The Wizards of Mind Control
What if some outside force could control your mind and make you act against your own interests? It’s a terrifying prospect—one that captures our imagination and recurs frequently in our fiction. It’s the goal of one of the three Unforgivable Curses in Harry Potter. It’s the purpose of Newspeak, the fictional language in George Orwell’s 1984. It enthralls in classics such as Brave New World and The Manchurian Candidate. In the 1950s, the CIA was so concerned that the communists had developed mind-control techniques that they launched their own secret program called MK-ULTRA, whose purpose was to use hallucinogenic drugs and biological manipulation to achieve mind control in ways that could be used against the United States’ enemies. It didn’t work—but mind control is real, and it can be observed in nature. Parasites do it all the time.
Parasites are organisms that live in or on other creatures, feeding on their hosts and taking their resources. They infect animals and pull their behavioral strings, manipulating them like marionettes. Such parasites are “essentially neuroengineers,” as one recent paper puts it, “capable of controlling the central nervous systems of the hosts they infect.”1 Their tactics are astonishing.
Neurochemical mind control is not just the stuff of science fiction.
Consider the fluke parasite . It masterminds a cycle that starts in the liver of a hoofed animal—a cow or sheep. First, it lays eggs that end up in the animal’s
