I was reading Carl Zimmer's blog,The Loom, http://www.scienceblogs.com/loom/ yesterday. Carl is a scientist (biology) and an author, his blogs are fun because they at times are like reading about alien life forms. What I read yesterday has stuck with me. It was a piece on how certain funguses can change the behavior of creatures that they infect. The name of this fungus is both unpronounceable and unspellable by me, so I will call it the ant fungus. This ant fungus forces the ant that it infects to climb as high as it can climb and to grip the stem that it is on with its mandibles so that the ant will not fall off. Then the fungus grows a spike out through the top of the ants head (ant dies). The spike takes up to 3 weeks to grow and mature. Upon maturation the spike explodes, shedding spores down on all ants that may be below it, starting the cycle over. This fungus can wipe out whole colonies of ants.
The thing that is of interest to me is that the fungus changes or I guess you could said redirects its hosts mind set to follow the funguses survival program. If this sort of thing can happen at the ant level (not only ants, but several insect species have their 'fungus amongst us' cross to bear) why could it not happen at the human level.
Are there humans infected with some fungus (minus the spike growing out the head) that causes a behavior conducive to that funguses survival. This would be an interesting investigation. What abnormal behaviors could be studied? What 'mental illnesses' could be caused by a fungal infection. Schizophrenia can happen to a person suddenly. Could a fungus be the trigger that we are looking for in the case of schizophrenia or maybe some borderline acceptable social behaviors.
Scary thought when you think about all the psycho babble and political rhetoric out there demanding that we take responsibility for our actions. What if many of us are hosting a fungus and following the primitive programming set down by that fungus?
Could be that the 'Pod People' are real.
Who do you trust?
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