On happiness and mind control.

Many of us would like to feel happier.

In the United States, people are having sex less often. And between alcohol, marijuana, recreational painkillers – not to mention anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication – we take a lot of drugs.

Many of us work long hours at jobs we dislike so that we can afford to buy things that promise to fill some of the emptiness inside. The most lucrative businesses are advertising companies … one of which, Facebook, is designed to make you feel worse so that you’ll be more susceptible to its ads.

The suicide rate has been rising.

From Dan Diamond’s Forbes blog post
“Stopping The Growing Risk Of Suicide: How You Can Help.”

It might seem as though we don’t know how to make people happier. But, actually, we do.

Now, I know that I’ve written previously with bad medical advice, such as the suggestion that intentionally infecting yourself with the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii could make you happier. This parasite boosts dopamine levels in your brain (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that conveys feelings of pleasure and mirth) and makes you feel bolder (in controlled laboratory experiments, infected mice show less stress when making risky decisions, and observational data suggests the same to be true for infected humans). You also might become more attractive (infected rodents have more sex, and portrait photographs of infected human men are perceived as more dominant and masculine).

There are drawbacks to Toxoplasma infection, of course. Infected rodents are more likely to be killed by cats. Infected humans may become slower as well, both physically and intellectually. Toxoplasma forms cysts in your brain. It might increase the chance of developing schizophrenia. It can kill you if you’re immunocompromised. And the surest way to contract toxoplasmosis, if incidental exposure hasn’t already done it for you, is by eating cat excrement.

My advice today is different. No feces required!

And I’m not suggesting anything illegal. I mentioned, above, that people in the United States take a lot of drugs. Several of these boost dopamine levels in your brain. Cocaine, for instance, is a “dopamine re-uptake inhibitor,” ensuring that any momentary sensation of pleasure will linger, allowing you to feel happy longer.

But cocaine has a nasty side effect of leading to incarceration, especially if the local law enforcement officers decide that your epidermal melanin concentration is too high. And jail is not a happy place.

Instead, you could make yourself happier with a bit of at-home trepanation, followed by the insertion of an electrode into the nucleus accumbens of your brain. Now, I know that sounds risky, what with the nucleus accumbens being way down near the base of your brain. But your brain is rather squishy – although you’ll sheer some cells as you cram a length of conductive wire into your cranium, the hope is that many neurons will be pushed out of the way.

The nucleus accumbens tends to show high activity during pleasure. For instance, cocaine stimulates activity in this part of your brain. So does money — tell research subjects that they’ve won a prize and you’ll see this region light up. If rats are implanted with an electrode that lets them jolt their own nucleus accumbens by pushing a lever, they’ll do it over and over. Pressing that lever makes them happier than eating, or drinking water, or having sex. They’ll blissfully self-stimulate until they collapse. From James Olds’s Science paper, “Self-Stimulation of the Brain”:

If animals with electrodes in the hypothalamus were run for 24 hours or 48 hours consecutively, they continued to respond as long as physiological endurance permitted.

Perhaps I should have warned you – amateur brain modification would carry some risks. Even if you have the tools needed to drill into your own skull without contracting a horrible infection, you don’t want to boost your mood just to die of dehydration.

After all, happiness might have some purpose. There might be reasons why certain activities – like eating, drinking water, having sex … to say nothing of strolling outdoors, or volunteering to help others – make us feel happy. After discussing several case studies in their research article “How Happy Is Too Happy,” Matthis Synofzik, Thomas Schlaepfer, and Joseph Fins write that using deep brain stimulation for the “induction of chronic euphoria could also impair the person’s cognitive capacity to respond to reasons about which volitions and preferences are in his or her best interests.”

When an activity makes us feel happy, we’re likely to do it again. That’s how people manage to dedicate their lives to service. Or get addicted to drugs.

And it’s how brain stimulation could be used for mind control.

If you show me a syringe, I’ll feel nervous. I don’t particularly like needles. But if you display that same syringe to an intravenous drug user, you’ll trigger some of the rush of actually shooting up. The men in my poetry classes have said that they feel all tingly if they even see the word “needle” written in a poem.

For months or years, needles presaged a sudden flush of pleasure. That linkage was enough for their brains to develop a fondness for the needles themselves.

If you wanted to develop a taste for an unpalatable food, you could do the same thing. Like bittermelon – I enjoy bittermelons, which have a flavor that’s totally different from anything else I’ve ever eaten, but lots of people loathe them.

Still, if you used deep brain stimulation to trigger pleasure every time a person ate bittermelon, that person would soon enjoy it.

Bittermelon. Image by [cipher] in Tokyo, Japan on Wikimedia.

Or you could make someone fall in love.

Far more effective than any witch’s potion, that. Each time your quarry encounters the future beloved, crank up the voltage. The beloved’s presence will soon be associated with a sense of comfort and pleasure. And that sensation – stretched out for long enough that the pair can build a set of shared memories – is much of what love is.

Of course, it probably sounds like I’m joking. You wouldn’t really send jolts of electricity into the core of somebody’s brain so that he’d fall in love with somebody new … right?

Fifty years passed between the discovery of pleasure-inducing deep brain stimulation and its current use as a treatment for depression … precisely because one of the pioneering researchers decided that it was reasonable to use the electrodes as a love potion.

In 1972, Charles Moan and Robert Heath published a scientific paper titled “Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male.” Their study subject was a 24-year-old man who had been discharged from the military for homosexuality. Moan and Heath postulated that the right regimen of electrode stimulation – jolted while watching pornography, or while straddled by a female prostitute whom Moan and Heath hired to visit their lab – might lead this young man to desire physical intimacy with women.

Moan and Heath’s paper is surprisingly salacious:

After about 20 min of such interaction she begun [sic] to mount him, and though he was somewhat reticent he did achieve penetration. Active intercourse followed during which she had an orgasm that he was apparently able to sense. He became very excited at this and suggested that they turn over in order that he might assume the initiative. In this position he often paused to delay orgasm and to increase the duration of the pleasurable experience. Then, despite the milieu [inside a lab, romping under the appraising eyes of multiple fully-clothed scientists] and the encumbrance of the electrode wires, he successfully ejaculated. Subsequently, he expressed how much he had enjoyed her and how he hoped that he would have sex with her again in the near future.

The science writer Lone Frank recently published The Pleasure Shock, a meticulously researched book in which she concludes that Heath was unfairly maligned because most people in the 1970s were reticent to believe that consciousness arose from the interaction of perfectly ordinary matter inside our skulls. Changing a person’s mood with electricity sounds creepy, especially if you think that a mind is an ethereal, inviolable thing.

But it isn’t.

The mind, that is. The mind isn’t an ethereal, inviolable thing.

Zapping new thoughts into somebody’s brain, though, is definitely still understood (by me, at least) to be creepy.

Discussing the contemporary resurgence of electrical brain modification, Frank writes that:

In 2013, economist Ernst Fehr of Zurich University experimented with transcranial direct current stimulation, which sends a weak current through the cranium and is able to influence activity in areas of the brain that lie closest to the skull.

Fehr had sixty-three research subjects available. They played a money game in which they each were given a sum and had to take a position on how much they wanted to give an anonymous partner. In the first round, there were no sanctions from the partner, but in the second series of experiments, the person in question could protest and punish the subject.

There were two opposing forces at play. A cultural norm for sharing fairly – that is, equally – and a selfish interest in getting as much as possible for oneself. Fehr and his people found that the tug of war could be influenced by the right lateral prefrontal cortex. When the stimulation increased the brain activity, the subjects followed the fairness norm to a higher degree, while they were more inclined to act selfishly when the activity was diminished.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking thing was that the research subjects did not themselves feel any difference. When they were asked about it, they said their idea of fairness had not changed, while the selfishness of their behavior had changed.

Apparently, you can fiddle with subtle moral parameters in a person without the person who is manipulated being any the wiser.

The human brain evolved to create elaborate narratives that rationalize our own actions. As far as our consciousness is concerned, there’s no difference between telling a just so story about a decision we made un-aided, versus explaining a “choice” that we were guided toward by external current.

Frank believes that Heath was a brilliant doctor who sincerely wanted to help patients.

When bioethicist Carl Elliott reviewed The Pleasure Shock for the New York Review of Books, however, he pointed out that even – perhaps especially – brilliant doctors who sincerely want to help patients can stumble into rampantly unethical behavior.

The problem isn’t just that Heath pulsed electricity into the brain of a homosexual man so that he could ejaculate while fooling around with a woman. Many of Heath’s patients – who, it’s worth acknowledging, had previously been confined to nightmarish asylums – developed infections from their electrode implantations and died. Also, Heath knowingly promoted fraudulent research findings because he’d staked his reputation on a particular theory and was loathe to admit that he’d been wrong (not that Heath has been the only professor to perpetuate falsehoods this way).

Elliott concludes that:

Heath was a physician in love with his ideas.

Psychiatry has seen many men like this. Heath’s contemporaries include Ewen Cameron, the CIA-funded psychiatrist behind the infamous “psychic driving” studies at McGill University, in which patients were drugged into comas and subjected to repetitive messages or sounds for long periods, and Walter Freeman, the inventor of the icepick lobotomy and its most fervent evangelist.

These men may well have started with the best of intentions. But in medical research, good intentions can lead to the embalming table. All it takes is a powerful researcher with a surplus of self-confidence, a supportive institution, and a ready supply of vulnerable subjects.

Heath had them all.

It’s true that using an electrode to stimulate the nucleus accumbens inside your brain can probably make you feel happier. By way of contrast, reading essays like this one make most people feel less happy.

Sometimes it’s good to feel bad, though.

As Elliott reminds us, a lot of vulnerable people were abused in this research. A lot of vulnerable people are still treated with cavalier disregard, especially when folks with psychiatric issues are snared by our country’s criminal justice system. And the torments that we dole upon non-human animals are even worse.

Consider this passage from Frans De Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug, discussing empathy:

[University of Chicago researcher Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal] placed one rat in an enclosure, where it encountered a small transparent container, a bit like a jelly jar. Squeezed inside it was another rat, locked up, wriggling in distress.

Not only did the free rat learn how to open a little door to liberate the other, but she was remarkably eager to do so. Never trained on it, she did so spontaneously.

Then Bartal challenged her motivation by giving her a choice between two containers, one with chocolate chips – a favorite food that they could easily smell – and another with a trapped companion. The free rat often rescued her companion first, suggesting that reducing her distress counted more than delicious food.

Is it possible that these rats liberated their companions for companionship? While one rat is locked up, the other has no chance to play, mate, or groom. Do they just want to make contact? While the original study failed to address this question, a different study created a situation where rats could rescue each other without any chance of further interaction. That they still did so confirmed that the driving force is not a desire to be social.

Bartal believes it is emotional contagion: rats become distressed when noticing the other’s distress, which spurs them into action.

Conversely, when Bartal gave her rats an anxiety-reducing drug, turning them into happy hippies, they still knew how to open the little door to reach the chocolate chips, but in their tranquil state, they had no interest in the trapped rat. They couldn’t care less, showing the sort of emotional blunting of people on Prozac or pain-killers.

The rats became insensitive to the other’s agony and ceased helping.

You could feel happier. We know enough to be able to reach into your mind and change it. A miniscule flow of electrons is enough to trigger bliss.

But should we do it? Or use our unhappiness as fuel to change the world instead?

On mind control versus body control

In jail last week, we found ourselves discussing mind control. Ants that haul infected comrades away from the colony – otherwise, the zombie will climb above the colony before a Cordyceps fruiting body bursts from its spine, raining spores down onto everyone below, causing them all to die.

Several parasites, including Toxoplasma gondii, are known to change behaviors by infecting the brain. I’ve written about Toxo and the possibility of using cat shit as a nutritional supplement previously – this parasite seems to make its victims happier (it secretes a rate-limiting enzyme for dopamine synthesis), braver, and more attractive.

I told the guys that I used to think mind control was super-terrifying – suddenly your choices are not quite your own! – but I’ve since realized that body control is even more terrifying.

We’d thought that each fungus that makes ants act funny was taking over their brains. But we were wrong. The Ophiocordyceps fungus is not controlling the brains of its victims – instead, the fungus spreads through the body and connects directly to muscle fibers. The fungus leaves an ant’s brain intact but takes away its choices, contracting muscles to make the ant do its bidding while the poor creature can only gaze in horror at what it’s being forced to do.

If a zombie master corrupts your brain and forces you to obey, at least you won’t be there to watch. Far worse to be trapped behind the window of your eyes, unable to control the actions that your shell is taking in the world.

A sense of free will is so important to our well-being that human brains seem to include modules that graft a perception of volition onto our reflex actions. Because it takes so long for messages to be relayed to the central processing unit of our brains and back outward to our limbs, our bodies often act before we’ve had a chance to consciously think about what we’re doing. Our actions typically begin a few hundred milliseconds before we subjectively experience a decision.

Then, the brain’s storytelling function kicks into gear – we explain to ourselves why we chose to do the thing that we’ve already begun doing.

If something goes wrong at that stage, we feel awful. People report that their bodies have “gone rogue.” If you use a targeted magnetic pulse to sway a right-handed person to do a simple task left-handed, that person probably won’t notice anything amiss. The storytelling part of our brain hardly cares what we do – it can come up with a compelling rationalization for almost any action.

“Well, I chose to use my left hand because … “

But if you use a targeted magnetic pulse to incapacitate the brain’s internal storyteller? The sensation apparently feels like demonic possession. Our own choices are nightmarish when severed from a story.

On a guaranteed basic income.

For several months, a friend and I have volleyed emails about a sprawling essay on consciousness, free will, and literature.

The essay will explore the idea that humans feel we have free will because our conscious mind grafts narrative explanations (“I did this because…”) onto our actions. It seems quite clear that our conscious minds do not originate all the choices that we then take credit for. With an electroencephalogram, you could predict when someone is about to raise an arm, for instance, before the person has even consciously decided to do so.

Which is still free will, of course. If we are choosing an action, it hardly matters whether our conscious or subconscious mind makes the choice. But then again, we might not be “free.” If an outside observer were able to scan a person’s brain to sufficient detail, all of that person’s future choices could probably be predicted (as long as our poor study subject is imprisoned in an isolation chamber). Our brains dictate our thoughts and choices, but these brains are composed of salts and such that follow the same laws of physics as all other matter.

That’s okay. It is almost certainly impossible that any outside observer could (non-destructively) scan a brain to sufficient detail. If quantum mechanical detail is implicated in the workings of our brains, it is definitely impossible: quantum mechanical information can’t be duplicated. Wikipedia has a proof of this “no cloning theorem” involving lots of bras and kets, but this is probably unreadable for anyone who hasn’t done much matrix math. An easier way to reason through it might be this: if you agree with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the idea that certain pairs of variables cannot be simultaneously measured to arbitrary precision, the no cloning theorem has to be true. Otherwise you could simply make many copies of a system and measure one variable precisely for each copy.

So, no one will ever be able to prove to me that I am not free. But let’s just postulate, for a moment, that the laws of physics that, so far, have correctly described the behavior of all matter outside my brain also correctly describe the movement of matter inside my brain. In which case, those inviolable laws of physics are dictating my actions as I type this essay. And yet, I feel free. Each word I type feels like a choice. My brain is constantly concocting a story that explains why I am choosing each word.

Does the same neural circuitry that deludes me into feeling free – that has evolved, it seems, to constantly sculpt narratives that make sense of our actions, the same way our dreams often burgeon to include details like a too hot room or a ringing telephone – also give me the ability to write fiction?

In other words, did free will spawn The Iliad?

The essay is obviously rather speculative. I’m incorporating relevant findings from neuroscience, but, as I’ve mentioned, it’s quite likely that no feasible experiments could ever test some of these ideas.

The essay is also unfinished. No laws of physics forbid me from finishing it. I’m just slow because K & I have two young kids. At the end of each day, once our 2.5 year old and our 3 month old are finally asleep, we exhaustedly glance at each other and murmur, “Where did the time go?”

But I am very fortunate to have a collaborator always ready to nudge me back into action. My friend recently sent me an article by Tim Christiaens on the philosophy of financial markets. He sent it because the author argues – correctly, in my opinion – that for many stock market actions it’s sensible to consider the Homo sapiens trader + the nearby multi-monitor computer as a single decision-making entity. Tool-wielding is known to change our brains – even something as simple as a pointing stick alters our self-perception of our reach. And the algorithms churned through by stock traders’ computers are incredibly complex. There’s not a good way for the human to check a computer’s results; the numbers it spits out have to be trusted. So it seems reasonable to consider the two together as a single super-entity that collaborates in choosing when to buy or sell. If something in the room has free will, it would be the tools & trader together.

Which isn’t as weird as it might initially sound. After all, each Homo sapiens shell is already a multi-species super-entity. As I type this essay, the choice of which word to write next is made inside my brain, then signals are sent through my nervous system to my hands and fingers commanding them to tap the appropriate keys. The choice is influenced by all the hormones and signaling molecules inside my brain. It so happens that bacteria and other organisms living in my body excrete signaling molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier and influence my choice.

The milieu of intestinal bacteria living inside each of us gets to vote on our moods and actions. People with depression seem to harbor noticeably different sets of bacteria than people without. And it seems quite possible that parasites like Toxoplasma gondii can have major influences on our personalities.

Indeed, in his article on stock markets, Christiaens mentions the influence of small molecules on financial behavior, reporting that “some researchers study the trader’s body through the prism of testosterone levels as an indicator of performance. It turns out that traders who regularly visit prostitutes consequently have higher testosterone levels and outperform other traders.”

Now, I could harp on the fact that we designed these markets. That they could have been designed in many different ways. And that it seems pretty rotten to have designed a system in which higher testosterone (and the attendant impulsiveness and risky decision-making) would correlate with success. Indeed, a better, more equitable market design would probably quell the performance boost of testosterone.

I could rant about all that. But I won’t. Instead I’ll simply mention that Toxoplasma seems to boost testosterone. Instead of popping into brothels after work, traders could snack on cat shit.

On the topic of market design, Christiaens also includes a lovely description of the interplay between the structure of our economy and the ways that people are compelled to live:

The reason why financial markets are able to determine the viability of lifestyles is because most individuals and governments are indebted and therefore need a ‘creditworthy’ reputation. As the [U.S.] welfare state declined during the 1980s, access to credit was facilitated in order to sustain high consumption, avoid overproduction and stimulate economic growth. For Lazzarato [a referenced writer], debt is not an obligation emerging from a contract between free and equal individuals, but is from the start an unequal power relation where the creditor can assert his force over the debtor. As long as he is indebted, the latter’s rights are virtually suspended. For instance, a debtor’s property rights can be superseded when he fails to reimburse the creditor by evicting him from his home or selling his property at a public auction. State violence is called upon to force non-creditworthy individuals to comply. We [need] not even jump to these extreme cases of state enforcement to see that debt entails a disequilibrium of power. Even the peaceful house loan harbors a concentration of risk on the side of the debtor. When I take a $100,000 loan for a house that, during an economic crisis, loses its value, I still have to pay $100,000 plus interests to the bank. The risk of a housing crash is shifted to the debtor’s side of the bargain. During a financial crisis this risk concentration makes it possible for the creditors to demand a change of lifestyle from the debtor, without the former having to reform themselves.

Several of my prior essays have touched upon the benefits of a guaranteed basic income for all people, but I think this paragraph is a good lead-in for a reprise. As Christiaens implies, there is violence behind all loans – both the violence that led to initial ownership claims and the threat of state violence that compels repayment. Not that I’m against the threat of state violence to compel people to follow rules in general – without this threat we would have anarchy, in which case actual violence tends to predominate over the threat of incipient enforcement.

We all need wealth to live. After all, land holdings are wealth, and at the very least each human needs access to a place to collect fresh water, a place to grow food, a place to stand and sleep. But no one is born wealthy. A fortunate few people receive gifts of wealth soon after birth, but many people foolishly choose to be born to less well-off parents.

The need for wealth curtails the choices people can make. They need to maintain their “creditworthiness,” as in Christiaens’s passage, or their hire-ability. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and, starting from zero, we rely on others choosing to give it to us. Yes, often in recompense for labor, but just because you are willing and able to do a form of work does not mean that anyone will pay you for it.

Unless people are already wealthy enough to survive, they are at the mercy of others choosing to give them things. Employers are not forced to trade money for salaried working hours. And there isn’t wealth simply waiting around to be claimed. It all starts from something – I’d argue that all wealth stems originally from land holdings – but the world’s finite allotment of land was claimed long ago through violence.

A guaranteed basic income would serve to acknowledge the brutal baselessness of those initial land grabs. It is an imperfect solution, I know. It doesn’t make sense to me that everyone’s expenses should rise whenever a new child is born. But a world where people received a guaranteed basic income would be better than one without. The unluckily-born populace would be less compelled to enter into subjugating financial arrangements. We’d have less misery – feeling poor causes a lot of stress. We’d presumably have less crime and drug abuse, too, for similar reasons.

And, of course, less hypocrisy. It’s worth acknowledging that our good fortune comes from somewhere. No one among us created the world.

On humor (and bad medical advice).

Back when she lived in town with us, Auntie Ferret would often accompany me to the public library to work. We would sit in the linoleum tiled area near the magazines. I would type. She would draw.

Of course, the process of creating artwork, at least in every field I know about, seems to involve several-fold more time spent taking in new information, researching, appreciating at other people’s work, etc., than time actually spent creating. In my case, the timing usually breaks down to about two hours per day spent typing, six hours spent reading. Auntie Ferret, because hers is a more time-intensive craft, probably spends equal time drawing and reading.

All well and good. The problem, from the perspective of someone sitting near her to work, is that Auntie Ferret is a very effulgent reader. Which can be distracting. She occasionally saunters to the magazine rack to scoop up another armful of bodybuilding magazines, then chortles with gusto as she read them. And then, of course, she reads the passage aloud.

A typical conversation between us:

FC: Huh. Yeah. That’s pretty horrible. But I should get back to work.

AF: Okay, okay… but wait! Wait, listen to this. On ViperPRO, I was so vasculated I thought I’d EXPLODE!

An hour might pass and I’d get nothing done. Whereas the time qualified as research for her. Her webcomic features a hearty dose of meat-head satire.

Eventually I learned my lesson. No, not to sit somewhere else, although I imagine that’s what a more timid ferretwrangler might do. Instead I realized that I should incorporate her research into my own work.

***********************

THIS SHIT SAVED MY LOVE LIFE

There’s lots of dating advice out there. Tips on what stereo system to buy, which records to play, what wine to drink, which celebrity cologne smells like you. Lifting guides for omnivores and for vegans and for the gluten-free, for those who augment their training stacks with GHB and those who wanna stick with anabolic steroids alone. And detailed instructions for how to act — secret secrets of the world’s best pickup artists! — although until they invent a hieroglyphic language that women can’t read, publication inevitably weakens those once-secret strategies.

I read the guides. Seemed like a lot of common sense. Maintain eye contact. Ply her with drinks. Initiate unwanted touching. Belittle her relentlessly. Act like the abusive ex-boyfriend you’d someday like to be. But, let’s face it, some of us are sensitive dudes. When there’s an opportunity for a killer neg, we compliment our interlocutor on her witty banter. Then wreck the moment when we ask before lunging in for a snog.

Does this sound like you? Striking out cause you don’t have that flirtatious take-no-prisoners attitude? Are you thinking to yourself, sensitive dudes would enjoy the occasional sexual encounter, too?

Well, I am here for you, man. I was in that situation. But I fixed it. This shit worked for me, and I swear it can work for you.

You need to eat more cat feces.

Not for the fun of it, mind you. You need to eat cat feces to increase your exposure to Toxoplasma gondii. It’s a microscopic parasite that evolved to control mammalian behavior.

Maybe that sounds bad. Parasitic mind control? That’s some freaky shit, right? But, let me ask you: do you wanna get laid, or not?

See, there’s mind control like Frank Sinatra zonked by a playing card and realizing it’s time to blow somebody’s brains out, and then there’s mind control like toxo. What’s it do? It makes you bolder. More confident. It boosts testosterone. Makes you happier, by helping you synthesize dopamine. Ever wonder why those gel-heads always duck to the back and snort coke before they make a move? Dopamine. But with toxo, you won’t need blow.

Dudes with toxoplasmosis are taller that dudes without. They’re consistently rated more attractive on Tinder-style image-only surveys. Ingest enough of this parasite to get cysts throughout your brain and you’ll be a handsome, aggressive, risk-taking sex machine. And, get this: toxo makes you smarter, too!

(Note: to date, intellectual enhancement has been observed only in females infected with Toxoplasma gondii. In males, the opposite effect is seen. Toxo invariably makes males into slower, dumber studmuffins. But, you’re still with me, right? What good is your brain if you’re sitting up alone at night, staring at a computer screen, not getting laid?)

Of course, not every cat has toxo. If you adopt a dud, you’re wasting your time. Masticating those slimy colon-prints for nothing. Which, right, here’s something else you should know: cranberry juice. Nothing else washes out the taste. Even cranberry juice doesn’t work that well.

Eat a few scoops of feces from some defective no-parasite cat, let me tell you, you’re gonna be pissed.

That’s why my little brother and I are starting this company where we’ll ship you fresh excrement from known toxoplasma-bearing felines. Each turd guaranteed >100 cyst-forming-units or your money back!, that’s what the packaging will say. We’re not open for business yet — FDA approval is such a bitch that we might give up on it altogether and market our product as a nutritional supplement — but we’ve already registered the domain name www.toxrocks.com.

Check us out. Like our shit on Facebook. And if you can’t wait till our little operation is up and running, go find yourself a parasite-riddled cat and start gobbling that shit up. Which is advice I’m willing to give gratis, cause I care about my fellow man.

*************

Doling out terrible medical advice isn’t necessarily funny… what if people actually follow your advice? But my thinking is, the world’s full of medical advice a good deal more harmful than this. And that’s all given sincerely. At the playground one day, a mother nodded approvingly at my daughter’s bare feet and told me, “It’s good you’re letting her get rid of some of those excess electrons.”

I was puzzled. Later I found out that some people believe that wearing shoes all the time makes them build up an appreciable electric charge.

Or the bodybuilding magazines.

Interspersed with articles like a dude recounting the time he tackled his brown-skinned buddy on New Year’s because the buddy was counting down in a foreign language and so dude thought he was a terrorist (hilarious, bro!) are advertisements for all variety of untested chemicals. Or there’s the self-generated schemes, like the claim, “I’ve got a pitbull and he’s f___in’ ripped. And I figured, he looks like that on dogfood? So that’s all I eat now, too.”

Um, I’m gonna go stand over there now, thank you.

Plus, I think it makes a difference whom bad advice is targeted toward. I’m not a huge fan of machismo bodybuilding culture. And I don’t know if you’ve seen many modern dating guides (a la Neil Strauss’s The Game, or the sort of thing that won’t be funded through Kickstarter ever again), but I think it’s reasonable to suggest to readers of such guides that they oughta eat more cat feces.

On toxoplasma.

I was talking to K and she pointed out that I missed the point of this whole “internet” thing. Apparently the goal of writing for the internet is not to sound like a pedantic stuff-bucket? This is something I hadn’t yet realized – I mostly use the internet to watch videos of Louis Scott Vargas playing Magic cards, since I don’t have much time to play myself these days.

So she told me, you should write this next thing as though you’re just writing an email to somebody, telling them some weird stuff about toxoplasma. And, yeah, put in references. But you’re not writing a critical essay here. Even if you were, I’m not sure you’d want to sound so stiff.

What can I say: I’m just a real formal dude? But here goes: wacky information about toxoplasma. Which I was researching as part of a general interest in mind control – the book has a fair bit about identity and how your brain works, so the idea that a parasite can exert a big influence on (mouse, documented in controlled studies, and human, possibly, suggested by observational studies comparing otherwise similar people who are and are not infected) the mammalian brain seemed pretty wild.

So, what does toxoplamsa do?

Well, fine: I guess it might be worthwhile to mention briefly what toxoplasma is. Parasite. Forms cysts in the brain. Lives part of its life cycle in a variety of mammals, including mice and humans, and part of its life cycle only in cat gut: it can’t complete the whole cycle without getting into a cat. It can also be transmitted from mothers to unborn children, and probably from males to females during sex.

In rats, toxoplasma makes its host less afraid of cat smell. If you compare the amount of time spent exploring a sandy maze dribbled with rabbit urine to a sandy maze dribbled with cat urine, a normal rat will spend most of its time in the rabbit area. A rat with a chronic toxoplasma infection will hang out in the cat section.

So that seems normal enough, right? The parasite has to get into cats, it makes rats not fear cats. Or at least stop avoiding cat smells. Which in theory should make the rat more likely to be gobbled up.

But it’s not just a change in response to cat smells. Rats infected with toxoplasma behave more recklessly in general – one test you can use is “open arm exploration,” which is less grisly than it might sound. Build a play space with a roof over some parts and no roof over others, and monitor the fraction of time that the rat spends in the open area. Theoretically being out in the open should make the rat feel scared, so it won’t do it much. A toxoplasma-infected rat will hang out in the open more. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that the parasite increases dopamine production in the brain – this is speculation, but perhaps the extra dopamine makes exploration more pleasurable, and therefore worth doing even when there are risks involved.

And here’s one last set of bonus curiosities – wacky things to consider for a parasite that seems to be sexually transmitted (which I guess I didn’t actually explain above. Sexual transmission seems to happen in humans, but hasn’t been experimentally verified because that would be evil, and definitely can occur in dogs, goats, sheep… ). Would it be reasonable to expect that the parasite would increase a male carrier’s chance of sexual coupling? Perhaps, right? But this is difficult (but not impossible, obviously) to assess – I’m no expert in rodent attractiveness. Are you?

The goofy thing is, toxoplasma can infect a wide variety of mammals. Not just rats. And mammals are pretty similar to each other. Toxoplasma presumably only evolved to control rats, because any particular toxoplasma gene requires ingestion by a cat in order to propagate. But some of the mechanisms that toxoplasma evolved in order to manipulate rats may well function in other species: it seems to have an effect on the perception of cat urine smell in humans. And infected human males are taller and reputedly better-looking than uninfected males, presumably due to higher testosterone levels. Perhaps the same mechanism makes male rats appear more alluring?

Still, toxoplasmosis is a disease. People can get sick and die from it, especially babies and AIDS patients. But other than that whole “risk of death” thing, problematic, sure, the next biggest negative consequence of toxoplasma infection is that it seems to increase your chances of being eaten by a cat. Especially if you are a rat. Slower reaction times, sunnier outlook on life with that increased dopamine, less risk aversion. Perhaps a bit more fooling around, although that’s not really related to being eaten, that might be an evolved consequence of the potential for sexual transmission of the infection.

But, weighing all of that, there is a chance that you, if you are a human male reading this, unlikely to be eaten by a cat, might want to be infected by toxoplasma. Personally I don’t – I find the whole parasitic mind control thing creepy – but it’s not as though there are zero traits that could be considered positive externalities. If you are a human female reading this, then, yes, there is a chance that the infection could be passed to a fetus if you ever happen to want biological children. But there is also observational data suggesting that toxoplasma infection increases female intelligence (it is suggested that the infection makes men less intelligent – more daring, more sexually alluring… dumber. Can’t have everything, can you?).

Anyway, that’s some information about toxoplasma. What a wacky little protist.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: toxoplasma

On happiness and mind control.

On mind control versus body control

On humor (and bad medical advice).

On toxoplasma.