Deric Bownds discusses how fecal transplants from old mice to young mice have bad effect on the critters' mental abilities. Maybe the opposite is also true. And maybe it works also for humans.
It seems that your microbiome can make you smart or dumb. Holobionticity is a complex matter, indeed!
Age related cognitive decline and the gut microbiome
by Deric Bownds
Haridy summarizes experiments by D'Amato et al. showing that fecal transplants from old mice to young mice result in the younger animals displaying learning and memory impairments. It would be interesting to expand this work to check whether transferring fecal transplants from young to older mice improved their learning and memory, as is the case with blood transfers from younger to older mice. Here are the background and results sections of the open source research paper.
