This got me wondering if an actual answer would be folks with brain injuries.

Or heavy metal and other neuro-toxins.

That is a far more severe problem than 99% of the public realize. It is like light outside the visible spectrum, or bacteria and viruses, before we had tools to see them.

While we can detect them, unless somebody has a huge sudden exposure, so that they have clearly attributable symptoms, smaller effects can only - badly - attributed statistically, for populations. Badly, because what exactly do you measure? It's not like you get numbers naturally. More aggression, less brain-ability in general, the measurements used even for the statistical analysis is hard.

Long-term slow exposure always correlates with age, so problems can easily be attributed to "aging" instead. And of course stress. And "it's all in your head" - which funnily (or unfunnily) enough is true!

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thaumasiotes 9 days ago | parent [-]

Exposure has to be huge, or rather hugely different from the baseline, but it doesn't have to be sudden to be perceived.

This is where we got the expression "mad as a hatter". The problem with being a hatter wasn't that you were suddenly exposed to huge quantities of mercury. It was that you were constantly exposed to it.

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nosianu 8 days ago | parent [-]

> Exposure has to be huge

No! Acute exposure is not the only thing that exists!

Source: Both the official line (e.g. that the only save exposure to lead is zero - and lead is not as bad as mercury, also an official line one can found in some NIH doc), as well as my own experience, as someone diagnosed and treated with chelators (see past comments).

You have chronic and acute. Chronic small does exposure exists. It has the problem that we have no reliable ways to diagnose or to treat that case, which is why I do not fault the medical system to be blind there. They just can't really do much or anything. If they did, it would be very inefficient, because there is no quick fix pill or surgery.

Just like Trump trying to stop reporting on things does not mean they don't exist, just because we don't try too hard (or at all) because we don't have a practical solution even in case of an assured diagnosis, if such were possible with current means, does not mean that only acute exposure problems exist.

	▲	thaumasiotes 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't really see what you're trying to tell me. The example I gave of "huge" exposure was hatters.

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thaumasiotes 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's fair.