Orange tabby kittens. Photo by Nagamori

Not just blog readers, it’s said a quarter of humanity is infected by T. gondii, though I’d guess viewers of Cute Overload are slightly more likely to be infected. That’s because according to this post I found at MicrobiologyBytes, T. gondii is a parasite transmitted by felines. Alan Cann adds:

Can an infectious disease indirectly alter human culture through its effects on personality? People infected with T. gondii experience long-term personality changes:
* Women become more intelligent, warm, outgoing, attentive to others, kindly, easy-going.
* Men show lower intelligence, novelty-seeking and bad tempered.
* Both infected men and women have higher levels of guilt-proneness.

You can find more at his post Dominated by men? where he talks about the paper Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture? by Kevin Lafferty in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.