Into the Void

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey - whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself - is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. Is it possible that when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy? This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish - the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this - that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophreniam T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Burroughs memes

Thanks to mememachinego for this creepy video. When keepers at the Seattle Aquarium moved an octopus into a tank with sharks and other large fish, they hoped the octopus would be ok. They should have worried about the sharks.

As you can tell, I’ve been reading the feeds this morning and checking out some of the non-technical articles I might gloss over during the week. And just generally dicking around on the computer. And seriously boffing up the router settings. I’ve straightened that mess out. Bah, still haven’t convinced the wireless to play nice with my PDA/phone. Thank goodness for reset buttons. Got it working.

• You Passed 8th Grade Science

  Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

  Could
  You Pass 8th Grade Science?
• MSNBC Space News has an article called 7 myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster.
  What interested me is that I never even heard any of these myths. There was a brief reference to Richard Feynman’s statements as a member of the Challenger investigation board, but apparently they never read the article in which he blamed the tragedy on quality control. Yes, QC. As the shuttle program progressed the scientists and technicians became more blase about correcting wear-and-tear, and tended to treat necessary repairs as maintenance tasks. “Well, the motor fan blades were cracked last trip and they didn’t break…”
  I didn’t see the launch live. I only saw the endless replays of the explosion. I was working on telemetry equipment at Aydin Monitor Systems for Edwards AFB at the time so I’d been following the preparations. What a shock. I also had a nice little shuttle simulator for the [tag]C-64[/tag], and after that I couldn’t stand playing it because of the jolt at MECO.
  
• Thanks to OxDECAFBAD for turning me on to this soul-sucking gallery of Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine. Takes me back to my childhood.
  It reminded me a bit of a wonderful [tag]Bisquick[/tag] cookbook that my mom had when I was a little bugger and which I kept as a reminder of what not to cook. I’ve pasted in some of the bizarre little food drawings.
  My mom also had one of those “brand-name” cookbooks featuring such culinary delights as “Crown Roast of Hot Dog.” This little book did nothing at all to improve my mom’s dull English cooking.
  
• Hmmmm, Cingular is trying to trademark emoticons. Since despair.com has already trademarked the frownie I believe we can expect some fireworks.
• Everything you ever wanted to know about toilets in space, brought to you by the fine folks at NASA.
• The Beeb has announced that Doctor Who will be coming to the SciFi channel in March.
• I just knew it - cats cause mental illness.
• Apparently eating at night is a psychiatric disorder.
  

  The researchers found that night eating syndrome involves a disturbed circadian rhythm of food intake while circadian sleep rhythm remains normal.
  “The circadian rhythm of food intake is extremely disturbed and the timing is delayed by 4 or 5 hours compared to that in normal people,” Stunkard tells WebMD.
  According to the researchers, night eating syndrome “is the first clinical disorder to manifest different circadian rhythms of two biological systems.”

• The bible has been translated into SMS messages. Hope your plan includes free messaging.