Hijacked by Athena Aktipis

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HIJACKED The New Science of Neural Manipulation and What It Means for Our Health, Happiness, and Sense of Self ATHENA AKTIPIS

The Selfish Gene meets Parasite Rex in this tour of the evolutionary biology of neural manipulation and what it means for our physical health, our mental health and the way we see ourselves.

Who is really in control of our bodies and minds? In HIJACKED, Athena Aktipis takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through new scientific findings that challenge our long-held assumptions about who we are and why we do what we do. She provides an in-depth look at examples of how things that aren’t us can manipulate our brains, take over our behaviour and affect our physical and mental health. From microbes that shape our food preferences to fetal cells that can take over maternal physiology, our lives are not entirely under our control. Our bodies and minds are a constant battleground of manipulation: not just because of foreign cells inside us, but also because of information coming in from the outside world – from our relationships, our families, and the technology we constantly interact with.

Luckily, we have evolved to decrease our vulnerability to manipulation through sophisticated immune systems, cheater-detection systems and bullshit detectors. But our world has also changed dramatically in recent decades and our anti-mind-control strategies have not necessarily kept pace. Are we now entering an age where we are particularly vulnerable to being hijacked, enabled by more rapid transmission of agents of manipulation, whether microbes or memes? In HIJACKED, we learn how to counter mind-control tactics that come from forces both inside and outside us. At the same time, however, we learn that manipulation is not always a bad thing – it for example allows us to accomplish things together we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do alone. As Aktipis argues, our ability to share microbes and information – our ability to hijack and be hijacked – is part of what makes us human.

ATHENA AKTIPIS studies general principles of cooperation across diverse systems from human society to cancer and multicellular life. She is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, director of the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, and co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She is also the chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting, host of the new podcast ‘Zombified’, producer of Channel Zed, and author of THE CHEATING CELL: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Agent: Jeff Shreve

Publisher: Princeton University Press Delivery: August 2022 Publication: Summer 2023 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 75,000 words

All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press), Japan (Kagaku-Dojin)