Our personality is formed by our genes, our lifestyle, our life history, and our environment. Now we learn it is perhaps molded by our inside environment, our microbiome, the ecosystem of gut microbes that live inside us and metabolize our food. As reported yesterday in Inverse, Katerina Johnson, a research associate at the University of Oxford, is publishing a study in the March 2020 edition of the Human Microbiome Journal, in which the gut microbiome is investigated with respect to human personality. The study reveals that people with larger social networks tend to have a more diverse microbiome, and as we know, a more diverse microbiome is associated with more optimal health. The study also found, like many other studies before, that anxiety and stress are linked to reduced diversity and an altered microbiome composition.

Read more