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>"Normally in animals, behavior is controlled by the brain sending signals to the muscles, but our results suggest that the parasite is controlling host behavio

• corndoge 9y ago
  The Last Of Us explored this concept using a fictional version of this same fungus that infected humans instead
  • goda90 9y ago
    One small detail is if you listen to some of the infected when they aren't attacking it sounds like they might be in agony, like they still have some sort of brain.
  • goatlover 9y ago
    There's also the Girl with All the Gifts. Was made into a movie last year.
• hdhzy 9y ago
  Maybe not that drastic but check this out: > "Crazy cat-lady syndrome" is a term coined by news organizations to describe scientific findings that link the parasite Toxoplasma gondii to several mental disorders and behavioral problems. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
• TheCoreh 9y ago
  Wouldn't that require the fungus to have a nervous system of its own?
  • zaarn 9y ago
    The article reads like it either does or it somehow manipulates the nervous system of the host without actually infecting the brain.
  • raverbashing 9y ago
    Yeah it's really weird. Animal time scales (needed to control muscles) seem much faster (order of ms) than fungus time scales (order of seconds for a very fast one) It seems to me it requires the whole fungus to assembly itself in some kind of "fungus brain". Really fascinating stuff
  • ajuc 9y ago
    > Although the host brain isn't invaded by fungal cells, previous work has shown that the brain may be chemically altered by the parasite, Hughes noted. I think it's much more probably that ants have some high-level chemical signals that the fungus uses. One to climb, and another to bite maybe? Ants already use pheromones to communicate.
    • arcticfox 9y ago
      That seems more probable and way more intuitive, but I don't really understand how the mechanics of that mesh with what the researchers are saying happens to the ant muscles.
  • ConceptJunkie 9y ago
    No more than the genes that lead animals to survive because they have an instinct to hide from predators. These evolutionary processes do not imply any kind of intent. They exist because they work. The things that don't work eventually disappear.
• Chris2048 9y ago
  waiting for the rule 34...
• AndrewOMartin 9y ago
  Ask an addict. Even simpler, put some chocolate biscuits on a plate in view of where you sit and attempt to avoid the action of indulging.
  • zaarn 9y ago
    I tried but somehow the biscuits kept vanishing. I can't explain it.
  • kobeya 9y ago
    That’s not what’s going on here.
• thunderbong 9y ago
  Honest question - Is this truly different from what social networks can do to gullible people? Or from what religion had been doing for centuries?
  • arcticfox 9y ago
    Yes, those are controlling the brain. In this instance, the fungus seems to be skipping the brain and just working the muscles.
  • vslira 9y ago
    Honest answer: yes, being indoctrinated is pretty different than having your muscles literally controlled by a third party, if only for the illusion of agency
  • pc86 9y ago
    Yes, a fungus literally working an ant like a puppet is different than Facebook or Catholicism.
• Larrikin 9y ago
  I was always a little disappointed I had so many friends get into Harry Potter when I was younger. Animorphs explores this idea in depth, especially for a kids novel. So in depth that you eventually feel that the parasite controlling other beings can be justified in their war. It is still a kids series so many of the books are filler, but the beginnings, chronicles, and ending are very deep even when looked at through that lens. The books are easy reads as an adult and the entire 60 book series can easily be read in a month.
  • divs1210 9y ago
    Animorphs affected me in a major way while growing up. Morphing into other animals involved getting into their minds and feeling their feelings. Sensations and emotions and instinct and reflexes . . . Spent some nice afternoons on distant planets as different beings :D
  • deadmetheny 9y ago
    >It is still a kids series Man, after having gone back and re-read them as an adult, it's only barely a kids series. Animorphs went hard in the paint with the horrors of war angle.
    • ConceptJunkie 9y ago
      Any good media "for children" can be enjoyed by adults. I never read Animorphs, or Harry Potter, for that matter, but there are good analogs on TV: Adventure Time and Gravity Falls, both of which are cartoons for children, but have depth and sophistication that adults can appreciate while still being accessible to children. Another good example is Terry Pratchett's kid-oriented books (e.g., the Tiffany Aching Discworld books, the Johnny books and the Bromeliad trilogy). He never wrote down to children. These books weren't really much different from his other books for an adult audience, although the plots were simpler, tended to focus more on children characters, and the morality was less ambiguous (as it can be in real life)). But as a big fan of Pratchett, I enjoyed these "children's" books no less than the others.
      • 9y ago
• wcoenen 9y ago
  > Imagine a human gets infected Relevant SMBC comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fungus http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fungus
  • kobeya 9y ago
    That was the old idea of how these parasites worked.
• openasocket 9y ago
  I had another thought which might be even more terrifying. I couldn't find anything suggesting the fungus cuts off or disrupts the ant's actual nerve endings, and from video you can see towards the end that the ant moves in an unnatural, jerky way, not like a normal ant. This could be just because a fungus is bad at acting like an ant, but what if it's also because the ant is actively trying to fight it?! I don't think this is especially likely, the fungus requires use of the ant's nervous system and sensory processing to figure out where a high up place is, so it definitely needs to have some significant control over the ant's brain, so it could suppress motor neuron function in the central nervous system. But still a very terrifying idea, to have some control over your muscles but the fungus is just overpowering you!
  • pavement 9y ago
    One conceptual reality to consider is that the ants on the surface of any hill are not quite as sentient as the queen. The survival of a queen that produces viable progeny is paramount to the survival of the species and, at a more granular level, the bloodline of the individual colony. The queen is dependent on the drones being as obedient as your fingers and tongue might be to your brain, with your brain being the queen organ, for your hundred(s of) pound(s of) tissue. We know that the surface ants support the colony, which supports the queen, and overall, the biomass of the ant colony is less than any single mammal, and we know that any signaling is provoked by scent, based on attack behaviors at a minimum. Meaning that reaction to scent wafts through colonies quickly, engaging behavior as quickly as it is noticed. Ants seem to drop everything, and move, unanimously, when a signal is given. The signals must be pretty complex, with pointers hooked into fixed physical actions on some level. The ants probably don't think very much about what they should do next, as much as constantly listen or smell for a prevailing vote on what to do. Attack, forage, assemble into a formation, wait for further instructions, and so on. In ant studies, an ant colony is segmented into chambers, each having odors, the most conspicuous being the colony's waste dump, so you have to figure that the colony survives, and expects the surface soldiers to go permanently missing once in a while, when scent signaling is disrupted. These fungal organisms probably interact with a degree of equilibrium, when exposed to healthy ant colonies. Usually a parasitic relationship with a host is balanced to not completely destroy the host population, according to an almost intuitive self-preservation instinct among parasites. So the fungus probably only disrupts soldiers at the periphery of the colony, without destroying the core of the hill. You can get a sense of this, based on the fact that the affected ants are driven away from the hill, toward environments more opportunistic to the fungus. If a version of the fungus were to grow opportunistically within the colony, it might invade and drive the ants to extinction, which might turn out to be, in effect, suicidal for the fungus too, and not just the ant. The colony is really the organism, and the soldiers serve it, abiding by prevailing odors, likely without very much free will. Or at least as much free will as your arm has, to reflexively recoil from a burn, or lash out at some unassessed threat when reacting in fear. This fungus probably is basically "numbing" the arm, but the wild part of seeing your arm suddenly behave with a mind of its own, would be an observation from the perspective of the queen, and is probably more or less like seeing a junkie or crackhead stumble around like a zombie, as far as the colony-as-organism is concerned. So, if the ant is "fighting" the "will" of the fungus, it's probably more likely that the ant is receiving strong scent signals compelling it to act a certain way, and the sauce that the fungus is producing as an override to the biological signals in the ant's circulatory system (remembering that insect circulatory systems are primitive, and probably easily hackable fluid systems) might be weak, or the infectious load might be light, resulting in a noisy, conflicted signal at the neurological level. Maybe like a junkie, not completely ruined by dope. tl;dr soldier ants follow their nose without a whole lot of agency, because they are born to serve the colony, selflessly. Thus they likely are unconcerned by a "loss of self," and perhaps might be more emotionally invested in failing the colony, if soldier ants have emotions.
• ComodoHacker 9y ago
  That seems logical. To control such a complex system as an ant's brain, the fungus itself must be no less complex. So controlling ant's muscles directly is the shortest (in evolutionary sense) path to its goal.
  • 46886532558 9y ago
    I don't think partial control of a complex system requires a system of equal complexity. Even human behavior can be influenced in the brain by something simple as a drug or virus.
    • macdust 9y ago
      Specific directives (to find a suitable place to anchor itself) require awareness of the terrain and object-recognition. Either a) the fungus has stumbled upon the signals to accomplish this singular feat or b) the fungus can read the ant's perceptions and can navigate. Finding the signal seems more likely because it is much less complex an achievement.
      • ConceptJunkie 9y ago
        Or the fungus "stumbled" across an effect on the ants' nervous system that was beneficial to it, so it thrived. Emergent properties don't require sophistication. They arise despite the lack of sophistication or the ability for specific intent. That's the definition of "emergent".
        • kdmoyers 9y ago
          Yes, like what if there is an existing chemical signal for "climb up." the fungus might emit that signal and then just ride along, without any understanding of how that happens. Because it works, those fungus do better than ones that gave a different signal. After a while, it gives the "bite" signal and hopefully, the ant has already climbed up. Voila, the ant has served the fungus. So maybe some pretty simple steps result in an effect that appears carefully planned?
• eighthnate 9y ago
  This is an interesting topic in the world of psychology, neuroscience and behavioral sciences. For all of human history, the elite has been able to control human behavior through propaganda which target our eyes and ears primarily. Comparing it to computers, our eyes and ears are natural APIs to our brain. And the elite used words/sound, pictures/imagery, etc to manipulate the masses/brain. If neuroscience advances sufficiently enough, we might be able to bypass the eyes/ears/senses and directly manipulate the brain. This would be akin to using system exploits to bypass APIs and directly access memory and take control of a system. If we reach that stage, we won't need propaganda or psy ops or anything like that anymore to gets people to think or act in a particular manner. The elites/government can directly manipulate the brain/memory. It would be a form of direct parasitic control rather than the current indirect parasitic control of the masses by the government/elites. But maybe if society and science has advanced to such a level, maybe we won't need humans anymore. If our understanding of the brain gets to such a level, organic/natural humans who be an evolutionary dead end and we'll be producing sentient AI. It seems like AI and brain research goes hand in hand. One informs the other and vice versa. The more we learn about the brain, the more we learn about AI. The more we learn about AI, the more we learn about the brain. Very interesting stuff.
• jandrese 9y ago
  It seems like it must put the host brain to sleep to avoid conflicting signals and to prevent errant signals (like "release the panic pheromone" from getting out). The ants sleepwalk to their doom. It seems like the fungus is still depending on the host brain to keep all of the life functions going, so it can't cut it off entirely from the body.
• ionised 9y ago
  > Imagine a human gets infected by a parasite that controls their body but leaves their brain intact to observe what their body is doing Sounds very Stargate SG-1!
• FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  >Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature. Another contender for that crown is the tongue eating louse or Cymothoa exigua. It attaches itself to a fish's tongue. Then, the true horro begins. 'The parasite severs the blood vessels in the fish's tongue, causing the tongue to fall off. It then attaches itself to the stub of what was once its tongue and becomes the fish's new tongue' I'd rather be a fungal thrall than have to a parasite take over as my tongue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua