Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
economist.com
Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
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Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#2Without S. Boulardii, I am a neurotic mess who can't digest anything at all nor think straight after eating anything, so I'm inclined to believe this hypothesis.
I am also intrigued about what this means for criminality and how the line between illness and evil is likely to shift given the role of microorganisms in behavioral dysfunction; and more broadly, we don't like to admit it, but it seems that completely amoral factors can be the cause of moral, amoral, or immoral behavior.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#3There's no free will :)
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#4There's no free will :)
I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think.
(Of course, this is just an opinion.)
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#5I'm not too keen on the discouragement against self experimentation at the end of the article in this case. Self experimentation has greatly improved insulin pump technology in the past few years, and this situation has much much less risk.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#6Reading about toxoplasma (a parasite of rats which can infect humans and alter their behaviour), I recall something about the common cold (a virus) and behaviour. My memory is fuzzy but there was a study that indicated that those with initial stages of a cold seek out human contact more and in the case of women, show more skin. The implication is that the virus seeks to replicate by altering our behaviour to transmit it to as many people as possible and the researchers speculated it could also mean that the common cold might lead to an increase in sex and also becoming a sexually transmitted virus.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#7Without S. Boulardii, I am a neurotic mess who can't digest anything at all nor think straight after eating anything, so I'm inclined to believe this hypothesis. I am also intrigued about what this means for criminality and how the line between illness and evil is likely to shift given the role of microorganisms in behavioral dysfunction; and more broadly, we don't like to admit it, but it seems that completely amora…
How did you find out?
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#8Reading about toxoplasma (a parasite of rats which can infect humans and alter their behaviour), I recall something about the common cold (a virus) and behaviour. My memory is fuzzy but there was a study that indicated that those with initial stages of a cold seek out human contact more and in the case of women, show more skin. The implication is that the virus seeks to replicate by altering our behaviour to transmit…
"the virus seeks to replicate"
variants of the virus that caused their hosts to socialize more replicated more
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#9Perhaps a stupid question but can't they run some kind of differential analysis on blood values to find out what could be causing the effect on the brain? (I.e. take blood samples before and after introducing gut bacteria)
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#10I'm not too keen on the discouragement against self experimentation at the end of the article in this case. Self experimentation has greatly improved insulin pump technology in the past few years, and this situation has much much less risk.
How good are most experiments with a sample size of 1? Can the data gathered be independently verified?