This is Your Brain on Parasites

Most horrific stories brought to life on the widescreen are actually inspired in true tragedies and twsited minds. And this This is your Brain on parasites is no different.

In our family there’s the boys band, who love all little tiny creatures they find in the soil, and the girls band who are more comfortable without little spiders crawling up our arms. And trust me I do try to fake me being super happy to hold bugs of different shapes and colors in my hands so that my unreasonable aversion doesn’t not get passed to my little ones, although I suspect it will make no difference.  So me diving into a book about parasites is in itself a psychological challenge. Maybe my parasites had decided to keep me away from adopting a grasshopper.

We believe ourselves to be bright. The most intelligent of all living creatures on earth.  Reading This is your brain on parasites made me think that this underestimation of other species might be as well based on our own ignorance.

Not that recently, it was found out that plants actually communicate with each other; they protect their little ones and are tremendously adaptive to their surroundings.  What Plants talk about takes us closer to our green friends and helps viewing them under a completely different light.  So if we want to refer to intelligence as the ability to survive, adapt and find solutions. We, as a human race might be losing points. One just has to take a peek to see how intelligently we manage our resources and surroundings, and what impact that might have on our own survival. ¡Here´s to human intelligence!

In This is Your Brain on Parasites Kathleen McAuliffe take us on a scientific thriller journey, where manipulators are insects, fungi, bacteria, viruses and all kind of living things invisible to the naked eye.  The book shows us complex behaviors of voracious killers, who control their victims, take them out of their natural course, jeopardizing their survival so that they serve their parasites´ goals.

Although it was criticized by some, as lacking  strong scientific base, and playing more on the emotional, hypothetical, what-if kind of notes. It is still a recommended read in which unconcluded studies are tagged as such by the author. It offers a point of  view completely new to many of us, and makes us question our understanding of our own bodies, beliefs, cultures and behaviors.

Samples of This is your Brain on parasites

While reading the book, I decided to do some search on the internet for multimedia material, and to my surprise I did find some interesting videos of some of the vicious murders and manipulations described by McAuliffe.

The emerald cockroach wasp

Green Banded Broodsac, Leucochloridium Paradoxum

Where to buy? Yeah I know I can just paste a link to Amazon, but instead of that, I invite you to pay a visit to your local bookstore and order it there 😉