Posts which contemplated that confused "hot is cold ... cold is hot" state of mindlessness in another context, but never-the-less used it as a metaphorical means for depicting the demise of empires.
This generally happens during the final phases of their typical, slow suicide routine:
Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."
(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive ...
(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, emphasis added). This is analogous to individuals who go through the same temperature analysis delusion, which inexplicably leads to what is called paradoxical undressing:
Paradoxical undressing is a term for a phenomenon frequently seen in cases of lethal hypothermia. Shortly before death, the person will remove all their clothes, as if they were burning up, when in fact they are freezing. Because of this, people who have frozen to death are often found naked and are misidentified as victims of a violent crime.
(Weird Universe, cf. Freezing to Death). In a global warming age like ours, preparing for an ice age by turning the heat up, rather than turning it down, is like putting on an Arctic parka while trekking across Death Valley ...when the temperature is 120 degrees F.
I guess we can coin a phrase "paradoxical overdressing" for the Agnotology Textbooks; a malady that leads to heatstroke, and catalogue it as being engendered by cultural ignorance generators (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).
That is the trance the deniers are in, utterly deluded with frozen minds, utterly convinced that they see reality more accurately than 97-99% of climate scientists.
Delusion of this intensity is not isolated to what we are doing to our planet, no, "bringing democracy to the barbarians" is another one:
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.
The "foreigner" is, moreover, outside the principal immediate system of law and order; hence aggression toward him does not carry the same opprobrium or immediate danger of reprisal that it does toward one's "fellow-citizen." Hostility to the foreigner has thus furnished a means of transcending the principal, immediately threatening group conflicts, of achieving "unity" —but at the expense of a less immediate but in fact more dangerous threat to security, since national states now command such destructive weapons that war between them is approaching suicidal significance. Thus the immense reservoir of aggression in Western society is sharply inhibited from direct expression within the smaller groups in which it is primarily generated. The structure of the society in which it produced contains a strong predisposition for it to be channeled into group antagonisms. The significance of the nation-state is, however, such that there is a strong pressure to internal unity within each such unit and therefore a tendency to focus aggression on the potential conflicts between nation-state units.
(Certain Primary Sources ... of Aggression, p. 319-20, PDF, emphasis added). Those books describe behaviors which not only existed back then, but also exist right now.
These delusions were foreseen long ago as potential manifestations in our culture ("If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison).
These aberrant cultural behaviors are perplexing to some close observers:
For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power, or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We’re talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations, and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
In both countries, that power quickly succeeded in its stated objective of “regime change,” only to find itself mired in deadly conflicts with modestly armed minority insurgencies that it simply couldn’t win. In each country, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, it built up a humongous army and allied “security” forces, poured money into “reconstruction” projects (most of which proved disasters of corruption and incompetence), and spent trillions of dollars of national treasure.
Having imagined that, ask yourself: How well did all of that turn out for this other power? In Afghanistan, a recent news story highlights something of what was accomplished. Though that country took slot 175 out of 177 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, though its security forces continue to suffer grievous casualties, and though parts of the country are falling to a strengthening Taliban insurgency, it has for some years proudly held a firm grip on one record: Afghanistan is the leading narco-state on planet Earth.
In 2013, it upped its opium poppy cultivation by 36%, its opium production by almost 50%, and drug profits soared. Preliminary figures for this year, recently released by the U.N., indicate that opium cultivation has risen by another 7% and opium production by 17%, both to historic highs, as Afghanistan itself has become “one of the world’s most addicted societies.”
Meanwhile, where there once was Iraq (171st on that index of kleptocracies), there is now a Shiite government in Baghdad defended by a collapsed army and sectarian militias, a de facto Kurdish state to the north, and, in the third of the country in-between, a newly proclaimed “caliphate” run by a terror movement so brutal it’s establishing records for pure bloodiness. It’s headed by men whose West Point was a military prison run by that same great power and its bloodthirstiness is funded in part by captured oil fields and refineries.
In other words, after 13 years of doing its damnedest, on one side of the Greater Middle East this power has somehow overseen the rise of the dominant narco-state on the planet with monopoly control over 80%-90% of the global opium supply and 75% of the heroin. On the other side of the region, it’s been complicit in the creation of the first terrorist mini-oil state in history, a post-al-Qaeda triumph of extreme jihadism.
The idea has been expressed by famous people in modern times, such as “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Need I mention that some of the most renowned historians have pointed out that it is the rule, not the exception, that societies commit suicide:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee
(Dredd Blog Quotes Page). Those who do not flatter society fall from favor, but honesty is better than favor.
Anyway, here is the post from today's date in 2009:
Nations become suicidal sometimes when enough people lose a grasp on reality to begin to act like an individual person does when that individual threatens to jump off the bridge.
Take NAZI Germany in the late 1930's as an example. Thankfully Germany fully recovered.
We have a growing problem of suicidal thinking in the United States.
Some Russian hackers stole emails from a climate research facility which they interpreted as proof of a vast global conspiracy to deceive the world about climate change.
A NASA scientist was interviewed to get his take on the situation:
Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change ... say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?
No, they have no effect on the science. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.
(Newsweek [they "lost" it, so here is the Wayback Machine version]). The Piltdown man scientific fraud, a clear case of scientific fraud, did not mean that all evidence for human evolution was thereby made fraudulent. The hacked email controversy is not a clear case, but even if it was it would not prove the case alleged by the climate change deniers.
It is essential that we learn the tenets of Ecocosmology so that our understanding is expanded to a cosmic understanding.
That is, a broader understanding of what humanity must do, including taking care of the earth, in order to avoid extinction of the human species.
One of these interviews is real, the other is too ... what is the difference?
Click the YouTube button on the lower right to view this on YouTube:
It was a state chief judge who once remarked that a good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
That statement elucidates the weak threshold that "probable cause" connotes ... but ... "all by himself", it was police officer Darren "Serve & Protect" Wilson, (the police officer who fired 12 shots at an unarmed citizen who did no-nos that
made doctors put a band aid on Wilson) who testified convincingly to the Ferguson Grand Jury (for four hours) that he was not a ham sandwich.
The jury returned a "the not-a-ham sandwiches have it" no-bill.
Rumors have it that Wilson also brought his "guitar" to the show.
Accompanied by the McProsecutor, they presented a début of his new folk song.
Sung to the tune of "Garbage, Garbage, Garbage", Wilson's "Remember, My Bubbas Will See You on the Streets and Call Your Name" made an impression on the 12 person grand jury.
He also wished them all Season's Greetings and gifted them with an autographed copy of the photo shown at the top of this post.
And wouldn't you know it, the world knows nothing about ham sandwiches:
The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., by police officer Darren Wilson has made the Midwestern U.S. city a focal point for the world's media. It shone a spotlight on what the world perceived to be America's deep, entrenched problems ... British news outlets covered the night extensively: In the past few months, a number had sent war correspondents to cover the violent protests and the militarized police response ... In Germany, the criticism was harsher. The conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argued that the underlying reasons for the violence in Ferguson are deep in American society ... France's leftist Liberation newspaper took a similar focus. "A predominantly white jury chooses not to pursue another white, accused of murdering a black in a predominantly black city," the newspaper wrote, concluding that Ferguson raises yet again the question of racism and police brutality in the United States ... The paper's centrist competitor Le Monde was equally concerned about Ferguson's segregation. "Michael Brown's death had highlighted a racial divide in a city which is undergoing a demographic transition and where blacks are now majority, while municipal institutions remain dominated by whites," the paper writes ... In France, the situation also saw a political reaction, with Justice Minister Christiane Taubira also wading into the controversy:
How old was #Mickael Brown ? 18. #TrayvonMartin ? 17. #TamirRice? 12. How old next? 12 month? ‘Kill them before they grow’ Bob Marley ChT — Christiane Taubira (@ChTaubira) November 25, 2014
Closer to home, the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail wondered what was next for their neighbor. "After Ferguson, America’s conversation about race has only just begun," an op-ed in the paper read. The same paper had previously used the events in Ferguson to marvel at how effective its own policing was in comparison ... In India, a reporter for NDTV, the cable news channel, said that “the case epitomized race crimes in America” and that the photos of protesters evoking the images from Tiananmen Square ... In Turkey, a country that has seen its own heavy-handed response to protests criticized by the international community, there were reports that the country's official press agency Andalou News had sent war correspondents to Ferguson ... Iran's state-owned Press TV ran stories that focused on the protests in 90 other U.S. cities, which it noted started "after St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch said that white police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted and that he would not even face charges for killing the unarmed African American." ... Ferguson also gained the attention of the United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, who released a statement asking that U.S. authorities review the "deep and festering" distrust in the country after the shooting and grand jury decision ...
One has to be as careful as possible when choosing a cultural trance to live by.
Assuming, of course, that a choice is even available, is economical, and is worthy of contemplation.
Trances come in all shapes and sizes, are commercially traded on the stock market and commodity exchanges, and are even put on sale from time to time (some of those sales occasionally being fire sales).
Some trances, such as the "good world war" trance, are very difficult to sell on the open market (so, you may have to go over to the black market for that particular trance), yet other trances are "free" and abundant, especially the fear induced trances, such as the fading 911 trance or the recent Obola trance (Obola: Art Thou Dying Properly?).
II. Why Choose Carefully?
One reason for the notion of being careful about the cultural trance you choose is that a cultural trance has all the components of the lowly psychotic trances:
Group-mind trance does not occur only in highly charged temporary gatherings, such as riots or lynch mobs. Group-mind trance is a part of the everyday life of each one of us. We belong to various kinds of groups--families, work groups, churches, and other organizations. Each has its own group mind that entrances us, perhaps more subtly than a lynch mob, but every bit as effectively. And in the group-mind trance, we experience all the features of other trance states.
(Comparing a Group-Mind Trance to a Cultural Amygdala). The part of that quote I want to focus on here is that quote's section: "in the group-mind trance, we experience all the features of other trance states."
(One has to wonder what other trance states the author is talking about)
Mainly, being careful in trance selection is important because there are matters of degree in trances, from mild all the way to severe:
Trance Zero examines the trances that we go in an out of every day of our lives, concentrating on our cultural trance, the group-mind trance of our society that is so pervasive that it is virtually invisible. He advocates establishing what he calls "Trance Zero," and intuitive state of being in which one is fully awake to the real condition of our existence. Such a state of nothing less than a new paradigm of personal immanence and is the very essence of optimism.
"Adam Crabtree seems to me to be one of the most interesting minds in the field of modern psychology....In some ways this is his most challenging book so far. What makes it so stimulating is that he takes a basic and simple idea--that we all spend more time in "trance" than we realize-and then develops it in wholly unexpected ways....Crabtree suggests that our culture induces a trance state ...
(Trance Zero, emphasis added). Our first big trance state is "freely given" to us by our culture through our parents (whose lives have been carved, molded, and fashioned by that culture and its particular trances).
We wake up at birth with a pat on the ass, we cry, then we enter into our culture as if it was the only reality to concern ourselves with (which it is at that time).
III. So How Do We Choose?
This begs the question of whether or not we can choose, so let's examine a mild trance so as to give us a fair go at grasping it:
Nevertheless, I believe we all live our lives going in and out of trances; that trances are behind what is the very best and very worst in human beings; and that it is possible to become aware of our trances and gain greater control of our lives.
To illustrate, let me ask you a question. At this moment are you in full possession of your faculties? If you are really concentrating on this question, you are probably already slipping into a trance. As you continue to read this page you become less aware of the sounds and sights around you and you generally lose touch with your environment. If you are really focussed here, you lose track for the moment of the other roles or identities of your life--the fact that you are a "teacher," "salesman," "lover," "friend," "mother," etc. Also, if you began reading with a slight headache or some other minor discomfort, the pain may disappear as you concentrate. All in all, through the experience of reading and becoming immersed in what you are reading, you lose touch with who you are and where you are. You find it hard to gauge the passage of time. You don't notice your body. You lose track of your relationships and your surroundings. These are typical features of the state called "trance."
This "reading trance" is so commonplace it escapes notice. Yet it can be a truly engulfing experience. As you become progressively more absorbed in reading, your trance could become so profound that you would fail to notice important things--such as the fact that you have reached your subway stop or that the pot is boiling on the stove.
But if something suddenly shocks you back to "reality"--if the subway lurches unexpectedly or you spill coffee on your lap, you snap out of your trance. Your attention again broadens to include a wider spectrum of impressions. You are once more aware of the place, the time, your body, the environment. You are awake from your reading trance.
This "reading trance" is just an example of a multitude of trances. Taken together, the trances of everyday life form the fabric of human existence. Their effects are important. They can enhance our experiences, but they can also rob us of freedom and fulfilment.
(ibid, from the book Trance Zero). Whew ... good thing I put an end to that quote, just to break you out of the "quote reading trance" --huh?
See, some trances are mild, but it would seem that The Cultural Trance is the biggie, the most intense in terms of impact on us, and perhaps a trance we can't grasp with mild inquiry, mild discovery, or mild pondering.
No, like the Matrix, it takes intense inquiry, intense discovery, and intense pondering to finally envision the big one.
So, how do we choose not to consensually be within the realm of control of the big one, The Cultural Trance (i.e., how do we choose to break any bad hold or bad sway of that trance)?
One suggestion is to experience multiple cultures in as many effective ways as possible.
Perhaps (from different cultures) music, art, empathy, intellectual discoveries, history, poetry, and whatever else might ease us into a better grasp of "When The Truth Is Found To Be Lies?"
IV. An Intense Example
Be careful with this section, because there is no way I can please everyone when I give an example that challenges some of the pillars of cultural trances.
If you are like me, you will suffer some if you shake the trunk of the tree of culture, and take a look inside some of the sausage making back rooms where the fruits of the cultural tree are manufactured.
One event (which took place just after the book being quoted from was written) is worthy of close consideration.
The book (Trance Zero) was written in 1999 shortly before our U.S. culture went into "the 911 trance."
A trance said to have "changed everything."
A trance in which wars started, economic problems arose, conspiracies abounded, loss of freedoms surged, NSA madness grew to the point of spying on the world, U.S. torture escapades galore became official, and "conspiracy theories" went far and wide (all of which are still ongoing).
Yes, a 9/11 trance that many people in our culture can't seem to get out of --even to this day.
Others, who at first were overcome by that trance, like most everyone else, have snapped themselves and perhaps others out of it, but still feel, see, hear, taste, and otherwise sense lingering aspects of its "presence" around them (the many truth.gov lies about events did not and do not help).
Thus, whether or not we can shake one trance, but not another trance, is going to depend on our own personal experiences, diligence, and abilities.
V. Some Other Intense Examples
I will now offer the "foreigner trance" (you can think of a better name if need be) which has been in our culture for a long, long time:
The "foreigner" is, moreover, outside the principal immediate system of law and order; hence aggression toward him does not carry the same opprobrium or immediate danger of reprisal that it does toward one's "fellow-citizen." Hostility to the foreigner has thus furnished a means of transcending the principal, immediately threatening group conflicts, of achieving "unity" —but at the expense of a less immediate but in fact more dangerous threat to security, since national states now command such destructive weapons that war between them is approaching suicidal significance. Thus the immense reservoir of aggression in Western society is sharply inhibited from direct expression within the smaller groups in which it is primarily generated. The structure of the society in which it produced contains a strong predisposition for it to be channeled into group antagonisms. The significance of the nation-state is, however, such that there is a strong pressure to internal unity within each such unit and therefore a tendency to focus aggression on the potential conflicts between nation-state units. In addition to the existence of a plurality of such units, each a potential target of the focused aggression from all the others, the situation is particularly unstable because of the endemic tendency to define their relations in the manner least calculated to build an effectively solidary international order. Each state is, namely, highly ambivalent about the superiority-inferiority question. Each tends to have a deep-seated presumption of its own superiority and a corresponding resentment against any other's corresponding presumption. Each at the same time tends to feel that it has been unfairly treated in the past and is ready on the slightest provocation to assume that the others are ready to plot new outrages in the immediate future. Each tends to be easily convinced of the righteousness of its own policy while at the same time it is overready to suspect the motives of all others. In short, the "jungle philosophy"-which corresponds to a larger element in the real sentiments of all of us than can readily be admitted, even to ourselves-tends to be projected onto the relations of nation-states at precisely the point where, under the technological and organizational situation of the modern world, it can do the most harm.
(ibid, Comparing a Group-Mind Trance to a Cultural Amygdala, emphasis added). In future posts of this series we will consider the foreigner trance (composed of self-righteous exceptionalism, etc.) more closely, and how one state's aggression thereby "tends to be projected onto the relations of nation-states" around it.
The foreigner trance also seems to be wired to grow its circuits continually.
Eventually, if not diminished, it manifests violence within its own culture domestically, that is, it makes dislike, distrust, fear, hatred, and even violence an everyday reality within our culture.
It feeds upon the perception of "those who are different from us" ("foreign") in the context of concepts of race, politics, gender, ideology, religion, ethics, and the like.
Our culture foments and perpetuates this foreigner trance above all others in many ways that are not always readily apparent to those of us enveloped in the culture.
But, the trance is visible to other cultures around us on this globe, since we are now seen as the greatest threat to peace on the planet:
The 12 Steps to regime change, employed by [MOMCOM] as outlined in the video:
Dispatch CIA, MI6 and other intelligence officers as students, tourists, volunteers, businessmen, and reporters to the target country
Set up non-governmental organisations (NGO) under the guise of humanitarianism to fight for “democracy” and “human rights” In order to attract advocates of freedom and ideals
Attract local traitors and especially academics, politicians, reporters, soldiers, etc., through bribery, or threaten those who have some stain in their life
If the target country has labour unions, bribe them
Pick a catchy theme or color for the revolution. Examples include the Prague spring (1968), Velvet revolution (Eastern Europe, 1969), Rose revolution (Georgia, 2003), Cedar revolution (Lebanon, 2005), Orange revolution (Ukraine), Green revolution (Iran), Jasmin revolution, Arab Spring and even Hong Kong’s Umbrella revolution
Start protests for whatever reasons to kick off the revolution. It could be human rights, democracy, government corruption or electoral fraud. Evidence isn’t necessary; any excuse will do
Write protests signs and banners in English to let Americans see and get American politicians and civilians involved
Let those corrupted politicians, intellectuals and union leaders join the protests and call upon all people with grievances to join
The US and European mainstream media help continuously emphasize that the revolution is caused by injustice thereby gaining the support of the majority
When the whole world is watching, stage a false-flag action. The target government will soon be destabilised and lose support among its people
Add in violent agent provocateurs to provoke the police to use force. This will cause the target government to lose the support of other countries and become “deligitimized” by the international community
Send politicians to the US, EU and UN to petition so that the target government will face the threat of economic sanctions, no-fly zones and even airstrikes and an armed rebel uprising
The trance reality can be a hard pill and difficult to swallow, but failure to face the medicine now means facing an epidemic eventually.
VI. Some Unusual Sources of Trances
In addition to trances formed by culture, in future posts we will consider or revisit some other interesting trances that are formed by other entities in our environment.
Let's consider, for starters down that road, two altered states of mind, two trances if you will, one caused by a tumor, and one caused by pathogenic microbes.
Remember, however, that these two following examples are rare compared to the ordinary, everyday trances we experience:
... [Whitman] killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.
The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:
I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.
By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.
It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …
Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had.
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. [metaphor: can a cultural amygdala get a tumor?]
-------------------/ next example /-------------------
The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior... Toxo instead has developed this amazing capacity to alter innate behavior in rodents... If you take a lab rat who is 5,000 generations into being a lab rat, since the ancestor actually ran around in the real world, and you put some cat urine in one corner of their cage, they're going to move to the other side. Completely innate, hard-wired reaction to the smell of cats, the cat pheromones. But take a Toxo-
"Complex" Is An Understatement
infected rodent, and they're no longer afraid of the smell of cats. In fact they become attracted to it. The most damn amazing thing you can ever see, 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.
... part of my lab has been trying to figure out the neurobiological aspects. The first thing is that it's for real. The rodents, rats, mice, really do become attracted to cat urine when they've been infected with Toxo. And you might say, okay, well, this is a rodent doing just all sorts of screwy stuff because it's got this parasite turning its brain into Swiss cheese or something. It's just non-specific behavioral chaos. But no, these are incredibly normal animals. Their olfaction is normal, their social behavior is normal, their learning and memory is normal. All of that. It's not just a generically screwy animal.
You say, okay well, it's not that, but Toxo seems to know how to destroy fear and anxiety circuits. But it's not that, either. Because these are rats who are still innately afraid of bright lights. They're nocturnal animals. They're afraid of big, open spaces. You can condition them to be afraid of novel things. The system works perfectly well there. Somehow Toxo can laser out this one fear pathway, this aversion to predator odors... Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala... Toxo knows how to get in there.
Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety... It knows how to find that particular circuitry... Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways... Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat pheromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing... So what about humans? A small 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... 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... But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think.
