Common Parasite Linked to Personality Changes Making You More Outgoing | Hacker News Reader

Common Parasite Linked to Personality Changes Making You More Outgoing

scientificamerican.com

25 pointsorpheum9 comments

This is weird, for the longest time I thought that T. Gondii had the exact opposite effect - making someone more introverted. Apparently that was/is true only for males, whereas it's supposed to make women more extraverted.

https://www.medicaldaily.com/toxoplasma-gondii-parasite-cat-...

>In the new study, a pattern appeared in infected men: the longer they had been infected, the less conscientious they were.

This seems...bad? In contrast with simply being more "outgoing".

"Outgoing". The terms usually published, for infected men, are reckless, and unattractive to women. For infected women, more adherent to convention.

I have not encountered "outgoing" anywhere.

A course of antibiotics is said to cure both the infection and the behavior.

> A course of antibiotics is said to cure both the infection and the behavior.

Probably not, since antibiotics work against bacterial infections, and Toxoplasma Gondii is not a bacterium.

I stand corrected.

Wikipedia says it's a eukaryote. Means I probably still have it.

Which antibiotic would this be?

I'll answer myself: "Antibiotics such as clindamycin, spiramycin, and azithromycin are known to be active against T. gondii."

But they apparently only work against the active form, parasite can still lie dormant in brain.

Would the FDA be averse to a business model selling the parasites to introverts? There are prebiotics and probiotics. Some doctors use maggots to remove dead tissue.

I think OSHA and DOT should have a problem with it and its risks in the wild have really only been so ignored because of the silos of these agencies.

(The cat lady on the Simpsons and the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland each express the same kind of model/correlated stereotypes for diseases with varying mental symptoms that weren't well understood in their time.)

Naturally, most people with Toxoplasmosis don't have psychotic outbursts and most hatters look dashing.

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