A white supremacist took MDMA for a study, and it snapped him out of his beliefs: 'Why am I doing this?'
A white supremacist took MDMA for a study, and it snapped him out of his beliefs: 'Why am I doing this?'
30 minutes after taking the MDMA pill, Brendan questioned his actions and realized his life was missing connection.
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The case suggested that MDMA has the potential to "influence a person's values and priorities," the authors wrote in a case study about Brendan. They hypothesized that if extremist views are fueled by fear, anger, and cognitive biases, they could potentially be treated with drugs.
It's interesting to learn, what this paragraph seems to suggest, that for some people holding extremist views is actually the result of mental illness. It is probably hard for people to realize and/or even admit that they are ill until something drastic happens.
Fear, anger, and cognitive biases are not mental illness. Experiencing emotions is a completely normal human experience. All humans have cognitive biases because of how our brains our wired.
Yes thats true.
That's not what they said though.
They said extremism. Which is absolutely not a completely normal human experience.
Extremist views are not normal, correct. I was addressing the quote and response because I want to be clear about the implications of a single anecdotal finding amongst a study on a drug being used for a very different purpose than the context being examined here. I don't want people jumping to too many conclusions.
I'm not sure that the case, the brain is very complex so there lots of places thing can go wrong.For example damage in the limbic system could cause increased fear responce or damage in part of the brain that could down regulate the limbic system. We tend to acknowledge this in the case of brain injury. But there does seem to be a bias when it comes to neurological defects that don't have any known direct causes. But it super possible to just have a brain that emotion processing is abnormally predisposed to fear responses to that point that is should be considered a mental illness