This seems so disturbing to me, but others talk about it like it is no big deal.

How can you find out if you have it? Can you get rid of it?

There are tests but it does not seem that you can get rid of it, you can just preven dangerous symptoms and keep your immune system up (don't ever get AIDS!).
See Carl Zimmer about Toxoplasma.

More general info : A Common Parasite Reveals Its Strongest Asset: Stealth

I don't know.

Sounds a little too much like midichlorians for me.

I've always been suspicious of attributing personality types to Toxoplasma. Reading the literature, it seems that there is a lot of conflicting data on the effects of the parasite on personality traits, which seems to ssuggest that the effect sizes are very small. There certainly are different personality types, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a neurochemical explanation for why certain psychological types show up repeatedly. I also don't deny that infectious diseases may influence emotional and/or cognitive functioning, However Toxoplasma seems like an unlikely candidate for being one of the most less staimportant of these.

Also, I find it odd when you say that scientists seem to be less "neurotic" than the general population. Any contact with great, revolutionary scientists shows them to be "weird" (in the best way of course) just like artists. Of course, not all scientists are this way, but neither are all artists, just the incredibly creative types in both fields. I would agree that the scientists are usually less emotionally sensitive, particularly in an interpersonal sense, than the artists, but they (we) still have to be able to develop a strong, sometimes all-consuming excitement about things that others wouldn't. This fixation implies an unusually driven, if not less stable, emotional psychology. Maybe this is colored too much by my own experience feeling that many of my emotional responses are somewhat "strange".

This theory is so beat. The line between objective scientific inquirer, and self-important cultural critic is definitely being crossed. The evolution of complex music was closely tied to practical things like the printing press (to disseminate music), the invention of good musical notation, better instruments, and the development of music theory ideas like keys and chords and such. It's not like it came out of nowhere with a bunch of brain-diseased savants making stuff up. They built on a long-developing art which ripened to fruition when conditions were right.

I would argue that the flurry of creativity in music was more the reaction to Renaissance cultural influences, and the exploration of newly discovered means of making music and disseminating it. This happens every time a new medium is invented in any artistic discipline.

Why is classical music dead? I would argue that it is dead because it's not convenient to listen to. I would argue it's dead, because shit gets boring when it's all there is for hundreds of years. I'd say it's dead because now we have tons of other stuff to listen to. Modern music is extremely rich and diverse, and we simply have reallocated our creative energy to new genres and media.

I really think your adherence to the "human accomplishment" rubric is the fundamental problem. Stop worshipping the past. We're smarter and better than we've ever been before.

Hyperbole -- don't ever comment on my posts again. You always piss me off, and you rarely contribute anything other than something that starts and stops with "I would argue X." No one cares what you would argue. The only reason I'm not deleting your comment this time is that you managed to raise a substantive point.

To get right to the point, I clearly stated that I believe an eccentric personality is one of many necessary components, and that everything else may have been in place before, but that there lacked the nuttiness of a Beethoven or Schubert. So mentioning that there are other factors (whether or not you're right about particular factors) is non sequitur. I also said there is a hint of sophisticated music centuries before -- just not at the level of a Bach.

Re: the particular factors you propose, the printing press is not very relevant to the composition of complex music -- most composers wrote their stuff out by hand, long after presses were in use. Dissemination is not creation. Also, polyphony came into being centuries before the printing press.

Better instruments are not very relevant either: I'm talking about the complexity of the musical composition, not how well it sounds. You could perform a Bach fugue with two or three human voices: no instruments necessary. Indeed, the major innovations began with religious songs / chants.

A richer repertoire of "theory" is tautologically linked to more complex music -- so why did it take so long for someone to dream up complicated music theory?

Better notation does make some sense.

I am not interested in arguing these points, as they are not related to anything in the post, which openly states that many things contribute. Further bickering will derail the discussion more, and I will delete any such bickering about the printing press, etc.

And as for classical music dying b/c "shit gets boring" when "it's all there is for hundreds of years" -- you must be a moron if you can't tell the difference between Scarlatti, Chopin, Wagner, and Stravinsky. So the "gets boring after hundreds of years" argument is a non-starter, as there was plenty of innovation. A similar argument would hold that the history of all representational painting using linear perspective is plodding and monotonous.

Arosko -- Neuroticism just measures how emotionally volative vs stable you are... a better way: how "touchy" a person is, how short their fuse is, etc.

I think you're thinking more of the facets of Psychoticism -- those are the most directly linked to creativity. Eysenck's idea was that people with high Psychoticism are less inhibited in their thinking (and people who score higher on Psychoticism do score higher on creativity tests). Simonton's related idea is that such people have connections running from one concept to many others, rather than from one concept to just the most closely related concepts. In some sense, these people are better at relating distant ideas to each other. (That's aside from what IQ does, which is facilitate pattern recognition.)

But Simonton does agree with you that "revolutionary" scientists tend to be more out-there than ordinary scientists, although he still places them below revolutionary artists. The people Cattell interviewed qualified as "eminent," but there was probably only 1 or 2 "revolutionary" guys in the whole group. I don't have a good idea about how Neurotic the revolutionary scientists tend to be; I can think of plenty of ones with short fuses, but also ones without. It'd be worth a look through biographies.

Maybe I am confused--I don't know much about the various psychological theories out there. I wasn't referring to the tendency to erupt in anger, and neither was I referring to being very emotional and "touchy feely" in the sense of someone who writes deeply emotional poetry or something.

I was referring to a kind of emotional character that tends to show up in slightly mentally "ill" conditions such as bipolar, hypomanic states, I believe some temporal lobe disorders, etc. These people can be somewhat morose such that they aren't satisfied with the mundane ins and outs of life, yet can react to certain experiences with an incredible sense of inspiration and excitement, and a slightly grandiose sense that there is something really important behind it. A more "stable" and "collected" person would have a much less exaggerated perspective, would be more inhibited and conventional, and wouldn't give way to flights of fancy. The best ideas in science don't have a flashing neon sign in front of them that says "pay attention to me!", and may take a lot of obsessive devotion to develop to the point where their full significance becomes clear, so if you can't make a mountain out of a molehill sometimes you will miss them.

Agnostic, threatening to ban people because they don't agree with you don't do much to raise the quality of discourse.

I'm going to disagree with you too. Your aesthetic judgments are not fact, but simply your OPINIONS. Other people may hold different opinions. You also seem to have ignored the fact that music as written is not necessarily the music as played. European performers of the 18th century and previous typically added flourishes or riffs to the basic skeleton of the score. Those are lost to us. If you were able to hear the music as played, you might well revise your judgments.

Western Europe and its offshoots have been enormously creative in a wide variety of fields since the beginnings of the Renaissance. As Tyler Cowen noted:

"Clusters of amazing achievement come and go pretty quickly, usually through some mix of environmental effects and luck. Look at Venetian painting. It was much better centuries ago..."

Just in the past five centuries, we've had waves of innovation in poetry, music, physics, chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, bioengineering, novels, drama, and film, just to name ten fields at random.

Perhaps there's a bacteria or virus whose timing fits most of these, or perhaps there's just some internal logic to what you need to know first in some field before you can take the next step--as economic historian Joel Mokyr might argue, you may just need a broad enough "epistemic base" to do physics or drama or mechanical cloth-weaving successfully....

Of course, all I'm pointing out is that another theory might explain a larger amount of data--not that T. Gondii plays no role in this case....Think of this as a horse-race between endogenous growth theory (e.g., the internal logic of knowledge-creation) versus exogenous growth theory (e.g., pathogenic accidents as a driver of technological innovation). This book would be a good primer on that race.

This idea of pathogen-triggered genius is fun to think about, but I don't buy it at all. (Of course, I recognize that you are just speculating; everyone is allowed to indulge in a little hokey speculation once in a while.) It's too bad that a longitudinal study of this possibility would be too impractical and controversial to ever get funded.

The winter/spring baby data are quite interesting. However, I would be more impressed if you didn't rely on Charles Murray's inventory of "genius". His rankings seem arbitrary and not as data-driven as they ought to be.

Agnostic - As interesting as it is, I think it only works time period-wise if you take a Eurocentric view. High points of other cultures in various artistic or creative genres don't fit the pattern. You might argue they don't match in terms of achievement, but within-genre I'd have to disagree.

I'd also have to disagree with Hyperbole that 'we' are better than we ever were - in context, I simply don't think that is demonstrably universally true, and a great deal is to be learned from contemplating past endeavour and accomplishment.

Anyone remember the story of the chimpanzee at an Israeli zoo that got an infection, and when he/she recovered started walking upright? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a hoax, but it's really late, and I won't google it.

Oh man... I really think I pissed off agnostic because I hit at the central problem in his theory.

"Re: the particular factors you propose, the printing press is not very relevant to the composition of complex music -- most composers wrote their stuff out by hand, long after presses were in use. Dissemination is not creation. Also, polyphony came into being centuries before the printing press."

Come on, don't pretend to miss the point. The wide dissemination of printed material has a contagious effect on creativity. Artists get inspired by other artists. Things rarely if ever happen in complete isolation. That is why "schools" of musical styles, artistic styles, philosophical styles etc. exist. If the printing press had a massive influence on scientific discovery, philosophic dialogue, literary creativity... what makes you think music would somehow be unaffected?

"And as for classical music dying b/c "shit gets boring" when "it's all there is for hundreds of years" -- you must be a moron if you can't tell the difference between Scarlatti, Chopin, Wagner, and Stravinsky. So the "gets boring after hundreds of years" argument is a non-starter, as there was plenty of innovation. A similar argument would hold that the history of all representational painting using linear perspective is plodding and monotonous."


I wouldn't say I'm a moron. But I would say it's moronic to judge modern musical creativity by a 19th centrury standard. Beethoven and Mozart were trained from extremely young ages, and were directly channeled into their chosen profession. Modern musicians complete k-12 schooling like everybody else. Sometimes they drop out. Sometimes they go to college. But wherever they end up applying their talents to, it's 9 times out of 10 NOT classical music. Most of our creative energy is not going into this genre, so why would you use it as a benchmark. The variety of 20th century music is broader, qualitatively and quantitatively than what came before. Artists play to be heard.

So yeah, I'd say shit gets boring. It was moving at a snail's pace before. Compare the evolution of music in the past 50 years to any other 50 year period. Give me a break. It is simply incomparable.

You can say what you want about bach's complexity and all that, but at the end of the day, that's just an intellectual game being played. The goal in writing music is not to make it as complex as possible. It is usually to sound good and interesting

All I'm asking is that you step back and look at this from an objective point of view. You seem to be seriously emotionally involved in this theory and it's clouding your judgement.

Anyway, I'm gonna continue listening to the new Nine Inch Nails album.

Like I said, I'm not interested here in debating whether the particular factors you mentioned are correct, and I already pointed out what I think about them.

The point of the post is how The Columbian Exchange could plausibly have affected the biology of humans in Europe, and what effects these changes could have had on the culture they produced, given the relationship between biology and culture.

I repeat: do not comment on my posts anymore. You take the tangential points and spout off about these -- e.g., I didn't say I prefer Common Period music to all other types. I simply noted that it's much more difficult to do / you have to be loonier to dream it up than for deodorant jingles, or even stuff like Aphex Twin that lacks the richness of interacting melodic voices on the level that Bach was operating at. That requires an explanation.

(I will delete further comments of yours because they sidetrack too much, you've added all you're capable of, and don't want to waste any more time responding to you.)

I think about hearing that chimp rob. Did you hear about the Lion that started adopting Gazelles? I think the main strain of toxo would be in Egypt. The cat was looked at as a god with powers. Perhaps it was Toxo. The domesticated cat went to Greece and Rome next.

I never thought of the South American connection later. It's worth more study. I never thought of a music connection. I thought more of Albert Einstein. See I have Toxo and me and my cousin got good affects but since it was a strict by the book family it wasn't able to adapt to the changes and well fell apart. I wouldn't think of treatment. I never had to read a book in my life and I still got 70-100% on all my tests. I didn't even need to know much of anything about the tests. The only subject I had to pay attention to was math. I'll be it I got a bit lazy, but I remember learning turbo pascal without a book or taking the class. All I needed was the help file and made a computer game in 2 weeks. Maybe it wasn't the toxo, but maybe it was.

Many animals seem to have a group mind. Perhaps that's how I knew the answers to tests.

English was a no go for me with extreme dyslexia and A.D.D.