DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook.

I don’t know — he certainly looks to me like a kook.

Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Look at some of the things cats do on YouTube.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes.

You know how pregnant women are, rooting around in cats’ litter boxes all the time. (Doesn’t ‘T. Gondii’ sound like a rap singer?)

T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage.

I guess homosexuals are cat people. Who knew?

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents.

Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt. (See above.)

He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Perhaps it even explains how Obama got elected President. Lord knows we could use a scientific explanation for that one.

T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal

And that would explain the success of Bill Clinton, If You Know What I Mean And I Think You Do. This theory is looking better and better.

The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.

And that’s not to mention college students. You can’t tell me that there isn’t some sort of parasitic mind control going on there.

Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.

Any resemblance to the effect of Unions on Congressmen is purely coincidental, of course.

Americans will be happy to hear that the parasite resides in far fewer of them, though a still substantial portion: 10 to 20 percent.

Ah. Undecided voters. It all fits.

Researchers had already observed a few peculiarities about rodents with T. gondii that bolstered Flegr’s theory. The infected rodents were much more active in running wheels than uninfected rodents were, suggesting that they would be more-attractive targets for cats, which are drawn to fast-moving objects

Compare the relationship between small business owners and government. Frightening.

Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

Cat people. I’m tellin’ ya….

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2012 at 09:53 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.