Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

In the early 1990s, about a third of the soldiers deployed in the first Gulf War complained of being “never quite right again,” with a constellation of symptoms—exhaustion, chronic unexplained pain, cognitive impairments. “Gulf War syndrome” was generally viewed as being some sort of psychological disorder, i.e., not for real, a marker of psychologically weak, self-indulgent veterans. And then science trickled in. Soldiers had been administered a heavy-duty class of drugs related to pesticides as protection against the nerve gas that Saddam Hussein was expected to use. While these drugs could readily explain the neurological features of Gulf War syndrome, this was discounted—careful research in the run-up to the war had identified what doses could be given safely, would not damage brain function. But then it turned out that the drugs became more damaging to the brain during stress, something that was not considered beforehand. One of the mechanisms implicated was that stress—in this case, body heat generated by carrying eighty pounds of gear in 120-degree desert weather, coupled with basic combat terror—could open up the blood-brain barrier, increasing the amount of drug getting into the brain.