Also would appreciate articles on frontal lobe accidents to the human brain, related to behavior after an event.

Criminal behavior because of brain injury. And learning problems and crime.

Thank you

Toxoplasma controls rat and mouse behaviour by releasing (or stimulating the release of) dopamine whenever serum adrenaline levels spike. This causes infected rodents to become “adrenaline junkies” or thrill seekers. They linger in areas smelling of cat urine because it thrills them to do so. This is not willful or conscious behavior, but a simple chemical response that conferred a survival advantage. Toxoplasma exhibits the same behavior in humans, even though it does the organism no good. It just does this whenever it is not in a cat.

This could account for much human self-sabotaging, self-destructive or thrill-seeking behaviors. I am pretty sure it explains my pathological procrastination. I have been conditioned by Toxoplasma to behave in ways that will make authority figures threaten me. (My father yelling at me for not finishing my homework. My boss threatening to give me a bad review). Perhaps criminals carry this to less civilized extremes. We’re all just tempting the big cat to eat us.

Perhaps toxoplasma is the root of all evil.

Jaroslav Flegr, the professor of parasitology behind the research at Charles University in Prague, . . . says, that toxoplasma infection and subsequent delayed reaction times were linked to a greater risk of traffic accidents. “If our data are true then about a million people a year die just because they are infected with toxoplasma,”

Infection relates to double or triple the amount of car accidents, (presumably) from slower reaction times.

Both car accident rate and reaction time are related to IQ, so I Pubmed-ed it, and sure enough, toxoplasma is also associated with lower IQ scores. (I wonder if the path runs the other way? Hygiene propensity, perhaps.)

Anyway I further regret my past associations with cats.

Carl Zimmer has an excellent article in Tuesday’s Science Times on the pathogen Toxoplasma gondii, with accompanying commenary on his blog.