A Chemical Mind

TLDR : Serotonin has no association with depression whatsoever. Instead, some cases are thought to be caused by reduced neuroplasticity during chronic periods of stress (mediated by the HPA axis and cortisol), resulting in a reduction in BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). SSRIs might work not due to serotonin, but due to significantly increasing BDNF expression, which is likely why psychede...

I know you’ve heard of it. “ Dopamine .” It’s supposedly a chemical in the brain that causes pleasure, right? I mean, everyone says so. Even Harvard says so, and surely we can trust Harvard, right? No , sadly, this most perpetuated of common wisdom is perhaps the most common medical myth of our time. If you thought dopamine had anything to do with feelings of pleasure, it’s time to set the record...

Note : I am not a doctor (I didn’t even finish High School) and none of this should be taken seriously let alone be considered medical advice, or in any way accurate, rational, logical, grammatically correct, or even comprehensible, and should probably be ignored by all of humanity. Anyone taking this too seriously might want to get checked out for Autism ahem I mean ENT J/P. I’m not usually inter...

Addiction Resources: https://chemicalmind.substack.com/p/addiction-support-resources Ko-Fi Link: https://ko-fi.com/dopamine Note : 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 hersel...

“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...

Coffee Fund: https://ko-fi.com/dopamine Note 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 eve...

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...

“ 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...

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...

“ All the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, starts with the humiliation of one individual. ” Kofi Annan Red. 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...

Warning : This post includes references to acts of Genocide Note 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 e...

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 inter...

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 hea...

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 i...

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 ti...

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...

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. Thi...

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,...

TLDR In 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 m...

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 e...

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 t...

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...

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,...

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, sm...