Shows
A Chemical MindThe Erotic Button: A Case-StudyAddiction 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 bu...
2026-01-2318 min
A Chemical MindSacrificing yourself to save your life“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...
2026-01-0912 min
A Chemical MindCan A Pill Change Your Morality?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 i...
2025-12-2424 min
A Chemical MindGods in a MachineIf 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 t...
2025-11-2923 min
A Chemical MindThe Illness That Didn't Exist“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 di...
2025-10-2714 min
A Chemical MindIs pro-natalism a political stance?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...
2025-10-2016 min
A Chemical MindEmotions of Mass Destruction“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 m...
2025-10-1117 min
A Chemical MindHate From Above & BelowWarning: 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...
2025-07-1734 min
A Chemical Mind[Substack Live] ZOMBIES!!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
2025-07-0849 min
A Chemical MindEmperors of Maladies: AugustusBefore 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...
2025-05-3125 min
A Chemical MindFathers and SonsI 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 st...
2025-05-1809 min
A Chemical MindSide-Quest: Thought Experiments with HistoryAuthors 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 t...
2025-04-1720 min
A Chemical MindSide-Quest: The Internet Is Wide-OpenI’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 pers...
2025-02-2311 min
A Chemical MindThe Shadow of Death: Part 1There'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...
2025-02-1217 min
A Chemical MindSide-Quest: Healthcare as a Human RightTranscript: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 th...
2025-02-0912 min
A Chemical Mind[Substack Live] Mind Uploads & Digital ImmortalityEver 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...
2025-01-281h 09
A Chemical MindWeapons of ChaosTLDRIn 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...
2025-01-2025 min
A Chemical MindViolent Threats against Healthcare WorkersI'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...
2025-01-0212 min
A Chemical MindBreaking Free of Conspiratorial ThinkingEdit: 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...
2024-12-2024 min
A Chemical MindSide-Quest: The Age of FirestormsThis 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...
2024-12-0820 min
A Chemical MindSide-Quest: Newtons Theory of Gravity is a Hoax!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 li...
2024-11-2917 min
A Chemical MindLife Before Medicine: The PlagueUpdate: 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 v...
2024-11-1720 min
A Chemical MindSpecial Edition #1: Interview with Dr Paul OffitVideo 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....
2024-11-1036 min
A Chemical MindDeliver Us from Evil: Part 3 - Cholera, Paranoia and ViolenceWelcome 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 sophi...
2024-10-2924 min
A Chemical MindDeliver us from Evil: Part 2Welcome 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 creat...
2024-10-2227 min
A Chemical MindDeliver Us from Evil: Part 1This 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 mo...
2024-10-1518 min
A Chemical MindNotes on Women in PainWarning: 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...
2024-09-2718 min
A Chemical MindThe Legacy of the House of ButterfliesNote 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...
2024-09-0121 min
A Chemical MindThe Brain Factory: Part 1Warning: 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 st...
2024-08-2416 min
A Chemical MindThe Volition Equation Podcast: Episode 1"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
2023-12-0427 min
Evolution Exchange AustraliaEvo #71 - Building High Performing Tech TeamsBuilding High Performing Tech TeamsToday's host is Nigel Hunter, and joining him are our amazing guests:- Elijah Oxenham - Digital Delivery Manager at Bunnings- Nicholas Kircher - Engineering Lead at Australia Post- Dhanushka Ranganath - Principal Consultant at ASG Group Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
2023-01-2350 min