Mercury or Quicksilver and Our Brain

Mercury, or quicksilver as it’s often called, is a substance that’s been known to cause mental dysfunction and erratic behavior for a very long time. However, this didn’t prevent it from being used extensively for various tasks. Many people are familiar with mercury as the liquid metal that acted as the active filling of thermometers until the 1990s.

However, perhaps the most common way that mercury becomes a pollutant is not from broken thermometers, but the aerosolized fraction that is emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. This mercury as air pollution is then free to float down to Earth and contaminate the soil as well as the surfaces of urban areas. The production of gold is also a very potent source of mercury, much of this ending up in run-off water.

This metal is especially reactive in human tissue where it actually blocks several necessary metabolic pathways in the human brain. It is not eliminated from the body and continues to gather in fatty tissues forever.