This is your brain on parasites :

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Title:

This is your brain on parasites :

This is your brain on parasites : how tiny creatures manipulate our behavior and shape society / Kathleen McAuliffe.

Title:

This is your brain on parasites : how tiny creatures manipulate our behavior and shape society

Author:

McAuliffe, Kathleen author

ISBN:

9780544192225

Publication Information:

Boston :

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

2016.

Physical Description:

268 pages, [16] pages of plates ; 24 cm

General Note:

"An Eamon Dolan book."

Abstract:

"Based on a wildly popular Atlantic article: an astonishing investigation into the world of microbes, and the myriad ways they control how other creatures -- including humans -- act, feel, and think As we are now discovering, parasites -- microbes that cannot thrive and reproduce without another organism as a host -- are shockingly sophisticated and extraordinarily powerful. In fact, a plethora of parasites affect our behavior in ways we have barely begun to understand. In this mind-bending book, McAuliffe reveals the eons-old war between parasites and other creatures that is playing out in our very own bodies. And more surprising still, she uncovers the decisive role that parasites may have played in the rise and demise of entire civilizations. Our obsession with cleanliness and our experience of disgust are both evolutionary tools for avoiding infection, but they evolved differently for different populations. Political, social, and religious differences among societies may be caused, in part, by the different parasites that prey on us. In the tradition of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, This Is Your Brain on Parasites is both a journey into cutting-edge science and a revelatory examination of what it means to be human. "-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Nervous system -- Diseases

Parasitology

Microbiology

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Library	Call Number	Location	Holdable	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Menasha	612.8 M11t	Adult Nonfiction	Book	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
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Summary

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures--including humans--think, feel, and act.

These tiny organisms can only live inside another animal, and as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey. With astonishing precision, parasites can coax rats to approach cats, spiders to transform the patterns of their webs, and fish to draw the attention of birds that then swoop down to feast on them.

We humans are hardly immune to the profound influence of parasites. Organisms we pick up from our own pets are strongly suspected of changing our personality traits and contributing to recklessness, impulsivity--even suicide. Microbes in our gut affect our emotions and the very wiring of our brains. Germs that cause colds and flu may alter our behavior even before symptoms become apparent.

Parasites influence our species on the cultural level too. As McAuliffe documents, a subconscious fear of contagion impacts virtually every aspect of our lives, from our sexual attractions and social circles to our morals and political views. Drawing on a huge body of research, she argues that our dread of contamination is an evolved defense against parasites--and a double-edged sword. The horror and revulsion we feel when we come in contact with people who appear diseased or dirty helped pave the way for civilization, but may also be the basis for major divisions in societies that persist to this day.

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, This Is Your Brain on Parasites is both a journey into cutting-edge science and a revelatory examination of what it means to be human.

Author Notes

KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE is a contributing editor to Discover. Her work has appeared in over a dozen national magazines, including Discover , the New York Times Magazine , Atlantic , and Smithsonian. From 1999 to 2006, she was also a health columnist for More. Her work has been published in Best American Science Writing, and has received several grants and awards, including a science writing fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. She has appeared numerous times on TV and radio, and was interviewed by To the Point, the nationally syndicated Osgood FIle, and other programs after her 2012 Atlantic feature How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy" became the second most widely read article in the magazine's history. McAuliffe lives in Miami with her husband-a research physicist-and her two children."

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Science journalist McAuliffe takes an "unabashedly parasite-centric view of the world" to suggest that perhaps microorganisms are actually the ones in control of human lives, with parasitic manipulation guiding human behavior and thoughts. Noting that correlation does not equal causation, McAuliffe reports on provocative studies that link contagious vectors-such as the feline-associated, behavior-changing Toxoplasma gondii, which was the subject of her virally popular article in the Atlantic-to mental illness and libido fluctuations, and others that link organisms thought of as symbionts, such as human gut bacteria, to obesity and personality. McAuliffe also presents some well-established yet still astonishing facts about neuroparasitology. The hairworm, for example, makes crickets behave erratically and head for water, leaving them easy prey, while the Ophiocordyceps fungus turns carpenter ants into "zombie ants." But by the book's end, she careens wildly toward biological determinism regarding a "behavioral immune system" that causes humans to shun the abnormal and unknown. She addresses studies linking visceral experiences of physical disgust with xenophobia and moral conservatism, and others that have connected living in an area prone to disease with developing a collectivist culture. McAuliffe presents her collected research-often from small, nearly anecdotal studies-less as fact than in a spirit of exploration. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpts

1: Before Parasites Were Cool It's not easy being a parasite. Sure, you get a free meal. But the life of a moocher still comes with plenty of stresses. You have to be able to adapt to the environment inside one, two, or, if you belong to a class of parasitic worms known as trematodes, three different hosts âe<-- âe The answer to that question is what set Janice Moore on her life's path. In 1971, she was a senior at Rice University in Houston sitting in an introductory course on parasitology taught by a titan in the field, Clark Read, a lanky man with a commanding presence and an odd style of lecturing. He would puff away on a cigarette and seemingly free-associate, drawing students into his passion with fascinating details about different species of parasites that he presented with no discernible regard for logic or order. But he was a gifted storyteller who could evoke the lives of parasites so richly that you could almost picture what it was like to be one. He also knew how to spin a good mystery, which was how he ensnared Moore. She couldn't imagine how to get an ant into a sheep's mouth in spite of Read's admonishment to "think like a trematode!" In fact, no one could, because the solution the parasite lit upon is absurdly improbable: It invades a region of the ant's brain that controls its locomotion and mouthparts. During the day, the infected insect behaves no differently than any other ant. But at night, it does not return to its colony; instead, it climbs to the top of a blade of grass and clamps onto it with its mandibles. There, it dangles in the air, waiting for a grazing sheep to come by and eat it. If that doesn't happen by the next morning, however, it returns to its colony. Why doesn't it just stay attached to the leaf? asked Read, scanning the classroom as if he expected his students to discern the trematode's logic. Because otherwise, he told his rapt audience, the ant will fry to death in the noonday sun âe<-- âe Read's tale stunned Moore. The trematode called to mind a comic-book arch villain who controls minds with a joystick, causing law-abiding citizens to rob banks and commit other crimes so the villain can take over the world. The report of the trematode's astonishing feat came from a German study done in the 1950s, but, thrilling Moore, Read had just learned of research being done on a different organism that was producing findings similar to the Germans'. The protagonist of this tale was a thorny-headed worm âe<-- âe

Introduction	p. 1
Chapter 1 Before Parasites Were Cool	p. 9
Chapter 2 Hitching a Ride	p. 25
Chapter 3 Zombified	p. 43
Chapter 4 Hypnotized	p. 57
Chapter 5 Dangerous Liaisons	p. 83
Chapter 6 Gut Feelings	p. 99
Chapter 7 My Microbes Made Me Fat	p. 111
Chapter 8 Healing Instinct	p. 123
Chapter 9 The Forgotten Emotion	p. 151
Chapter 10 Parasites and Prejudice	p. 165
Chapter 11 Parasites and Piety	p. 181
Chapter 12 The Geography of Thought	p. 205
Acknowledgments	p. 221
Notes	p. 225
Index	p. 253

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Bound With These Titles

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Excerpts

Excerpts

Table of Contents