Can Viruses Control Our Behavior?

Can viruses control our behavior? Maybe this isn’t a question you’ve ever asked yourself, but many people have. It’s true that the question seems to come from a science fiction or even a horror story. But science, used to asking much more complex questions, has found that they do: Viruses can change our behavior.

Of course they don’t do this in a direct way. It’s not that they ‘hijack’ our will and make decisions for us. In fact, they do it in a more whispery, quiet and cunning way. Why? Because if there’s one thing these infectious microscopic creatures desire above all else, it’s to survive, replicate, and be part of complex ecosystems.

Therefore, one way to achieve their vital goal is to change the behavior of their host host to spread more viral particles.

So many of those symptoms that we experience when we go through the flu, diarrhea, or even the common cold, for example, are meant to be passed on to other healthy individuals in order to spread the infection.

For example, sneezing is more than just a natural mechanism for expelling invaders from our bodies. It’s also a way that viruses actually “jump” from one organism to another. This works well for them, as we all know. However, there are even more fascinating (and disturbing) facts about this topic.

How can viruses control our behavior?

The word virus in itself scares us and even more so in the current context of COVID-19. As we often say, our worst enemies are the very ones we can’t see. The ones that are only visible under a microscope and have the power to weaken our health.

But what exactly are these living beings? In reality, they are nothing more than packets of genetic information. They are like containers surrounded by a conspicuous protein capsule.

Their sole purpose is to get into the cells of other organisms to survive and multiply. They not only infect humans, but also invade animal organisms, plants, fungi and even bacteria.

So, when we ask how viruses can control our behavior, the first thing we need to understand about them is that they are smarter than we think. They don’t have brains, of course, but it’s common for virologists to define them as highly intelligent creatures.

They know how to invade a cell, how to disarm it and transform it so that it replicates viral particles. In addition, as we mentioned above, they also change the host’s behavior. Let’s see how.

The Symptoms of Disease: The Way Viruses Spread

To find out whether viruses can control our behavior, we refer to a recent study. It was published in the journal PLOS Pathogens and conducted by Dr. Claudia Hagbon and Dr. Maria Istrate of Linköping University in Sweden.

In this study, they sought to delve deeper into a type of infectious disease that kills 600,000 children each year. This is a very high number and the cause is a rotavirus. The most obvious symptoms are always vomiting and diarrhea. Vomiting was believed to be a defense mechanism of the body itself against the disease.

It was thought that vomiting also followed this link between the brain and the gut to expel a dangerous element, bad food, or other poisonous substance from the body. In this case, it was the serotonin that activated the nervous system so that the brain generated this behavior and thus could expel these harmful elements from the body.

What this team of Swedish doctors discovered in this regard was the following. The rotavirus controls the mechanisms of vomiting and diarrhea for a very specific purpose, which is to spread viral particles and infect other people.

The science of behavioral virology

Can viruses control our behavior? The answer, as we can see, is yes. They do, and their strategy is to convert our symptoms into their infection mechanism involving other people, even other hosts. In their quest to survive and replicate, they take control of behaviors such as sneezing, vomiting, and diarrhea.

The science of behavioral virology goes even further. Research such as that at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, revealed more. Some viruses can completely change our behavior. They can cause irritability, insomnia, hyperactivity and even radically change a person’s behavior.

An example of this is Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (mad cow disease), in which the patients suffer from progressive dementia, difficulty walking, agitation and mood swings.

Another example is the Borna disease virus, which was first described in horses in 1766. However, it also affected humans and caused clinical symptoms very similar to schizophrenia. Rabies is another example of how a virus can change the behavior of humans and animals.

Finally, we would like to note that luckily science protects us from the effect of many of these viruses. For the rest, for the viruses for which we do not yet have a vaccine or defense mechanism, there is a very effective strategy: washing your hands regularly and good hygiene.