A Plastic Spoon in Every Brain

“Two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot.”— campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover, 1928.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics.” — Career advice to a new college graduate, offered by a well-meaning friend of his parent(s), in The Graduate, a classic 1967 Dustin Hoffman film.

A recent paper in Nature Medicine magazine, the British medical journal, reports astonishing findings. Scientists who looked found as much as spoon’s worth of plastic microparticles in the brains of cadavers that they examined. Here’s the Smithonian Magazine’s summary of the results, verbatim: “The human brain may contain up to a spoon’s worth of tiny plastic shards—not a spoonful, but the same weight (about seven grams) as a plastic spoon, according to . . . the journal Nature Medicine.”

Think about that. If your brain is like those cadavers’, you are walking around with a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic micro- and nano-particles in your brain. The seat of your memory, knowledge, emotions and life— all your consciousness—is polluted with minute particles of plastic.

Why is that scary as Hell? Because most plastics and other synthetic materials have no direct counterpart in Nature. That’s why they had to be man made.

So it’s a good bet, if not a sure thing, that, in the billions of years of evolution of life on Earth, the natural processes in our bodies never “learned” to deal with, let alone “clear,” these chemicals, because they never encountered them before. If we take 1950 (seventeen years before The Graduate) as an arbitrary year for the widespread production and use of plastics, we have lived with plastics and other artificial compounds for less than 75 years—a mere nanosecond in evolutionary history. In that absurdly short period of biological time, our bodies could not have evolved means to excrete these compounds or break them down for excretion.

It gets worse. Many modern plastics and other synthetic materials contain elements from a column of the Periodic Table known as “halogens” (second from the right in the linked source). These elements include Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine. They are unique in having a single electron missing from their outer electron shells. So when they form molecules in which other elements “supply” that electron, those molecules are especially stable.

That’s one reason why the so-called “forever” chemicals (dubbed “PFAS” for short), all contain fluorine (as the “F” in “PFAS”) and are almost impossible for any natural processes to break down. That’s why they’re called “forever” chemicals.

AFAIK, fluorine is very rare in terrestrial life forms. The next halogen down in the column, chlorine, appears in chlorophyl, believed to be a major participant in photosynthesis, and is thus a major component of the molecular makeup of plants and photosynthetic bacteria. But fluorine, not so much.

In fact, the basic chemical elements of life are mostly just four: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. For example, the four nucleotides of our DNA “alphabet,” Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine, are composed exclusively of these four elements. Other biological compounds have, in addition, certain “metallic” elements like calcium and magnesium. So when industrial chemists start throwing other elements, like fluorine, into compounds that can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed through our skin, it stands to reason that our bodies don’t have the faintest idea how to deal with them.

It gets still worse. Do you know what “microfiber” means? It sounds like high-thread-count Egyptian cotton, doesn’t it? But it’s not.

Apparently, the US laws that require all fabrics to carry labels identifying their nature allow it to be used in those labels, at least on sheets and pillowcases. Here’s the key part of its Wikipedia definition, verbatim:

“Microfiber (microfibre in British English) is synthetic fibre finer than one denier or decitex/thread, having a diameter of less than ten micrometers.

The most common types of microfiber are made variously of polyesters; polyamides (e.g., nylon, Kevlar, Nomex); and combinations of polyester, polyamide, and polypropylene.”

In other words, “microfiber” is a generic term for synthetic fabric with tiny fiber size. Its use tells you nothing about what’s in the fabric. It’s like saying a wire is 1 mm thick. But in this case, the “wire” is artificial, man-made stuff, having no direct counterpart in Nature.

So “microfiber” is part of the “revolution” in synthetic materials that led to plastics appearing everywhere in our biosphere, from the deepest parts of the oceans ever studied, to the intimate recesses of our brains. And if you have microfiber sheets or pillow cases, you are likely inhaling or absorbing microscopic particles of their synthetic compounds for as long as you sleep, every single night.

Now let’s switch gears. “Old age,” as the saying goes, “is not for sissies.” Your body and mind slowly decay. If you have a certain self-awareness, you are conscious of that decay.

But one thing stays with you: old memories. As old people know and science confirms, long-ago memories, especially from childhood, are durable. They remain and often come forth even when you can’t remember where you put your eyeglasses or car keys or what you ate for breakfast yesterday. So if you want to get the flavor of how things were half a century ago, with some reliability, ask someone about my age (soon to be 80).

And here’s what I have noticed. Over the last generation or so, the level of discourse in society and in our media has deteriorated badly. There’s much more emotion, especially anger, rage and hate. There’s much less deduction and reasoning from known facts. There’s far less honest and sincere effort just to find our what the facts are.

So-called “news” stories used to follow a rigid, logical formula. The headline aptly and accurately summarized the story. The lead paragraph expanded the detail, giving key facts to put the story in general context. The following paragraphs expanded the detail, in strict logical order, giving the reader information to place the story in a more detailed context of recent or historical events, or of scientific or general knowledge. There were few, if any, irrelevant details. Getting the main point across was all.

Today, many so-called “news” stories read like short stories from literature. They start in the middle, with a paragraph about one or two individuals, who may be completely unknown to the reader. They tell the individuals’ stories in chronological or emotional order, sometimes giving the reader little hint of what the story’s about until halfway or nearly all the way through.

I used to think this trend arose from too many frustrated and underpaid would-be literary writers going into journalism. But now I’m not so sure. This strange “journalistic” ethos has infected all the “best” print media that I read for news. And the “stories” so-called “news” media tell seem increasingly designed to evoke our strongest emotions, such as fear, alarm, hate, disgust or revulsion.

Of course, when you turn to full-blown masters of propaganda like Fox, this trend goes into overdrive. Hence the endless repetition, with misleading photos and video clips, of lies like the hapless Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, eating more established (read “white”) residents’ pets.

This trend seems to be increasing, and it’s growing more irrational with every passing day. The resulting divergence between what “news” is like now and what it was in my memory of my youth is exploding.

So I now have a new hypothesis. Could something physical be affecting our collective national psyche, through the mind-body link that every science now recognizes? Could something in our air and water, or in our brains, be driving us to “think” with our amygdalas, rather than our cerebral cortices?

The class of PFAS chemicals, which includes thousands of specific compounds, are known endocrine disruptors, as found in this paper, one of many. Furthermore, some studies suggest that their dose-response effect on human endocrine systems is anomalously high. Our endocrine hormones, including adrenaline, thyroxine, testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, affect not just our reproductive systems, but our strongest and deepest emotions. Could it be that we are poisoning ourselves in general, and our minds and emotions in particular, with artificial, unnatural compounds that get into our food, toothpaste, cosmetics, clothing and bedding and thence into our bodies and brains?

If so, this will not be the first time a thriving, powerful democratic empire poisoned itself. Although the idea has been controversial, evidence and acceptance are growing that lead poisoning at the highest levels of ancient Rome’s society was at least partly responsible for its decline, and probably directly responsible for the “mad” emperors (Nero, Caligula, and Commodus) who caused Rome to degrade from the top. (I’ve looked at the linked sources on the three and can discover no other common thread of time, heredity, or place that could explain the anomalous resurgence of clear insanity at the highest levels of Roman society in a about a century and a half. An analogy to our own time would be three Donald Trumps since our Civil War.)

In ancient Rome, lead was used for water pipes. (Our English word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word “plumbum” for lead, which appears abbreviated in its modern chemical symbol “Pb.”) Rome’s natural water was slightly acidic, causing the lead to leach into drinking water. But Rome’s self-poisoning had an interesting twist: it affected primarily the Rome’s “elite,” including the emperors, leading senators, and rich merchants. The “common people” got their drinking water from common fountains made of concrete or stone, fed by acqueducts of similar material. (The ruins of some of these engineering feats still stand, and some, repaired and expanded over two millennia, are still in use today.)

So Rome apparently poisoned itself from the top down, while we in the US and West may be poisoning everyone equally with plastic and other synthetic microparticles. In fact, we may be poisoning the Earth’s entire biosphere, as plastic microparticles have been found virtually everywhere. We can only hope that perhaps their concentration is higher closer to the source, in the nations that now use the most plastics.

So think about that plastic spoon in your brain. But please don’t try to pry it out directly. It’s not really a whole spoon. It’s dispersed throughout your cranium and your brain cells. If you try to get it out without professional help, you might hurt yourself.

Have a nice day!

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