Toxo Terror: Are Our Brains Controlled by Cat-Loving Parasites?
By Greg Boustead
The sheer ubiquity of microscopic organisms is staggering.
Microbiologist Tom Curtis recently compared the size of the microbial
population to the size of the universe: The number of microbes in the
world is billions of times larger than the number of stars in the sky.
Think about that for a second.
And welcome back. Teeming within your body alone are trillions of
microorganisms—bacteria, fungi, viruses, protists—that make up 90
percent of all the cells in your body. You are more them, than you are you. In fact, there’s not really a you.
Your body is more of an ecosystem than a discrete organism. The sum
effect of this fact is unnerving: In a way, you are not one thing, but a
codependent mass of countless organisms, moving in unison toward shared
goals. Through hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution within
this host-microbe habitat, these organisms have developed a complex
scheme of cat-and-mouse survival strategies that affect the overall
system.
So then: Whenever you do something, whenever you make one of the
myriad, inane daily choices that ultimately define who you are, who is
it making the decision? You? Or is it them?
The idea that microscopic flora living inside our bodies can directly
manipulate our behavior and personality is perhaps surprising. It’s also
exactly what a growing number of scientists is suggesting. And it’s
absolutely terrifying.
For the past few decades, an obscure scientist in Prague, Jaroslav
Flegr, has been studying the influence of a particular brain parasite
that co-opts the behavior of its hosts in surprising ways. The goal of
this parasite, a protozoan known as
Toxoplasma gondii, is simple: It wants whatever host it’s infected (typically a rodent) to get eaten by a cat.
Why? Because Toxoplasma can only reproduce in the digestive tracts of
cats. So it’s devised a clever strategy: The parasite alters signals in
the rodent’s brain, making it behave in ways that increase the
possibility it will be caught and eaten by a cat— namely by removing the
rodent’s instinctual fear of cats, slowing its reaction time, and
actually making it attracted to the smell of cat urine.
“It’s the most damn amazing thing you can ever see,” said Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, in
an interview
with edge.org. “Toxo knows how to make cat urine smell attractive to
rats. And rats go and check it out and that rat is now much more likely
to wind up in the cat’s stomach. Toxo’s circle of life completed.”
The fact that a parasite has learned to sneak into brains, hack some
biochemical wiring, and effectively reverse a deep-seated, primordial
fear that’s been beaten into the inherited psyche of every living rodent
is, in a word, bonkers. But Toxoplasma also infects humans. In fact,
it’s a fairly prevalent parasite, found in roughly one-third of the
world population. The parasite has been known for over a century, and
the screening of pregnant women for Toxoplasma is standard practice, as
infection is fatally dangerous for developing babies. But the vast
majority of infections in healthy adults are latent (or asymptomatic),
meaning infected humans typically go about their business with no
apparent ill effects.
It turns out, of course, that there are some effects. Many of them are
still poorly understood, but new research is beginning to illuminate the
many subtle but significant ways Toxoplasma influences human hosts.
According to the Czech researcher Flegr, Toxoplasma tries to do the same
thing in humans that it does in rats: control our brains to increase
the likelihood of our getting eaten by a cat.
We’re not hunted by cats of course. So what does Toxoplasma do when it
wants us to get eaten? Well, the behavioral influence plays out in a
number of strange ways. Toxoplasma infection in humans has been
associated with everything from slowed reaction times to a fondness
toward cat urine—to more extreme behaviors such as depression and even
schizophrenia. And here’s the kicker: Two different
research groups have
independently shown that Toxo-infected individuals are three to four times as likely of being killed in car accidents due to reckless driving.
Wait. What?
Just last month, Flegr’s group published
a paper
in the scientific journal Public Library of Science with the chillingly
cool title “Fatal Attraction Phenomenon in Humans.” The study shows
that some people infected with Toxoplasma find the typically
gag-inducing odor of cat urine “pleasant,” compared with non-infected
individuals. And just to make sure it’s not some sort of general urine
kink, the researchers included other animal urine samples (horse, hyena
and tiger!) in the study as well. But the infected group was horny for
only the cat urine. In other words, Toxoplasma thinks we’re rats, and it
wants us to be eaten by a cat.
Such findings have spawned all sorts of fun speculation and cute
stories about the shared evolutionary histories with our microscopic
life partners. It’s
been suggested
that Toxoplasma could even explain the eccentric behavior of so-called
“cat ladies.” You know, cases of irrational hoarding of like 20+ cats,
often in squalor, and a tendency toward reclusive, nonsocial behavior.
“It’s totally cool cocktail party fodder,” Sapolsky suggested in an
email to me, “But, as far as I know, no empirical evidence.”
Still, it’s tempting to draw a connection. If you’ve ever visited a
home where cat hair covers every possible surface and the wretched stink
of cat waste is heavy in the air, the possibility of toxoplasmic cat
lovers doesn’t seem so far-fetched. This is, after all, a parasite that
encourages an unhealthy feline attraction, an immunity to cat piss, and
eccentric (perhaps schizophrenic) behavior.
To take it a step further, maybe cat ladies
are more likely to
be eaten by cats. Imagine someone leading a reclusive life, dying
alone, surrounded by now-starving cats. It’s not absurd: In 2008, a
woman in Romania described as a cat lover was “eaten head to toe” by her pet cats after dying of natural causes.
The phenomenon even has its own technical name:
postmortem predation.
At a 1992 American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in New
Orleans, a forensic pathologist told the following story, paraphrased by
an editor at
The Straight Dope:
“Sometimes, when an individual living alone dies unexpectedly, several
days may pass before anyone takes notice. Some of these individuals may
own a dog or a cat, which will go unfed. In my experience, a dog may go
for several days before finally resorting to eating the owner’s body. A
cat, on the other hand, will only wait a day or two.”
For now, though, the proposition that parasites are controlling our
minds to suit their own survival needs is a radical one. Many of the
scientists I spoke with view Flegr’s conclusions in his human studies
with raised eyebrows, cautious enthusiasm, polite euphemisms, or
incredulousness. When Flegr began looking at this complex parasitic
relationship, most of his papers where rejected by scholarly journals.
But that’s changing. Toxoplasma research has become something of a bona
fide subfield in parasitology over the last few years. The number of
scientific papers published with findings about the effects of
Toxoplasma on human behavior or personality
has exploded.
“After nearly 20 years of research in this field, I think most
parasitologists and evolutionary biologists finally accept this effect,”
says Flegr. The challenge now is to get researchers from other
disciplines, such as psychologists, to understand this effect on human
behavior in order to get a clearer picture of how the parasite might
influence personality types. “When I send my papers to psychological
journals, they’re usually rejected,” says Flegr, “for the same reasons I
encountered 15 years ago with parasitology journals.”
Jaroslav Flegr, the parasitologist
“Flegr is very creative and pushing the envelope,” says Kevin Lafferty,
a researcher studying parasites for the US Geological Survey. “It is
hard to do the sort of work he does with humans, so the results are open
to alternative interpretations. But I think he is on to something
aboutToxoplasma.”
Research on this curious parasitic manipulation has gone increasingly
mainstream. There are now several groups at top-tier science
institutions pushing the investigation forward. Joanne Webster, a
parasite epidemiologist at Imperial College London, leads a team teasing
apart the behavioral components of Toxoplasma, and Glenn McConkey’s lab
at University of Leeds is focusing on the parasite’s genome.
The real fruit of this research may be what the ancient critter can
teach us about modern neuroscience. Sapolsky, for instance, is a highly
regarded professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. A baboon social
scientist turned neuroendocrinologist, Sapolsky has recently become
fascinated with the bizarre story of Toxoplasma and is now leading the
charge to unpack the parasite’s neurobiology. In his interview with
Edge,
he explained what drives his interest in Toxoplasma and other emerging
parasite interactions, “this utterly bizarre world of parasites
manipulating our behavior.”:
What does Toxo do to humans? There’s some interesting stuff
there that’s reminiscent of what’s going on in rodents. Some literature
is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are
Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive. And then
the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have
reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the
likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding.
In other words, you take a Toxo-infected rat and it does some dumb-ass
thing that it should be innately skittish about, like going right up to
cat smells. Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a
proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately
averse to, like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces.
Maybe this is the same neurobiology.
On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows
more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000
neuroscientists standing on each other’s shoulders, and this is not a
rare pattern. Look at the rabies virus; rabies knows more about
aggression than we neuroscientists do. It knows how to make you rabid.
It knows how to make you want to bite someone, and that saliva of yours
contains rabies virus particles, passed on to another person.”
Sapolsky recently followed up in an email: “I think that the really
fascinating and creepy thing about the whole Toxo story is that there
have to be a gazillion other examples like this out there, ones that we
haven’t a clue about —viruses, bacteria, protozoa, multicellular
parasites.”
In other words, this is just the beginning of a new chapter in biology.
One that stands to reshape how we view discrete organisms,
neurochemistry, and even free will. One in which the human body is a
cornucopia of alien life, and we are merely vessels guided by the
competing whims of microscopic creatures imprinted with coded
instructions through eons of evolution.
And maybe, just maybe, it helps explain how we ended up with so many cats.
