Cat parasite could alter human behavior

03 Aug 06
Science, Strange Stuff

Have a cat? You could be infected with a bacteria that alters some of your instinctual or personality traits. The bacteria in question, Toxoplasma Gondii, in it’s normal life cycle affects the behaviors of small mammals that eat cat poo. The change is so that the mammals become less fearful so that they are more likely to be eaten by larger mammals, thus begining the cycle over again and spreading the parasite.

In cats it works kind of like a symbiote, in that when it’s working as it should it makes normal cat prey more easily catchable by cats. The study linked above is looking for correlations on overall cultural attitudes in populations with large infection rates.

This strikes very close to a lot of theories on how various bacteria can drastically affect not only our physical health, but mental as well. One of my favourite authors, Greg Bear, wrote a sci-fi book on this exact concept.