In a similar vein, I always found it interesting (although frightening) that rabies cause hydrophobia. The theory is that drinking water can wash away the virus from your saliva, inhibiting its ability to spread through bites.
It makes sense that a virus passed through saliva would evolve like this, but I just find it particularly unsettling when a pathogen can effect higher-level behaviors like drinking water (or jumping into water for mantises).
The frightening part is that it’s a cognitive effect. That’s crazy. And it opens the whole “how much of our personality is real versus controlled by microbes” question.
Imagine there was a virus or parasite that just made you feel pleasure, all the time, with no tolerance effects?
I wonder what progress has been made in addiction medicine for meds that simply prevent the development of tolerance? If possible, it would fall under the category of harm reduction. Failing the patient to get sober, they could at least continue getting high on the same amount which might prevent their failure to function.
Youd have to figure out how to continuously produce dopamine and serotonin, or replicate their effects from the perspective of pleasure. Pretty tall order since they have multiple purposes inside you. Trillion dollar idea though.
I was more suggesting that if the receptors could be targeted (I have no idea how, just spit-balling) by another agent, then tolerance would perhaps not occur. The addict/user would still need the original drug.
Receptor downregulation plays a key role in maintaining homeostasis within normal brain function, so attempting to intefere with that process is playing a dangerous game, however it is in theory possible, since the effects of receptor activation are separate from the downregulation process, though they are linked.
When a neuron's receptors get strongly activated, that neuron can withdraw receptors from its surface into the interior of the cell (a process call internalisation), and from there either digest the receptors (downregulation) or move the receptors back to the surface of the cell where they resume their typical function (resensitisation). Those processes are potential targets for a tolerance-mitigating drug.
The tricky part is that they are very fundamental processes across all neurons and it would be very hard to target, say, dopaminergic receptors in the nucleus accumbens to ventral tegmental area (the "reward circuit") without also affecting neurons across the entire brain.
The best cure for tolerance is taking a break :) easier said than done, I know.
I appreciate harm reduction but I think any such 'perfect' drug would lead to dehydration / starvation deaths, or at least a lot more people living on the streets.
> I always found it interesting (although frightening) that rabies cause hydrophobia.
Well, there are two potential senses of "hydrophobia".
In its primary use, it means "rabies", and it's not really interesting that rabies would cause that.
In rare cases, it could mean "fear of water", which rabies doesn't cause. Rabies causes pain when swallowing. The pain causes fear through conventional mechanisms.
I have not checked the sources, but according to Wikipedia [1]:
Rabies has also occasionally been referred to as hydrophobia ("fear of water") throughout its history. It refers to a set of symptoms in the later stages of an infection in which the person has difficulty swallowing, shows panic when presented with liquids to drink, and cannot quench their thirst. Saliva production is greatly increased, and attempts to drink, or even the intention or suggestion of drinking, may cause excruciatingly painful spasms of the muscles in the throat and larynx. Since the infected individual cannot swallow saliva and water, the virus has a much higher chance of being transmitted, because it multiplies and accumulates in the salivary glands and is transmitted through biting.
I feel like calling "shows panic when presented with liquids to drink" a fear of water is a perfectly fine shorthand. Even if it might not be a literal fear of all forms of water, only water you are supposed to drink
Sure, I don't know how it works physiologically...
But anecdata at least suggests that being in enough pain can cause panic, but it might do so indirectly so that the fear is created around the inability to think the pain will ever end or at least lessen at least a bit.
My leg has been fucked for 15 years. Sometimes it hurts so bad, I’d need narcotics to make it go away. I don’t panic when walking, I just deal with it because I need to get to my destination. If you are thirsty, you will drink through the pain. Panic is something else.
I think you've gotten fear confused with panic. Fear is indeed a learned behavior, panic is not. Panic is beyond rational thinking, it is what gets people who save drowning people dead. Panic is what gets normal humans dead when in bad situations. Panic is not learned, it saves your ass at all costs -- or gets you killed.
They’re just wrong. Neither panic nor fear is learned behaviour. What one panics about or fears is in part learned. But there is still a lot of instinct at play.
If I come into the room and stab you with a steak knife every time you drink, and sometimes even if you only think about drinking, you will definitely panic when drinking is brought up in the future, after some time.
Not sure what's wrong with you that you cannot empathize.
As someone who has most definitely been in more shit than most humans on this planet, I can empathize just fine.
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I think you've confused fear with panic. Fear can be conditioned, panic cannot. You can panic from fear, but it is not a guaranteed thing, and often, that panic is long after the fear is gone (aka PTSD).
Panic is an autonomic response to saving yourself at all costs. It is not something you "learn" or have "conditioned" into you, and if so, definitely not over the course of a few weeks that you have a virus; otherwise we'd all be dead from Covid and go into a panic every time we cough.
Panic is what causes you to drown a person saving you, so that you can breathe. Panic is what causes you to over-correct and steer into a tree. Panic is what causes you to run out of your house, in the middle of winter in pajamas, because there was a spider. Panic has a cause, but it is mindless with the only goal of saving oneself. The action itself is often quite stupid-looking, in hindsight and lack of context.
Most people have never seen a person panic, first-hand. Most people have never panicked. Today's world is largely safe, so it is easy to confuse fear with panic.
> symptoms can include slight or partial paralysis, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, and hallucinations
There is more than just pain here. The virus changes the host behavior, making it more aggressive, so it is very possible that it also promotes a panic reaction to pain.
without a big genetic assay isn't it virtually impossible to know whether or not the trait (hydrophobia) persisted due to the symptom itself rather than just a correlated advantageous mutation that brought along hydrophobia as a happy coincidence?
if we need to continue the flawed math analogy; evolution has always done pretty imprecise cocktail-napkin math, even if it has been wildly successful at it.
> Sea turtle hatchlings have an inborn tendency to move in the brightest direction. On a natural beach, the brightest direction is most often the open view of the night sky over, and reflected by, the ocean. [0]
Man made artificial lighting greatly affect sea turtle hatchlings also. There are several groups of volunteers who watch the eggs for hatching and will help the sea turtles make their way towards the sea.
The volunteers use apps to coordinate watching the eggs and there is tons of data collected. Using AI / ML to help determine when the eggs will hatch or creating autonomous drones to watch the eggs and perhaps assist in corralling the hatchlings to the sea would make great PhD dissertation subjects.
It is an irate response. I guess when you read a 1000th "perfectly fine comment" it gets to you. I remember this site being full of interesting stuff, like really vibrant CS things, math for programmers, all kinds of new languages and frameworks and patterns and algorithms, but nowadays all of that diversity is eaten and shitted out as AI AI AI AI AI ... It's nauseating. I'm sorry I know this is a rant but damn, what the fuck happened :(
If you are interested in this subject, Carl Zimmer wrote a great book that has all sorts of examples of parasites that control their host: "Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures"
IIRC, there's some parasite that makes the host (some species of insects) climb up plants, as high as possible, so that it can be eaten by birds and other animals.
So that the parasite can reproduce inside the new host, and spread further.
Cordyceps is a bit different in that it makes the host insect clamp down on a branch or twig until death so that when the fruiting body grows out of the host, its spores are spread through the air, where it can infect similar insects.
What OP is talking about sounds more like the lancet liver fluke, which has a stage of its lifecycle inside an ant and a stage inside a grazing animal, so it makes an infected ant climb to the top of a grass stalk. Amazingly, the ants only do this from dusk till dawn, resuming their normal activities if they haven't been eaten by dawn. The rationale seems to be that being exposed to the hot sun during the day could quickly kill the ant along with its passenger flukes
Similarly Candida can drive people to crave sugar, and the more sugar they consume, the more Candida thrives. This growth leads to biofilms in the intestine that block the absorption of essential B vitamins like thiamine. Without enough thiamine the Krebs cycle energy-producing process fails leading to chronic fatigue. This is what causes most peoples chronic fatigue btw. Over time, this can significantly impact health and even contribute to their premature deaths. Then after death Candida feeds on the body during decomposition. Was this it's goal? Likely.
Candida is one of the disease that cranks online love to diagnose themselves with; and blame all of their problems on; and endlessly expand the scope and symptoms of.
Someone talking about Candida is not necessarily a crank; but the chances are pretty high.
It’s also a very old crank-territory: I’ve learned it from a fantastic Polish blog documenting medical quackery back in _2009_; if anyone feels like trudging through it with Google Translate: https://blogdebart.hell.pl/2009/06/02/choroby-urojone-candid...
I skeptical. Carbs are converted to glucose in the intestines and we eat orders of magnitude more glucose in carbs than in sweets so candida should not really care about sweets, but all these studies are about craving sweets not carbs in general.
There are places that will do a stool analysis for you, but it's a lot of guesswork. Many quacks have also discovered that they can get people to pay a lot of money hoping for relief, and they don't hesitate to take advantage. It's a shame because there are honest people out there trying to help, but sorting the wheat from the chaff is quite the order.
My opinion is that if you're concerned, the best thing is to make sure you aren't overeating carbs (I suggest limiting carbs to 30-40g per meal and 120g per day, and avoid simple carbs) and ideally take a probiotic and/or consume fermented foods such as yogurt, kombucha, etc that naturally provide probiotics. The carb limiting is the most important. If you do nothing else, do that. Even if you don't have an issue with candida, you'll feel better overall and get healthier. Again this is just my opinion as someone who has spent years reading and experimenting on myself, but is not formally educated or trained so take with a grain of salt.
Can you narrow it down to which specific B vitamin does it? If you really wanted to undertake a project, you could do a single blind study with placebo vs real b vitamins and prove if they work (grind up real vitamins and press them back in a way they look like placebo, put them in 30 day packs, and ask a friend to label and mix them up). Then make your guess after several months.
Candida species cause thrush and yeast infections. Afaik they are fairly ubiquitous in the human biome but become problematic when Candida gets out of control.
So if you can test for it chemically there could be positives even if it's not a problem. So it would be a matter of looking under a microscope at the gut microbiome and checking if theres an overgrowth. And then treatment is tricky in the gut - how do you target a single problematic species but keep the rest of the microbiome intact? And if you do knock it out, you still need to create the conditions where it doesnt just bloom again since its ubiquitous.
In the end it might be a thing where you have to follow general gut health advice and try to cultivate a healthy gut microbiome.
> Many animals are capable of perceiving some of the components of the polarization of light, e.g., linear horizontally polarized light. This is generally used for navigational purposes, since the linear polarization of sky light is always perpendicular to the direction of the sun.
They were already able to perceive polarized light [0], like many other arthropods, though AFAIK it's not clear what they normally use this perception for.
You can wear polarized sun glasses to help block the light reflected off of roads and water like when driving or boating. Seeking stronger horizontally polarized light would historically lead you to a water source. Adult horsehair worms complete their life cycle in water.
Look at all the examples of manipulation in this thread. I have to wonder just how manipulated humans are everyday and we don't even realize it. It has become 'human nature'.
Just my fantasy scenario, imagine if some kind of yeast/virus affects humans to eat so much sugar, we never need so much sugar, but there's some-kind of yeast inside us that controls us, to create and consume sugar for it.
> imagine if some kind of yeast/virus affects humans to eat so much sugar
I think the gut microbiome can indeed do this.
The episode called "Swap Out Sugar" of the BBC podcast Just One Thing explains more - the relevant section is from after 7 minutes to before 12 minutes into the episode:
Well the Guinea worm does force humans to get into water to complete the parasitic cycle. But it's also on track to be fully eradicated.
I think a parasite affecting human behavior in a substantial way is risking detection and elimination. So unlike with mantises this decreases the chance of survival, unless you paint a zombie-apocalypse kind of scenario.
A successful human parasite has to alter the host behavior in a very subtle way. This could be happening even now and we wouldn't know. There's some evidence this is the case with toxoplasma increasing affection towards cats.
Star Trek actually did an episode which addresses such a parasite. The episode was one of several episodes banned in a few places, I think for showing how the uninfected humans had to eradicate the infected humans violently.
> Well the Guinea worm does force humans to get into water to complete the parasitic cycle.
How they do this [0]:
- Humans typically get infected when they unintentionally ingest copepods while drinking water.
- During digestion the copepods die, releasing the D. medinensis larvae. The larvae exit the digestive tract by penetrating the stomach and intestine
- About a year after the initial infection, the female migrates to the skin, forms an ulcer, and emerges.
- Upon reaching its destination, the worm forms a fluid-filled blister under the skin.[5] Over 1–3 days, the blister grows larger, begins to cause severe burning pain
- When the wound touches fresh water, the female spews a milky-white substance containing hundreds of thousands of larvae into the water.
- The larvae are eaten by copepods, and after two to three weeks of development, they are infectious to humans again.
Part of the eradication effort was hacking this mechanism by convincing humans to use a closed container of water when this happens. The contaminated water can then be safely disposed thus breaking the cycle.
The parasites you should be worried about are memes (in the biological meaning - an idea that forces host to reproduce and spread it - not "a funny image" meaning).
We already have such ideas that change human behaviour on massive scale and cause millions of deaths.
An STD that increased human promiscuity seems like it could be really successful at spreading. I wonder if any existing STDs have evolved to do anything close to this.
The social stigma around being seen as "dirty" for having an STI is known to drive the infected into more risky sexual behaviors and less hygienic partners. This is why normalizing testing and treatment as everyday things are part of the public health effort.
Doesn’t seem like it from the ones we know about, and I think that’s why we know about them. STI symptoms are typically unpleasant, painful, and when untreated potentially deadly. HSV for example is most contagious when a person is having an outbreak of sores, which certainly wouldn’t put most people in the mood.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directly oversees the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA is one of HHS's operating divisions, with its Commissioner reporting to the HHS Secretary.
QED, the guy who admitted to dietarily contracting brain worms in order to weasel out of alimony might also be chief over the FDA.
At least his physique is evidence that has a better practical understanding of health than 95% of Americans his age (and at the majority of Americans half his age, more than half of whom are overweight).
As an American, the distinguishing trademark of Americans is shallow understanding. It is very bizarre for an American to have a deep understanding of something; it's definitely not the norm.
There is a reason Winston Churchill said that Americans will do the right thing after exhausting all other options.
It’s very obvious to me that he’s taking TRT or other steroids. Personally I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s not going to make me trust his judgement more on vaccines or any other health issue.
It's obviously because he's rich. Nothing correlates more strongly with health. The idea that we're classless adults with equal access to resources and only character to differentiate us is an absurd, medieval perspective.
Speaking of parasites manipulating human behavior, does women not wanting to have anything to do with you cause you to follow Alex Jones and Andrew Tate? Or is it the other way around, that following Alex Jones and Andrew Tate causes women not to want to have anything to do with you?
It makes sense that a virus passed through saliva would evolve like this, but I just find it particularly unsettling when a pathogen can effect higher-level behaviors like drinking water (or jumping into water for mantises).
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