Speaking of things to eagerly await, in the first of a five-part series, Mike Johnson at Modern Dragons speculates about gut flora and their possible influence on human mood and behavior:
I think that’s probably the case and, getting further afield, what I’d like to do is attempt to look into whether the changes in gut ecosystems caused by changes in eating habits and food manufacturing trends- aggregated over the 300 million people who live in America- could contribute to a stochastic change in national character. Perhaps a significant contributing factor to some of our institutional ills is the food we eat, the corresponding imbalance in gut flora which arises from eating such food, and the subtle yet powerful-in-aggregate dysfunctional personality changes that e.g., biologically-active metabolites of such non-symbiotic gut flora might cause.I sense some reader eyebrows being raised at this point– that bacteria could influence, let alone commonly influence, personality may seem quite a stretch. But consider the case of toxoplasma gondii (among other examples): it’s a protozoan parasite that spends part of its lifecycle in cats and part in other mammals, and shows clear signs of manipulating host behavior for its own ends. Infected rats, for instance, actually seek out the scent of cat urine, since when the rat gets eaten the toxoplasma can complete its lifecycle in the cat. What’s mind-boggling, though, is that humans who show tell-tale immunological signs of a past toxoplasma infection score statistically different on personality tests than do those who have not been infected (infected men tend to score higher in paranoia, whereas for women toxoplasmosis seems to lead to higher levels of social trust and sexual promiscuity).
