First up, lead poisoning causes damage to the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) because lead mimics calcium and apparently this part of the brain is constructed using calcium as children grow. Instead of a healthy calcium based structure, it's lead.
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There's also another weird as hell idea I had: You know how people with similar psychologies seem to collect together, or view others like them as totally normal? Get enough people poisoned with lead and nobody would think any of this is weird. It'd be the normal.
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Alright, so lead poisoned weirdos who can't control theirself, do tons of drugs, and act like sociopaths are normal. And nobody suspects that, well, maybe Americans are weird because of some poison. Can you say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding …
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What if, the Replication Crisis in Psychology is *not* because Psychologists are fraudsters who ran around fabricating bullshit? What if it's just everyone they analyzed was poisoned with lead, and now people aren't, so the results are different?
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That'd mean that--since lead poisoning wasn't controlled for--nearly every psychology study for the last 50 years is suspect and wouldn't represent anyone who was not lead poisoned. Like, what if social priming totally works--only on lead babies. Everyone else it doesn't work.
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And if you think about what a hell of a lot of psychology is all about it's: Regulating your damn brain. So, lead could be something that totally upends psychology research since it pretty much destroys the part of the brain most psychology is focused on.
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Let's take a simple example of Dunning-Kruger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect … What if, actually, everyone who was bad at the self-awareness necessary to evaluate their skill was just a lead baby? That would explain why the effect isn't found in Japan and other cultures.
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Final random thought: If the ACC is responsible for detecting errors then it *might* make someone a bad programmer. A huge part of programming is spotting errors just like the ones tested in the studies, so I'd be curious to see if it makes debugging harder too.
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I almost forgot a couple more logs to throw on this fire: 1. If the crime goes down because of lead, but the gun purchases stay the same or go up, then it's lead not guns. 2. If crime goes down with lead poison, then men or any race or culture, aren't necessarily more violent.
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For #1: You could actually separate out regions with lead poisoning, control for it, and get a better picture of gun violence. You can then focus on eliminating lead as a proxy mechanism for lowering gun violence (and all violence).
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For #2: If the majority of men who are violent (or any race or culture deemed "genetically more violent" bullshit) are actually just poisoned with lead, then it could be lead affects baby boys more than girls (which is common with lots of toxins).
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Another way to look at a lot of this is: Tons of social, psychological, and political policies and beliefs could simply be because tons of people were poisoned with lead. Prisons, laws, numbers of officers, therapies, racist/sexist beliefs, all need to be reevaluated.
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Sorry I have one more, but this one is potentially *super* unpopular: It looks like damage to the ACC also causes things like "alien hand syndrome" and OCD, which could explain people who desperately need to cut off their arm to feel "right". Could cause body dysmorphia too.
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Combine OCD and 'alien hand syndrome' with damage of self-awareness, and an ability to correct errors in visual perception, and damage to the ACC could be the cause of people not feeling like they belong in their own body.
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End of conversation
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