Tylenol, a mind-altering drug?

Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, is also present in abused drugs like Vicodin and Percocet. Scientists have discovered that

Physical pain and social rejection share a neural process and subjective component that are experienced as distress." That neural process has been traced to the same part of the brain. They figure that if you blunt one, you blunt both. As they told LiveScience, "When people feel overwhelmed with uncertainty in life or distressed by a lack of purpose, what they're feeling may actually be painful distress ... We think that Tylenol is blocking existential unease in the same way it prevents pain, because a similar neurological process is responsible for both types of distress."

For those in the experiment who took Tylenol, their moral judgment appeared to be blunted! James Hamblin conservatively concludes, writing in The Atlantic,

acetaminophen indeed appears to be affecting people's perspectives.

Even though these changes in judgement are abstract and seemingly for the better, inclining people to benevolence and forgiveness, what other cognitive effects of acetaminophen might we yet discover? For the millions who take acetaminophen on a semiregular basis unaware that it might be confounding their value system, as well as the artists whose livelihoods are contingent on their work invoking profound existential angst, the question is not just academic.

Read more here: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/whats-tylenol-doing-to-our-minds/275101/