these particular results weren't what was actually intended or expected. The goal was to treat the epilepsy, which seemed to emanate from the temporal lobe. They were simply reciting the observed events as they occurred, likely recorded on a tape recorder. That, and the interviewer wasn’t José Delgado himself.As John Horgan wrote in his 2005 Scientific American article "The Forgotten Era of the Brain":Delgado limited his human research, however, because the therapeutic benefits of implants were unreliable; results varied widely from patient to patient and could be unpredictable even in the same subject. In fact Delgado recalls turning away more patients than he treated.Then, one day, a little-known movement, driven by some incredibly obscure and religio-politically-motivated individuals, picked up on José Delgado and his new pop-sci-esque book, twisted it to their own purposes, and generated a political firestorm which would go on to tarnish the reputations of the good and the bad alike, all but ending much of the experimental research in direct electrical stimulation of the brain, and whose shadow looms large over the field to this very day.That shadow would also come to define one of the world's most potent conspiracy theories, bolstering the anti-medicine and anti-science movements, leading to threats, and encouraging the public slandering and menacing of honest scientists by the mob.This has been Part 1 of “Deliver us from Evil”. Next week, we explore the long shadow - and the people who cast it.You won’t want to miss it!This week’s DopaMerch T-Shirt release is here: My Periodic Table of Psychiatry. Great for diagnosing friends, scaring off said friends, and making new cooler friends! It’s also a great way to support my work and keep me writing: Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Warning: This post contains themes that may be upsetting. It’s going to be very heavy. Very personal. I had to get this written down, so something can take some of this weight off the heart.This post is not going to be my typical just-the-facts-ma’am kind of thing. This is deeply personal and deeply serious. I normally try to keep control of my emotions in my writing, especially anger. Not this time. I cannot remain silent on this. I will not be complicit in the mistreatment of Women by the medical establishment.Hell hath no fury like the children of suffering parents. Especially when that suffering could have, and should have, been prevented.Here goes.Pain.All-consuming. Stops the mind from turning. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.You sit, watching the clock on the wall, hearing it tick over continuously. Hoping that it will stop eventually. Stop, and let you think. Let you live.Mum has developed a super-human ability to withstand pain. Years ago, she called me up one day to tell me that she had fallen over and sprained her arm, and had put it in a sling. That was all. She said it had been hurting “a bit”, but she didn’t think it was broken.I urged her to get it checked out by the doctor.“It’s just a sprain, they’ll just send me home and tell me to do what I’m already doing.”Honestly, she wasn’t wrong. They almost certainly would have.It took 2 weeks of relentless pain before I finally convinced her to at least seek an x-ray at the hospital. When she did, doctors found a large portion of the bone in her arm was shattered, in fragmentary pieces. The ER physician brought several colleagues in to meet her because they could hardly believe she had been walking around for 2 weeks with a shattered arm bone.That was classic Mum stuff. Putting aside her own suffering, marching on regardless. Loathe to ever complain “too much.”Women’s symptomatology is often different for many things when compared to men. Some of this is simply because their physiology is different. Some of it is because their neurology as well can be different.Sometimes it’s because their lived experiences make them feel the need to temper things, not to make it seem too serious, in order to avoid the perception of being “over-dramatic.”For years, she has had to take variable amounts of a Paracetomol/Codeine combination, the weakest of all opioids on the market. She has fused ribs, sprengels shoulder, fibromyalgia, and osteoarthritis, so obviously it’s not all “in the mind.”She also watched her own younger sister - who was a doctor herself - develop a crippling addiction to Oxycodeine, and eventually commit suicide.Because of that, she has always been self-limiting when it comes to anything which can treat pain, especially opioids. Sometimes, however, there is just no other option. You can’t just suffer all the time. Something’s got to give, eventually.So, when she tells me the pain she’s in is serious, there is no doubt in my mind that it is beyond the cautionary point.Something is wrong.For those of us that are listening, we can hear the drumbeat of patriarchy slowly being drowned out by all the other voices it had once suppressed throughout the world of human endeavours. This drumbeat, however, still echoes loudly in the great halls and corridors of the House of Medicine. It thunders above the sound of women in agony. In order just to exist in this reality, women have had to find ways to adapt to pain because no one will help them, far more often than Men do. Men’s pain is often treated. Women’s pain? “It must be psychological.”I come from a family of pain-suffering people. My dad endured an extreme form of Crohns disease for 40 years before it eventually killed him. In and out of hospital he went, as the surgeons knife cut away more and more of his dying colon, the victim of friendly fire under bombardment from his own immune system. Previously healthy, normal cells, were forced to commit suicide by the chemical signals raining down upon them from a microbial defence system gone completely mad. Often hooked up on a morphine drip to ease the severe suffering, he wasted away gradually. One of the last times I saw him alive - again in hospital - he hardly looked it; yet he managed to live on for another half-dozen years after that.When I saw him in his coffin for his funeral, his frozen, embalmed face was exactly the same as the one I saw in that hospital bed all those years before. Gaunt, grey/white. Empty. Pained. Practically dead.My mum, born in the breach, shoulder dislocated at birth and ribs fused and deformed, she lived her whole life where one arm could not be raised above her head; yet she still managed to join the Royal Australian Army Reserves, teaching drill to her platoon made mostly of men 3 times her size (and she was damn good at it). She served her country in the public service, attending to the needs of Australians overseas who found themselves in the worst kinds of trouble far from home. She often needed to be the first on the scene of an airplane crash if any Australians had been on board, so that she could have remains identified. When we returned to Australia following a chloroquine-resistant infection of Cerebral Malaria, she was in chronic pain from then on; she also had acute PTSD from experiencing the burned wreckages of airplanes and charred bodies in morgues that she had to deal with, along with major clinical depression and cyclothymic ups and downs.Not only that, but the sheer hostility from her male colleagues at a Woman doing such a high-powered job, and doing it better than all of them combined, was relentless. They never, ever let her rest. They never let up. Meanwhile, instead of doing their own jobs, they would play solitaire all day, and throw extreme insults, many sexual in nature, at her, or share them around the office about her, to everyone they could. If the internal communications of those days still exist somewhere, I think they would tell a remarkable story of male hatred and rage and entitlement which saturated Australia’s public service throughout the 80s and 90s, and in all honesty, probably hasn’t changed as much as we think today either. Regardless, she paved a pathway for women to achieve high-ranking positions, and through that, she changed the world for the better.Those world-changing efforts left her with terrible scars. Scars that eventually sapped her strength and broke her will. PTSD, Chronic fatigue, along with chronic pain, and extreme flare-ups of her life-long depression ended the career she loved.Then, there was the cancer.Cancer survivors are a special breed. They live the rest of their lives under the sword of Damocles. It can reappear years down the line, having evaded detection and removal, slipping into the lymphatic system of the body and colonising organs, bones, brain. By the time it’s found, it can be far too late. By then, it has conquered, becoming the Empire of All Maladies.We thought we had caught this one just in time. They hit it with everything. They cut out a very large mass, they blasted the area with radiation, then they starved any remnants of the estrogen it needed to grow.Every check-up since then has been in the clear. No cancer found.Until now.One woman was told she was being “dramatic” when she pleaded for a brain scan after suffering months of headaches and pounding in her ears. It turned out she had a brain tumor.Another was ignored as she cried out in pain during a 33-hour labor. She was supposed to be getting pain medication through her epidural, but it had fallen out.Dozens of women complained of torturous pain as their vaginal walls were punctured during an egg retrieval process. They were told their pain was normal, but, in actuality, they were getting saline instead of anesthesia.Washington Post | From heart disease to IUDs: How doctors dismiss women’s painThe first smell that hits the nostrils when first walking in to the Cancer Centre is the smell of disinfectant. The second is the smell of the gel lubricant they use for ultrasounds.I’d just flown in from Melbourne. The flight was delayed, and we spent another 45 minutes on the tarmac. I was overwhelmed. The sun was setting. I had been warned that she “looked sick”. I had no idea what I was going to find.When I finally arrive in the B-wing, mum is laid up in a fairly large room. I knock.“Hey mum.”She sits up. “Meebs! The pain is so much better!”She shows me the morphine pump she has to carry around with her. It’s about time. Her voice is no longer strained, words no longer stopping and starting. She’s as fluent and lucid as I’ve ever seen her, visibly showing only the signs of age.“It is such a relief not to be in pain anymore.”It is, for me as well. She doesn’t tell me all the details of what she went through, but I gather it from the discussions she has with various nurses and some of her comments, and piece it together. She had been brought to tears - something that almost never happens with her - and was on the floor, writhing in pain.About one month before, sometime in mid-late August, she had reached a breaking point. Pain had seeped through into her consciousness and was agonising. It was everywhere. It was bad enough that it had forced her to seek help from doctors, who she worried would merely dismiss her, as they so often do.I wasn’t so sure. I have a lot of trust in the medical system. Then again, my experience is that of a straight white male. She texted me her commentary, as I texted back encouragement.She sat in that waiting room for hours. More hours. Pain surging, all-consuming.It took an entire day sitting in that waiting room before someone finally came to see her, and tried Oxycodeine: failed. So they tried Endone: that failed, too. It didn’t make her pain worse. It gave only the slightest of improvements.The doctors shrugged their shoulders. They decided that was all they could do, and would send her home with less than a small handful of Tapentadol, a synthetic form of Oxycodeine, very similar to Tramadol. It hardly even took the edge off, and lasted hardly a day. It was all she would get, though.They told her she’d need to follow up with a GP. With her normal GP out of action for a month, she’d have to see someone new.So, reluctantly, she went to see a new local GP, asking them to refer her to a pain specialist to get this pain under control.Immediately unsympathetic and suspicious (pain doesn’t really exist, after all, so anyone talking about pain must be a drug addict), the GP looked at the discharge notes from the hospital.Guess what it said?“Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia”.That means: Pain caused by opiates.Upon seeing this “diagnosis”, that was when all hope of medical care was gone. Mum was simply asking to be referred to a pain specialist. The utterly inhumane GP said “No”. Why?“It would be too confusing for me to receive the reports from the pain specialist since I’m not your normal doctor.”Holy f*****g quackadoodles Batman, it’s almost as if you can’t just specify in the referral letter that the reports need to be sent to multiple people! Are you for REAL?!Now, I am loathe to proclaim b******t from a doctor, but let me tell you, that is some rare Grade-A purified hydroponic gold-plated B******t. Not only from the GP who utterly abdicated their duty of care for my mum, but from the Hospital, too.How do you diagnose Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia? Let’s take a look, shall we?From the 2021 paper: Wilson, Sylvia H et al. “Mechanisms, diagnosis, prevention and management of perioperative opioid-induced hyperalgesia.” Pain management vol. 11,4 (2021): 405-417. doi:10.2217/pmt-2020-0105Opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH) occurs when opioid medications worsen rather than decrease pain.Hear that? The truth shall set you free, so they say.Had any of these doctors ever been briefed on this before slapping on the diagnosis? Do they have any idea of the implications of misdiagnosing OIH? Do they have any sense of duty of care for a patient that has come in, who is in some of the worst suffering of their lives, clearly not well enough to be sent home?They didn’t even explain the diagnosis to her, nor explain how to treat it.When a former cancer-patient comes in to a hospital with extreme pain, how is it ever appropriate to send them home for later GP follow up when they are still in that state? What the f**k exactly is the GP supposed to do anyway? If Endone barely takes the edge off, what are the alternatives?This kind of pain is enough to drive any rational sane person to suicide. This is no joke. Alas, these highly-trained, highly-experienced medical professionals seemed to see it as such.A joke.So mum does her best to soldier on, meanwhile the pain is escalating every single day. She is writhing. She gets to hospital again, only for them to send her away once more.Now it’s getting really, really desperate. She manages to get on the phone with the Oncology people who had been managing her post-cancer recovery. They told her they’d been requesting the Emergency Department to send her in to the Cancer Clinic for tests immediately, both times that she had been in there.Instead, the ED sent her away both times, ignoring the oncologists.So she finally goes in for a Bone scan, and awaits a call about the results. Days go by. Eventually, she’s reached total breaking point. An ambulance is called. They rush her in to Emergency again. This time, when they look at her records, there is a sudden realisation.Her bone scan report was in. Her spine is riddled with tumors. The pain is primarily caused by the growing tumors in the vertebrae, crushing nerve fibres along the spinal cord. It is also one of the most excruciating types of pain a human being can experience when it is untreated. She’s been suffering from this for 2 months, while asking for help and getting none.She had been booked in for an appointment for the day after the bone scan, but no one had told her. No one had called, either to tell her about the appointment, or to check in on her when she inevitably missed it. No text, no email, no call, nothing.It had been yet another week, yet another unnecessary week, of desperate suffering.Week after week after week.Everywhere she had turned, they had dismissed her. Ignored her. Sent her away. Treated it as if it was not a real problem. Treated it as though it were not the dire emergency that it was.There is a word for this s**t that I am so very hesitant to ever use in a medical context because of the implications, but if there’s any time where the definition fits, it’s this time. It’s a word with deep roots embedded in the hard clay soil upon which the house of Medicine was built. The worst part is, this is not even just a single incident.It. Keeps. Happening. Over. And. Over.When it comes to women in pain, that word is: Negligence.I’m fed up. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Note from the Author: I'd like to personally thank Prof Bill Kovarik, who is also a subscriber, for his work on this subject. He and a small band of like-minded individuals have produced the vast majority of authoritative scientific accounts, data, and research on Leaded Petrol exposure, and have been on a lonely mission to inform the world of the damage that has been done to so many by the greed of so few. Most of this post is based on their work. I hope my small contribution is of some assistance to them in their mission; the world needs to know.Every single reader is a gift to me. Especially you. Thank you.Looney GasThe men in the mixing room were apparently normal when they started work. Within a few days, they began to show signs of slowness and confusion.Internal memo, Standard Oil, 1923.October 23rd 1924, in the new section of Standard Oil's refinery in New Jersey, mysterious things were happening. A plant worker named Ernest Oelgert—one of 45 employed in this new part of the facility—was losing his grip on reality. He and his colleagues had for some time been seeing "winged insects" covering their bodies while working, and could often be seen swiping at them and shooing them. The thing is, the insects weren't real. They were hallucinations.This wasn't exactly a brand-new phenomenon either; workers at other plants around New Jersey—all of whom worked on producing the new Tetraethyl Lead (TEL) gasoline on behalf of Thomas A Midgley and Charles Kettering at GM and Standard Oil—had been experiencing similar things since the very beginning. These psychological symptoms ranged from hallucinations, to major mood swings, changes in personality.Right now, Ernest seemed to be falling into a dark spiral of paranoia.He had begun telling his colleagues that people were following him around, watching him. He started to fear that he was being watched constantly, around the clock, even sensing malice in his own co-workers.TEL already had a nickname by this time: the "looney gas". Facilities that produced the stuff also had a common nickname: "house of butterflies". Despite the seeming light-heartedness of these names, the legacy it was leaving behind was anything but.TEL had been in production for a little less than a year—only since 1923—but already, 9 people had died horrific, painful, slow deaths, and many dozens more had been hospitalised, often going completely psychotic and falling into the life-long grip of chronic illnesses, both physical and mental.Ernest had been told by doctors who worked for the plant that he would be safe, "...that working in the laboratory [making TEL] wouldn't hurt him." They said he'd "have to get used to it", or quit.The next day, a Friday, Ernest was witnessed racing around in a panic at the plant, screaming that there were "three coming to get me at once!" Saturday, throughout fits and violent convulsions, he had to be placed in a straight-jacket whereupon he was transported to a hospital in New York City. His continued shrieking and terror must have severely perturbed his colleagues, several of whom were themselves beginning their own descent. By the following day, Sunday, Erneset was dead, and 4 of his colleagues were spiralling out of control.Then one by one they went: Walter Dymock dove out of his second-story bedroom window. William McSweeny turned up at home feeling ill, and the next morning was thrashing around so much he was also straight-jacketed. He and William Kresge—another colleague—would all end up in hospital, with William having lost a ton of weight in a short few weeks.Now, at yet another plant, things suddenly escalated. Workers began writhing, their muscles convulsing out of control. With their gums turning blue, their skin turning black from deep bruising, they became violent and sometimes suicidal. Though they were forcibly put into straight-jackets to stop their own bodies beating them to within an inch of their very lives, nothing could be done to stop the destruction happening at a cellular level, and it was all being caused by humanity's oldest known toxin: lead.It was enough to alarm the medical examiners: people who have seen it all, specialists exposed to the often gruesome aftermath of the very worst industrial and chemical accidents; they were not easily impressed, but this incident had concerned them to the point where they felt the alarm must be raised.And raised, it was. Now, on this cool October Monday, it was a front-page story in newspapers all over the world.The New York Times article on Monday's edition read "ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE".The "Odd Gas" was Tetraethyl Lead. It quoted a Dr Archibald Sinson, saying: "These are the first cases of this sort that ever admitted to the hospital. ... It is a form of ethyl chloride which will penetrate the kind of gas masks I understand they use at the plant. It is poisonous and appears to affect the rational judgement, causing hallucinations."The executives over at Standard Oil could not have been happy to see a story they had worked so hard to keep buried erupt like a volcano onto the public consciousness in such spectacular fashion. When approached for comment, they gave nothing officially. One famous quote however was plucked from one of the plant supervisors dismissing the incident, saying the victims “Probably Worked Too Hard.”Knocking at fortune’s doorIn 1916, Europe was tearing itself apart in The Great War. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the new world, a young graduate of Cornell University by the name of Thomas A. Midgley working at General Motors, asked his boss—Charles Kettering—to give him a new project to work on. He was getting bored and restless, keen to be put to work on something useful and interesting. So, he was assigned to work on something called the "anti-knock" problem.Combustion engines run by creating a series of precisely timed explosions, triggered by the spark plug which ignites the air/fuel mixture in the chamber at the exact moment in time when the piston is in position. The pressure waves from these explosions then push the piston, which turns a wheel, which drives a crankshaft, which can then be used to turn the wheels of a motor vehicle, or the propeller of an aeroplane, etc.The thing is, each explosion needs to be timed precisely, lining up with the state of the piston so that it is ready to go. Explosions that happen outside this precise timing cycle—either before the spark plug fires (pre-ignition) or after (engine knock)—can slow the pistons down, or push them too hard or too fast, or even cause the whole engine to blow apart. The higher the compression factor of the air/fuel mixture, the more likely it is for these unintended combustion events to occur. However, higher compression also allowed for dramatic increases in engine performance and power, fuel efficiency and economy, so you could get more from less fuel, allowing it to last longer. The ability for a fuel to withstand this compression and achieve the aforementioned benefits was given a metric: the Octane rating.The higher the Octane rating of a fuel, the more efficiently it can be used.In the early 20th century, their reasons for wanting better fuel economy weren't motivated by concerns about climate change, or pollution, or making it more affordable for the common good. They were driven primarily by the belief that at current rates of extraction, global oil reserves might only last another 20 years. Unless some vast new sources were discovered, the clock was ticking. Alternative fuels and power sources would be needed. This made Petroleum essentially a stop-gap until something renewable was widely and cheaply available. Work was already well under way, with a number of alternative fuels available in the market made from various things.Somehow, a way had to be found to cheaply and reliably boost the octane rating in the petrol manufacturing process. Well, one such answer, as Midgley discovered after some 7 years of investigation, was to add lead.When added to gasoline, lead turned out to be a remarkably effective anti-knock agent, and it was cheap, abundant, and only a relatively small amount of it was needed per gallon of oil. There's just one small problem: lead is universally toxic to all forms of complex life, as well as being radically neurotoxic in particular.Help spread the word, share this post with friends and loved ones.AmnesiaIn 1923, the mixture Midgley and colleagues came up with was Tetraethyl Lead, or TEL, though they often dropped the "lead" off the end, to "avoid scaring consumers". Despite the tremendous usefulness of lead for many things, humans have known about the acute neurological effects of lead poisoning for several thousand years at least. The Romans knew about it. The ancient Greeks wrote about it. We humans, however, have a strange kind of amnesia about things like this.Lead has effects on just about every system in the body—blood cells, immune system, heart, lungs, kidneys—but the very worst damage happens to the brain. The brain is the most sensitive organ to lead exposure, which easily slips through the blood-brain barrier, sucked up by the pumps which normally transport calcium ions. Once there, it wreaks havoc, producing abundant free-radicals, which react with the organic matter of neurons, structural proteins, cell walls, even DNA. It produces so many free-radicals and Reactive Oxygen Species, the antioxidants stored in the body are quickly depleted, leaving you defenceless. Children are the worst affected, disrupting the very formation of synapses between neurons in the cerebral cortex, stripping neurons of the protective myelin sheath, corrupting chemical signalling, and stunting neuronal growth. The damage is accumulative and irreversible.While most adults can recover from some peripheral effects after exposure ceases, children never recover.Curiously, however, there were already other known non-toxic anti-knock formulas which did not require lead at all. Midgley and Kettering both knew of them and corresponded with each other about them, Alcohol blends being most prominent, and were just as effective (if not more so). Unfortunately, they also required more per unit of oil than Lead, and cost more, moderating the total profit margins they could achieve. So, of course, when the reports started coming in during the first test trials of a manufacturing process for TEL of plant workers getting acute lead poisoning and several of them dying, GM and Standard Oil had already done the math: the profits from TEL were projected to be mind-boggling.With dollar-signs in their eyes, they decided to do everything they could to ensure the continued production of TEL. They would willingly sacrifice any number of lives to defend their projected profits, and they did. A deliberate campaign of obfuscation and misinformation was begun. "They did not realise what they were working with." said GM President Charles Kettering of the tragedy, blaming the workers themselves for somehow being careless.It was not the workers who were careless. The manufacturing process developed by Standard Oil was an open one, fully exposing the toxic materials which saturated the air with fumes. Du Pont had tried to insist on a fully-closed system, along with adequate ventilation, in which workers would have no exposure at all to the chemicals; they were turned down, in favour of the cheaper option. So what if a few plant workers got sick and died? Full steam ahead!High-Octane GreedThey [Standard Oil] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of this material without the permission of the state of New Jersey.A Du Pont Attorney, 1952The fact is, no one at General Motors or Standard Oil was actively trying to poison anyone. They were blinded by the pursuit of profit, overcome by their own greed, and they cared nothing for the riff-raff employed to make this stuff for them. They might shed a tear at the funeral of a close friend or immediate family member, because that was one of their own. Otherwise, it wasn't their problem.Many, many more tragic deaths and poisonings were to occur during those first few years of TEL's manufacture, beginning in 1923. One particularly remarkable instance was at the opening of a new plant in New Jersey: 17 extreme cases of lead poisoning resulting in major psychosis, and 5 deaths in quick succession. It was so bad, not only was the plant shut down by the state government after only 2 months of operation; Standard Oil was also forbidden by law from manufacturing TEL anywhere in the State of New Jersey, something which was unprecedented anywhere in the country.Standard Oil of New Jersey would eventually be renamed in the 1970s, becoming Exxon.An explosive rise in demand for motor vehicles all over the world—particularly following the second world war—meant demand for petrol to run them was near insatiable. Vast and untold riches poured in to oil companies, and TEL was the dominant formula for decades and decades, up to the turn of the 21st century. Where there were cars, there was leaded petrol. It seems, however, the damage did not end simply with improved manufacturing processes. Merely being exposed to the open air, fumes from TEL would spew lead into the lungs of anyone nearby—whether at a refinery, at a petrol pump, or in a motor vehicle. The millions upon millions of cars traversing roads all over the developed world filled the atmosphere with leaded exhaust fumes. It was chronic, it was prolific, it was near-inescapable.Recently though, large amounts of long-overdue research was done looking at the history and impact of environmental lead exposure—primarily from leaded petrol—and what they've been finding is devastating. Previous studies have noted how lead poisoning can cause violence, paranoia, and reduced impulse control, along with a significant reduction in IQ. Other studies correlated a significant rise and dramatic fall in violent crime with the use and availability of leaded petrol—rising as its adoption and use did, and falling as bans were put in place.Then, in 2022, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research article was published, looking at numerous recent studies on lead exposure in the United States, which showed that adults who grew up during the peak era of leaded petrol in the US—between the 1950s and 1970s—likely suffered permanent life-long damage, not only neurologically, but also physiologically, literally altering their physical development and changing the entire trajectory of their lives, putting a great big measurable dent in overall IQ, and driving an epidemic in violence and chronic illness.That's an entire generation of people in the Western World still suffering from the consequences, to this day, with a range of chronic illnesses and cognitive deficits, all thanks to the astonishing greed of oil and automotive companies.It has been speculated that Thomas Midgley himself might have contributed more to atmospheric and environmental contamination than any other single organism in history; with his relentless drive to push for his lead formula, he was making bank while simultaneously poisoning a large proportion of the human population of our planet over decades. Just think about that for a minute. Internal memos show that Midgley knew the real score. He knew—and had raised a number of times in the very early days of his research—about the profound toxicity of lead. He even experienced lead poisoning himself from his time in the lab developing the mixture. As soon as he saw those dollar signs—maybe he even hallucinated them—he made a choice to side with the money, at the expense of humanity; leaving the rest of us to cover the bill.Midgley, Kettering, and all of their collaborators, trampled upon humanity to win their fortunes.As far as I'm aware, to date, no one has ever been held to account.No one has ever admitted complicity.And no one has ever apologised.Thank you so much for reading, and once again a massive thank you to Prof Kovarik and the other dedicated scientists and researchers who have spent so many years trying to inform the world about the brutal effects that leaded petrol has had on humanity. You can find more of his work on this and other subjects at his website: https://billkovarik.com/bio/ Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

Warning: this episode contains references to drug use.Last year, I posted up a response to a redditor who messaged me asking if there’s a way to reduce his chances of developing Parkinsons. The question sent me on a research trip of epic proportions, and sadly, I didn't end up finding anything out there that might help. However, I was hopeful, because it was not inevitable that they would develop it, and the current pace of medical technology (and human technology in general) is such that there is very much hope that even if it did strike, we might in our lifetime discover a way to overcome it.It turns out, we may not have much longer to wait.Part detective story, part morality tale, the search for the Holy Grail of brain medicine is full of complexities - both technical and political - but carries with it the power to end the scourge of neurodegenerative diseases.Disclaimer: I Am Not A Doctor of any kind, and this is NOT medical advice. If that is what you seek, please speak to a qualified medical professional.Synthetic NightmaresIt was the Summertime of 1982 in the Northern Hemisphere, and a bad batch of dope was making its way through the various drug supply networks of California in the USA. This was no "ordinary" case of tainted Heroin, not that anything to do with Heroin should ever be considered "ordinary".In those early July days, the emergency wards all across the state began receiving patients that had developed paralysis seemingly out of nowhere. They initially put it down to a kind of "Catatonic Schizophrenia". These individuals - mostly young and otherwise healthy - had fallen into a stiff daze, a kind of stupor, and were unable to respond to even the most potent of stimuli.One such patient - George Carillo, a Hispanic man of 42 - had the soles of his feet scraped with the claw-end of a hammer, blunt force applied to the tips of his fingers, and intense ammonia smelling-salts held to his nostrils in an effort to snap him out of it, to no effect. He was sent to the psych ward as a "mental case", and the doctors moved on with other patients.Another by the name of Connie Sainz was taken to Stanford Hospital - thought to have some of the very best doctors in the world - but it was quickly decided she must be experiencing some kind of "hysterical emotionally-driven sympathetic paralysis", since they were told her symptoms started after her boyfriend - who was also her dealer - had become paralysed himself. She, too, was dumped on the psych ward, doctors having decided there was nothing "really" wrong with her.While there, she was injected with "truth serum" (Pentobarbital) by the psychiatrists to force her to talk about her "deeply rooted psychological problems", to no avail. After two weeks of this nonsense, the psychiatrists simply gave up and sent her home, still in her frozen state, telling her mother she'd get better on her own.She and George were both utterly locked-in to their bodies while fully aware, with no way to communicate with anyone, no way to move, no escape, and in constant agony. They experienced everything that was said and done to them during their paralysis, and the experience became burned in their memories.Two brothers, David and Bill Silvey, were found paralysed in their apartment by their Mother who had come looking for them. They had been stuck there for days, unable to answer the phone, unable to drink or eat, but fully aware and terrified. Taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, there too the doctors just shrugged and handed them off to the Psychiatrists, saying the problem was "all in their minds".I have enormous respect for medical professionals of all kinds, especially those on the emergency wards; every single day they are faced with decisions of life and death, seeing people from all walks of life at their very worst moments, all while working inhumane hours. They do the very best they possibly can with any and all situations, and sometimes that means making difficult choices on very limited information. Despite ER doctors that have seen just about everything, no one had ever seen anything like this before in the early 1980s. There was no textbook saying what to do when patients with sudden onset paralysis of this kind turned up out of nowhere.Regardless, it's hard to look at a story like this and not feel angry about the way these individuals were treated. What's more remarkable is despite going to several different hospitals, many were treated essentially the same way: the doctors would look at them, sometimes attempt to snap them out of their paralysis, but would often decide that since no immediate physiological cause could be identified, there must not be any.Luckily, one patient was not given up on: George Carillo.While George was in the psych ward, he was visited by Dr Phil Ballard of the Behavioural Neurology Department at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. He and his boss, Dr Bill Langston, did some tests, and realised George was in the grip of something Neurological, not Psychiatric. Whatever was going on, it was coming from damage to the very brain itself. They decided to try putting a pen in George's hand along with a paper notepad. Very, very slowly, the hand moved, and writing began to form on the page over several minutes. This is what George wrote:"I'm not sure what is happening to me. I only know I can't function normally. I can't move right. I know what I want to do. It just won't come out right."When he was asked what medications he was on, George wrote only one word:"Heroin."Don’t do drugs; subscribe to us instead!Kids on ChemicalsThese patients came from diverse backgrounds and personal situations, but they all had 2 things in common. First, they had spontaneously developed paralysis from head-to-toe. Second, they had all used Heroin shortly before their symptoms began. Several of them were regular Heroin users and had never experienced anything like this before from previous use. This was something new.It occurred to Langston and his colleagues that George’s condition seemed oddly similar to a case report they had seen some years previously. The journal was dug up from the archives.In 1976, a kid named Barry Kidston, in Maryland, USA was a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student with a keen interest in finding ways to synthesise novel narcotics which were not addressed by any law. His goal was to produce something like Pethidine, a Schedule II opiate-like drug. In the USA, Schedule II is a classification given to drugs which are considered to be only barely therapeutic, or have an extremely high addiction potential. Heroin, LSD, Ecstasy, etc are all under Schedule I, meaning "verboten."So one day, our friend Barry the undergraduate chemist comes across a paper published in 1947. The authors described a method for synthesising a compound called Desmethylprodeine - or MPPP - and had tested it on Rats. The Rats seemed to tolerate it very well, and the effects reported seemed similar to morphine. No laws referencing MPPP seemed to exist, and so Barry decided that was good enough for him. He'd give it a go and see what it was like.He started producing batches of the stuff and injecting it into himself. The first few batches apparently worked quite well, and produced the effect he was hoping for. However, he became careless. He rushed the production of a new batch, and injected it into his arm. Suddenly, he realised all to clearly that this was a catastrophic mistake; there was a severe burning sensation on his skin, spreading out from the injection site, and within moments Barry found himself physically slowing down. Then, like the "Frozen Addicts" patients that would come after him, he lost control of his own body entirely, and became trapped inside. Treatment with first-line Parkinsons drugs like L-Dopa helped at first, but only so much, and lost effectiveness over time. His case puzzled his doctors. This sort of thing just doesn't happen to young people. Parkinsons takes decades to develop, it doesn't just spring up spontaneously.So they continued treating him as best they could, though his mental state was deteriorating just as much as his physical state; one day 18 months later, he was found dead under a tree from a cocaine overdose, possibly the result of extreme depression, a common comorbidity with Parkinsons.Combing through his lab, they discovered the manufactured batches of MPPP, some of which contained a distinct impurity that occurs when the temperature of the reaction is not properly controlled and escalates too high. This impurity is called MPTP. When injected into Rats, the investigators found no sign of Parkinsonism, and so they couldn't be certain whether this impurity had any connection with what happened to Barry. An autopsy on Barry's brain found all the same hallmarks of Parkinsons, such as Lewy Bodies and deep damage to the Substantia Nigra, one of the Brain's main sources of Dopamine manufacture. What's more, it seemed the damage was remarkably localised to just those neurons. Their results remained buried in a journal for years.Synthetic drugs have been circulating ever since chemists have existed. The "war on drugs" has simply forced more people to try their hand at chemistry, searching for ways to get the same effect while making it easier to get past sniffer dogs and drug tests. It's essentially grass-roots drug research, but with no safeguards, no checks and balances, no oversight, done by people with no qualifications or prior study, made using a cooking pot in a trailer or a basement, and then tried on various human guinea pigs and addicts; or, sometimes, even the producers themselves. Sometimes it works out fine. A lot of the time, it ends up a disaster; occasionally, it’s even fatal.Fascinatingly, the wikipedia article on Schedule II classification currently includes the following line:These drugs vary in potency: for example fentanyl [a Schedule II drug] is about 80 times as potent as morphine (heroin [a Schedule I drug] is roughly two times as potent). More significantly, they vary in nature. Pharmacology and CSA scheduling have a weak relationship.(Emphasis added.)That means Fentanyl is 40 times more powerful than Heroin.The drug classification system in the USA - and much of the western world - makes no sense.Impure DreamsMPTP on its own isn't particularly dangerous. The problem begins when it crosses the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, reactions begin taking place which convert MPTP into something called MPP+, the result of the Monoamine Oxidase enzyme attempting to metabolise it. Like a Trojan horse having made it through the gates, its violence is swift and total, and with a stunning rapidity it wipes out the Substantia Nigra, destroying the brains ability to produce the Dopamine necessary for motor control. A process that normally takes decades in cases of Parkinsons disease is completed in mere hours.The Substantia Nigra, in a fully-grown adult, is roughly the size of a marble. Sitting within the Basal Ganglia, it interconnects with many of the systems that deal with motor movement and planning. Its destruction results in many of the prototypical Parkinsons symptoms of gait, stiffness, and shaking.While much of our bodies can re-grow and heal themselves, neurons do not. The brain does not grow back. No one is quite sure why that is. Unfortunately, neurogenesis ends during embryonic development, and that's all you get. Neurons can sprout compensating fibres when necessary - making new connections, patching up ones that are severed for whatever reason - but they don't divide like skin or blood cells, and even if the adult brain has a store of Neuroblasts (stem cells for neurons), it doesn't use them to patch up the damage. In all likelihood, every neuron powering your brain on the last day of your life will have been there since your birth. Any neurons you lose are gone forever.So, right now, the only real treatment for Parkinsons involves supplementing the lost Dopamine with L-Dopa, a precursor chemical that is transformed into Dopamine after crossing the blood-brain barrier. This is not nearly as straight-forward as it sounds, and is riddled with challenges, because Dopamine isn't just used in the control of our movements, nor is it only produced by the Substantia Nigra.For example, I recently learned the Retina uses and produces its own Dopamine. If all Retinal Dopamine was lost, visual clarity would be significantly degraded; some foreground objects would seem to merge with background ones, and we'd be unable to properly adapt our vision to varying light conditions.Although Parkinsons causes varying amounts of damage to 3 of the 4 major Dopaminergic pathways - in addition to nearly obliterating the Substantia Nigra - we can't target only the damaged and destroyed neurons with the supplimented Dopamine. When we add more of it to the bloodstream, we essentially saturate the whole brain, and the rest of the body.Everything else that uses Dopamine for some purpose will now have an excess of it, and the resulting side-effects can range from the uncomfortable, to the bizarre. The Vagus nerve can be triggered when the concentration in the blood gets "too high", leading to an upset stomach. Schizophrenic hallucinations can occur, and so can mood swings resembling hypomania or bipolar disorder. It can even trigger psychosis in some cases, or sudden bouts of extreme daytime sleepiness in others.Connie Sainz was one such example of the extreme side-effects that can occur with L-Dopa treatment: she would sometimes get up late at night and stalk around her house with a knife, lunging at invisible demons to strike them down. George Carillo was often seen trying to walk through doorways that simply were not there, becoming frustrated on discovering only a solid wall.Then there's the fact that the treatment loses effectiveness over time.So, clearly, if we can’t efficiently replace lost Dopamine, and we can't stop the brain’s destruction, there’s only one alternative:To grow a new one.This was Part 1 of The Brain Factory, a history of Neurogenesis. Part 2 will be out on Tuesday, 27th August. Thank you so much for reading! This series has taken me an age to write, and every single time someone reads a post of mine it’s a huge boost to my motivation. If you liked this, please share with friends too! Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe

"Volition, also known as will or conation, is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action" - Wikipedia page for Volition (Psychology)Note: Neither of us are doctors, or medical specialists, or even educated. Assume Nicholas in particular is dumb as a rock. This podcast is not medical advice, nor could it ever be, as it is meant purely for entertainment. No rocks were harmed in the making of this podcast. Get full access to A Chemical Mind at chemicalmind.substack.com/subscribe