[ExI] microbes again

[William Flynn Wallace]

Reading 10% Human - Collen

I was just thinking of Ockham's razor, preferring the simplest explanation
if you know very little to begin with.

If  person has a mental health problem, is it simpler to assume a
biological/genetic explanation, or an environmental/lifestyle/emotional
explanation?  I have not figured that out.  How would you answer this?

But in this book, personality changes of a dramatic sort are obtained in
studies of the transfer of gut microbes from one strain of mice to
another.  Giving antibiotics to autistic children immediately results in
dramatic behavior changes (which don't last - microbes mutating?).
Toxoplasma infection changes the behavior of people.

So now I think we have to add a third category to the biological/genetic,
environmental/emotional explanation:  microbial infection or imbalance.

Of course an initial problem is working with people as subjects.  We can
hardly inject microbes into people to see what happens.

But the results in this book are not to be denied:  microbes help run our
lives,and sometimes it sends us off the rails to behavior that resembles
schizophrenia, obsessive/compulsive problems, and others.

bill w
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