Parasites That Brainwash Their Host (opens in new tab)

Cysticercosis (pork tapeworm) can cause marked personality changes in humans when cysts form in the brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysticercosis

hmm, no comments yet? I'm assuming its one of those articles that speaks for itself. I know I read it last year, but watching it/reading it all over again was just as fascinating. The fact that similar proteins were used in the fungi, which coordinated with the actual organism was pretty amazing. It's almost as if evolution hacked itself to brainwash an organism. Kind of nuts...

Gross. This stuff's used in Chinese medicine. My parents have a friend who drinks a tea made from this fungus.

This is an awesome example, as the article says, of the extended phenotype of Prof. Richard Dawkins. The genes of the worm parasite for example, produce proteins which manipulate the central nervous system of the grasshopper, ergo, one has the genes of one organism affecting the behavior of another organism. I'm a big Dawkins fan, ever since I got 'The Selfish Gene'. I am particularly intrigued by the ability of the parasite to escape once its host has been preyed upon, so if a frog eats a grasshopper that has a worm in it, the worm can escape both the carcass of the grasshopper and the frog. In the end, the grasshopper becomes nothing more or less than the worm's mechanism of replication. One could view this as a restricted class of cases, however, I think one can generalize this by saying as some do, that in fact all life from parasites to ourselves is simply a form of intermediaries to preserve a relatively restricted set of phenotypes, i.e., we are indeed, like the grasshopper, "gene carrying robots". Of course I think I take a certain geeky pleasure from this knowledge, to be able to disabuse people of their quaint, deluded notions of life having mystical attributes, when in fact it is finally speaking a fancy chemical process brought about to preserve genomes, this, and nothing more! :-)

Robert Sapolsky has a fascinating article on this topic called "Bugs in the Brain." I couldn't remember the article title, but I just had to google for the terms:

sapolsky french kiss polar bear

and that did it. Read the article and find out why. It's classic Sapolsky.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bugs-in-the-brain

Could someone have said "that page starts off with a huge close up of an insect"? I freaked as soon as it popped up and had to close my eyes.