Cordyceps, the Carpenter Ant, and the Boundaries of the Self: The Strange Science of Zombie Fungi

“It is likely that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time that there have been minds to manipulate.”

“The mind is its own place,” Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” While this is psychologically true — the mind is, after all, how consciousness renders reality — it is not always physiologically true: The brain and body out of which the mind arises are a physical system, contiguous with every physical force and proc...