Before everyone shouts that the correlation may be spurious, I would like to say that some drugs (e.g. Parkinson's disease drugs), can have significant psychological side-effects, like increasing impulsivity and reducing risk aversion for those who experience them. People leave their spouses, buy expensive cars, get tattoos, and yes, leave their jobs to pursue entrepreneurship.
My point is that it's not far fetch to link infection to impulse, cause infection may change the chemical functioning of the brain.
> Sam Bankman-Fried Confirmed He Wears an Emsam Patch. [...] The Emsam patch contains something called Selegiline, which was originally used primarily to treat Parkinson's.
MAO-B and A inhibitors (they inhibit the enzymes that break down dopamine, serotonin and other amines) are not too uncommon to be used as nootropics in the nootropic communities, and selegiline has probably some more nootropic effects. It is also used for ADHD. While definitely indication of risky behaviour (disrupting body's homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms is quite risky, people can die when taking this together with foods high in tyrosine) I doubt he used it specifically to increase impulsivity.
That doesn't sound smart at all. There are many safer ways of acting on the dopamine pathway(s) than directly going for L-dopa (which, unlike a lot of other substances, isn't rate limited by subsequent bioprocesses).
Neuroinflammation is directly behavior-modifying as I understand. Papers like this one are suuuuper interesting: “Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models” from 2017 by Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen and Russo.
("A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal")
My point is that it's not far fetch to link infection to impulse, cause infection may change the chemical functioning of the brain.