This is Hippocampus, the seahorse. I could say a lot about them at this point, and have done at length in ‘Here Be Dragons’, but for now I want to focus on the one in the brain, because this has come up in something in the last couple of days. I resisted the temptation to do the obvious thing and have AI generate an image of hippopotami at university, mainly because AI in its current popular form is distinctly dodgy. Don’t worry: I won’t let this get away from me.
Yesterday I came across the book ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’ by Dr Michael Nehls. I want to be fair. He is a genuine doctor and has authored papers with Nobel Prize nominates. The guy is not just a quack. That said, there are many examples of respected scientists going seriously off the rails. One of the oldest examples I can think of is the renowned Lord Kelvin, who came to insist that Earth was much younger than other, younger scientists claimed, because it didn’t seem to have an internal heat source yet was still molten inside. He estimated it as less than 400 million years old and perhaps as little as 20 million, which wouldn’t seem to give undirected evolution time to produce humans and he was a theistic evolutionist. The crucial missing piece of information was that nobody at the time knew about radioactivity, which is how the inside of this planet stays molten. Three other examples are Fred Hoyle, who denied the Big Bang (and actually, ironically, named it), David Bellamy whom I’ve blogged about who denied climate change, and Nigel Calder, who predicted an ice age in the near future. Just being justifiably renowned as an expert in one’s field does not imply that all one’s ideas will be acceptable or worthwhile, particularly when one comments on something outside one’s field of expertise. So there’s that.
Another problem is that I can’t read the book without making a financial contribution and perhaps boost the algorithms. I can, however, look at what’s available on Amazon for free, which includes the table of contents. That said, the sheer difficulty with engaging with such things just now is that one is forced to reinforce one’s own echo chamber because attention feeds the algorithm and simply looking at stuff from the “Other Side” is likely to draw disproportionately more attention to it. That said, I feel that this book occupies a middle ground, which is often the case with these materials. This can be illustrated with the reptilian conspiracy idea. This touches on an apparent truth about powerful people being uncaring and being led by selfish and perhaps base desires, but isn’t literally so. This happens a lot with such things. A general impression which may well be true either gets misdirected or the metaphor is taken literally.
Enough of this preamble. The basic assertions Nehls makes include the following. Vaccinations against Covid-19 as they were designed reduce neurogenesis in the hippocampus, which makes people more compliant to persuasion. He also, very strangely, claims that lithium should be recognised as a nutrient. There may also be an element of denial of anthropogenic climate change but it isn’t clear from what I’ve read so far that that’s what he’s doing. If that’s there, it places everything he says in doubt because it makes him an unreliable source of information. It does not, however, mean that he’s wrong about everything.
At this point I need to interrupt and describe my apparent about face about vaccination. I was never against vaccinations per se. I had several issues, foremost amongst which was the probability that pathogens transmitted via droplet infection would be best defended against by the increased production of the relevant alpha globulins since it was these which would constitute the first line of defence against them. This objection was addressed when they started to be given by nasal spray, as this would constitute the exact solution to this problem. I had some other objections. For instance, I don’t trust that attenuated viruses are less virulent in the long term than fully-active viruses and am not aware that they’re tested as potential slow viruses. However, the Covid-19 vaccine also resolves this problem as it uses mRNA to induce human body cells to synthesise the spike proteins on the virion, to which the specific immune response then develops antibodies in one case. Another provides the spike protein itself, which is again absolutely fine. The other approach is to modify an adenovirus, that is a cold virus, either affecting chimps or a human one, once again to produce the spike protein. In each of these cases, none of the problems I’ve outlined arise and therefore my objections to anti-viral vaccines in the 1990s CE simply don’t apply any more. There’s more to be said about this, but this is the relevant bit to my apparent change of mind. The vaccines changed, so I did too. It’s like being happier with EVs than with petrol-driven vehicles, which to a certain extent I am, though not so much as I would be with better public transport. There’s also no transcription of RNA into the nuclear genome this way, which is good too.
Turning to Nehls’s claim that neurogenesis in the hippocampus is impaired by the Covid-19 vaccines, the problem with this issue is that good quality research by scientists in the relevant field without a conflict of interest shows the opposite to be so. Here is a link to such a study, which shows that vaccination of animals (unfortunately not humans) against respiratory infections such as influenza actually encourages hippocampal neurogenesis whereas acquiring Covid-19 itself impairs them. This seems to be borne out by the apparent memory impairment which can follow recovery from a Covid-19 infection, as seen here. Incidentally, as a vegan I’m not at all happy with the vivisection these involve, but post-mortem studies in humans show the same effect. So the evidence shown is actually in the opposite direction to Nehls’s claim.
That’s one thing. The other is the issue of lithium. Studies show that the brains of patients who had Alzheimers are lower in lithium post mortem than those of other people. This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s a link, for several reasons, and here I’m open to being proven wrong just as I have been with vaccines. A few decades ago, aluminium was considered to be a factor in causing Alzheimers. The metal was higher in the tap water where the prevalence of Alzheimers was higher and again, post mortem studies showed that aluminium was higher in the brains of Alzheimers patients. My own diet is in fact particularly high in aluminium because I eat a lot of basil although I don’t drink tea, which is another source of dietary aluminium, so I might be expected to have a higher risk of Alzheimers if that’s so. I should point out at this stage that Dr Nehls is primarily an Alzheimers researcher. Although I am experiencing cognitive impairment, I don’t believe this is to do with aluminium excess. It may be due to an excess in tau protein or related to some kind of dietary deficiency, and I’m hoping it’s reversible and am taking steps to do so. Anyway, the explanation for the aluminium excess in Alzheimers is that the blood-brain barrier lets through more aluminium and is already impaired. In the case of lithium, the situation is the reverse. The low levels of lithium in the Alzheimers brain may be due to slower passage of the metal across the blood-brain barrier and the loss of neuronal ability to maintain ion gradients, and the poorer diets of Alzheimers patients may also contribute to lower lithium. As for the rodent studies, and bear in mind that the very fact that they’re in rodents renders them suspect as they’re not humans, the murine body moves lithium around differently than the human one and the relationship between different minerals is often complex, such as the see-saw relationship between zinc and copper levels in the diet. However, lithium is involved in brain function, which is very obvious from the use of lithium compounds in medication for bipolar disorder.
There’s an irony in the insistence that lithium should be considered a nutrient. It has a pharmacological action, but that doesn’t make it a nutrient. In the ’90s, there were attempts to declare fluoride an essential mineral because of its perceived benefit to teeth and bones, something which the fluoridation lobby strongly objected to. Now we have the opposite: a “maverick” scientist advocates for declaring lithium an essential mineral. I wonder how people feel about lithium fluoride! But this is interesting because it’s an effect of the reputation of the person advocating for the change more than being led by evidence.
Nehls has in fact published a book on this too: ‘The Conspiracy Against Lithium: The Suppressed Essential Nutrient and its Benefits for Mental Health’. I haven’t read this either, for the same reason as before, but also note that the blurb implies that autism is a form of developmental pathology or brain damage which doesn’t exactly engender sympathy or put him on the side of the angels. It gets worse: he explicitly states he’s going to use generic “he” in a book published next year! Even Roger Scruton used to have to insist on this in the 1980s. It’s not feasible to access more of this book without paying for it, which I’m obviously not going to do.
Lithium is an odd element. It’s the third in the periodic table and in general, the lighter an atom is, the more common it is. 74% of the atomic matter in the Universe is hydrogen, the first element, followed by 24% for helium, one percent oxygen, 4.6 permille carbon and so forth, and all of these are light. Lithium might therefore be expected to be the third most common (and beryllium the fourth), but this is not so. Only traces of lithium formed in the ostensible early Universe (don’t get me started) and lithium which forms in stars falls into the interiors and is destroyed by fusion and disintegration of that nucleus into two helium nuclei. As far as Earth is concerned, the small amounts of lithium making it up tend not to integrate well in crystal lattices in rocks and are therefore thinly spread. Only rare geological processes concentrate it after that point, which is also why using lithium batteries is less than ideal. Once it comes to being included in biological systems, sodium and potassium, similar but heavier and much more abundant alkali metals, are more available to organisms, so they use those. There are scarce elements in biochemistry, such as iodine in thyroid hormones and cobalt in B12, but lithium doesn’t seem to fulfil a role because if it did, life would be confined to specialised environments rather than occurring all over the planet. This means that reasoning would seem to suggest that lithium lacks an essential role in living organisms and the human diet.
Nonetheless, it is medically useful, as I’ve said, in bipolar disorder. People on it, though, need to be carefully monitored due to side-effects like kidney damage. There is an unexplained negative correlation between lithium levels in drinking water and prevalence of dementia, but we’ve been here before with aluminium and that came to nothing. Here’s one study, for example. However, there’s also this, which was conducted here rather than in “proper” Scandinavia as it were. I’m guessing (not going to look because it’s not 100% germane) that the negative correlation between depression and lithium levels was probably related to the development of the various lithium compounds for bipolar. There are a couple of other tit-bits I really have to stick in here. One is that 7-Up used to have lithium in it, which is why it’s called that, and it was marketed as a hangover cure. The other is that it’s occasionally been advocated that lithium be added to tap water to reduce crime and anxiety. This was in the now-discredited future scenario of extreme population growth and overcrowding. It’s now known that if anything, removing lead from petrol was a better idea and that the real problem is population collapse.
That’s all very well and may seem to have questionable relevance to Dr Nehls’s books but in fact I think it reflects his views’ outmodedness. He’s advocating for an element which was suggested as a possible solution to social problems over half a century ago, insists on generic “he” when everyone else switched to “he or she”, “s/he” and so on around the same time as when they stopped advocating for lithium in tap water, but also opposes vaccination, which is a more timeless position.
All that said, as usual there is an annoying core of truth in some of what he says. It is indeed harder to think independently at the moment for several reasons, including chatbots making comments for astroturfing purposes, AI chatbots eroding the ability to think and social media shortening our attention spans. The trouble is that he’s pushing in the wrong direction. This is a puzzlingly common error today. People often start off saying things with which progressive people can agree, then proceed to advocate for a conservative or fascist position there’s plenty of evidence against. I don’t know why this happens. He does also advocate for things like an active lifestyle and good diet to prevent dementia, which is good but may not actually prevent it in the long term. I just hope we can learn something from this.
A Box Of Chocolates 