This Is Your Brain on Parasites Quotes

“Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Save for the ancient Egyptians, he found, virtually no one kept cats as pets until the latter part of the 1700s. The first people to embrace the practice “were poets—avant-garde, left-wing types in Paris and London, and it just came to be the thing to do.” They called it the “cat craze,” and coinciding with it, the incidence of schizophrenia rose sharply.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties or invite a bunch of people over,” reported Reiber.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“To varying degrees, scientists now suspect, intestinal microbes influence whether you’re happy or sad, anxious or calm, energetic or sluggish, and, by signaling the brain when you’ve had enough to eat, perhaps even whether you’re fat or thin.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Flegr told me he himself had just completed a study on the same topic that exploited brain-imaging technology not available in Jírovec’s day. When we were seated again in his office, he handed me a copy of the newly published paper. Only forty-four people with schizophrenia participated in the trial, but small as it was, there was nothing ambiguous about the results. Based on MRI scans, twelve of them had missing gray matter in parts of their cerebral cortex—a puzzling but not uncommon feature of the disease—and they alone had the parasite. I shot him a raised-eyebrow look that said Yikes! and he replied, “Jiří had the same response.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“In contrast to uninfected people, both men and women with the protozoan were much more likely to believe that they could be controlled through hypnosis. They also were far more inclined to report reacting slowly or passively to imminent threats and experiencing little or no fear in dangerous situations.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Those who harbored the parasite had significantly slower reaction times. Closer analysis of the data revealed that infected people’s performance began to deteriorate a few minutes into the task as their attention began to wander—an observation that set him thinking about whether they might be a danger behind the wheel of a car. Safe driving, after all, requires constant vigilance and a quick response to changing road conditions.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Perhaps, for example, a better understanding of the odors that stir insect pests into a feeding frenzy might suggest how to combat them with a subversive form of aromatherapy—a trap consisting of fragrances more attractive to mosquitoes than the human body’s bouquet. Or knowledge of the genes a parasite activates to enhance a mosquito’s sensitivity to human odor might suggest a way to block its functioning, cutting the insect off from the world of scents—the bug equivalent of a person being rendered blind or deaf.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“To figure out how the parasite could coax its host into acting so imprudently, he and graduate student Jenny Shaw analyzed the neurochemistry of infected fish. They found that the parasite was disrupting the regulation of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that influences the anxiety level of many animals, including humans (the popular antidepressant Prozac increases serotonin levels in the brain).”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“An outstanding example is the flatworm Leucochloridium, a favorite of parasitologists since the 1930s for reasons that will soon become obvious. The parasite replicates inside a bird’s digestive system and gets excreted in its waste, so”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“By tinkering with the settings of the cricket’s visual system, he believes, the worm mesmerizes its host. It’s effectively whispering to the insect, “Go toward the light.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“An undiscovered universe of animal behavior will yet be traced to parasites. Their meddling, in her view, is just harder to prove in some species than others.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Predators, in her view, may not always be the supreme hunters nature documentaries suggest they are. A significant portion of their catch of the day may be low-hanging fruit brought within their reach courtesy of parasites.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Rather, it appears that disgust sensitivity is related to a conservatism across a wide variety of cultures, geographic regions, and political systems.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“And in 2014, anti-immigration websites and even some U.S. congressional representatives warned that the stream of Latin American refugees flooding the nation’s southern border might infect citizens with Ebola—and this despite the fact that not a single case of the disease had occurred south of Texas.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Clay is especially valuable to rats, she reported, as those animals can’t vomit. When poisoned with lithium chloride by experimenters, they immediately eat clay if given the chance and are presumed to do the same when their gastric upset is caused by pathogens. People have been consuming clay since at least as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“The leaves they choose always are covered in indigestible hairs, and the animals never chew them, as they would food, but rather swallow the leaves whole—sometimes as many as a hundred in one bout. All that roughage, Huffman believes, dramatically accelerates the movement of food through the GI tract, purging them of at least two species of parasitic worms.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Babies delivered by C-section into the sterile hands of a surgeon have fewer encounters with their mothers’ microbiomes in the critical early period when gut populations are being established. And newborns fed formula miss out on hundreds of microbial strains in their mothers’ breast milk.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“After the mother’s water breaks, microbes lining her vaginal canal jump aboard the infant with each contraction. From that moment forward, each of us becomes a magnet for microbes.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“An estimated 10 to 30 percent of people in North America and Europe are infected with the worm’s larvae, and as much as 40 percent of the populations of some poor countries.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Malaria, despite mountains of money invested in vaccines and public-health measures to counter it, still afflicts 214 million people in ninety-seven countries”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“In medieval times, one-third of Europe’s population was decimated by the bubonic plague. Within a few centuries of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas had been wiped out by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other germs brought in by European invaders and colonists. More people died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic than were killed in the trenches of World War I. Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Vast populations in parasitic hot zones are without hospitals, doctors, drugs, or surgical equipment. Meanwhile, often directed at the very same underserved regions, wealthy countries are throwing billions of dollars into campaigns aimed at containing wars ignited by ethnic hatred and religious intolerance, not to mention dealing with the refugee crises and other tragedies this violence has spawned. By investing more in health care up front, Thornhill’s model predicts, Western countries might not have to spend so much on warfare later—and may ultimately reduce human suffering far more effectively.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“When subjects in one of Pizarro’s studies were shown a sign recommending the use of hand wipes, he reported, they were harsher in their judgment of a girl who masturbated while clutching a teddy bear and a man who had sex in his grandmother’s bed while housesitting for her.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“By enlisting the assistance of a team of neuroimmunologists, however, Schaller succeeded in conducting one of the few studies to address the question. As in many of his previous trials, subjects were shown a disease-y slide show, but with one major difference: Immediately before and after the presentation, their blood was drawn and mixed in a test tube with a pathogen surface marker to determine how aggressively their white blood cells countered the challenger. Specifically, the investigators looked to see if arousing subjects’ disgust spurred their white blood cells to produce higher amounts of a pathogen-fighting substance called interleukin 6 (IL-6). It did—and by a whopping 24 percent.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Xenophobic propaganda can take another sinister form. Its progenitor is that favorite taunt of the playground bully: “You’ve got cooties.” Grown-up bullies are notorious for fomenting hatred by branding the target of their aggression—usually a vulnerable minority—a parasite or other vehicle for transmitting infection. This tradition has deep roots. The ancient Romans vilified outsiders as detritus and scum. Jews—history’s favorite scapegoats—were depicted by the Nazis as leeches on society, setting the stage for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, in the United States, law-abiding Japanese American civilians were called “yellow vermin”—a slur that became a rallying cry for imprisoning them in internment camps. In 1994, Rwanda erupted in a genocidal bloodbath when Hutu extremists incited their followers to “exterminate the Tutsi cockroaches.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“The recently ill display similar biases, possibly, Schaller theorizes, because their immune systems may still be run-down, so their minds compensate by ratcheting up behavioral defenses. In support of that contention, he points to a provocative study by evolutionary biologist Daniel Fessler and colleagues, who showed that pregnant women become more xenophobic in the first trimester, when their immune systems are suppressed to prevent rejection of the fetus, but not in later stages of gestation, when that danger has passed.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“Nonetheless, studies by Schaller and other researchers indicate that people who chronically worry about disease are especially prone to antipathy toward those whose appearances diverge from the “normal” template, and these people have a harder time moving beyond that reaction.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

“We were seated in a sparkling new building on the UBC campus with austere modern lines and sleek, minimalist décor—about as sterile a setting as one could imagine. “We don’t really worry much about infectious disease. We forget that in most of the world and throughout most of our history, infectious organisms have posed this extraordinary health threat and have almost certainly played a huge role in human evolution, including the evolution of our brain and nervous system.”
― Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society