Science at UM [S05-ep02]: Towards cognitive virology?

[Podcast] - Published on December 4, 2025 in Science-Society

This week in Science at UM Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget from the Montpellier Infectiology Research Institute talk to us about cognitive virology. Our report takes us to the dendrochronology plateau at the Montpellier Institute of Evolutionary Sciences with Benoit Brossier, and finally, last-minute guest Nathan Roure will introduce us to the Sud de Sciences. A program broadcast every Wednesday on Divergence.

On November 28, the newspaper Le Monde published an op-ed written by a group organized around Solenn Tanguy, president of Winslow Santé publique, entitled "The symptoms of long Covid only make sense when they are linked to their cause." This opinion piece followed another published in Le Monde on November 4 entitled "Alongside the science of disease, we advocate the science of symptoms." This text was written by researchers and clinicians advocating for a psychosomatic view of long Covid.
This proves that six years after its appearance, long Covid remains a controversial disease in France.

However, numerous studies document and confirm the persistence of prolonged cognitive impairment following COVID-19. One such study, published last September in Nature Medicine, compared 351 people hospitalized for COVID-19 with an average age of 54 to 2,927 people similar in age, gender, and education level. The results are chilling: "It's as if the brains of these patients had undergone a 20-year acceleration of the aging process," says one of the authors.

And Covid isn't the only virus that causes cognitive impairment: West Nile virus, chikungunya, rabies... All these agents have become experts in the art of infiltrating our brains, and they don't always do so without leaving traces, as explained by Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget, researchers at the Montpellier Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IRIM) and authors of an article entitled " When viral infections alter neural circuits: towards cognitive virology," published in the journal Sciences Direct on November 7, 2025.

In the second part of the program, we begin a series of reports from the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences in Montpellier. For the first report, Benoit Brossier gives us a tour of the dendrochronology lab, where he studies tree growth rings.

Finally, Nathan Roure, press relations officer at the University of Montpellier, presents the Sud de Sciences festival, which began on December 2 and will continue until the 7th for its^eighth edition.

At UM Science, you have the program, so let's get started!

Co-production: Divergence FM / University of Montpellier
Host: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interview: Lucie Lecherbonnier / Aline Périault
Reporting: Aline Périault
Production: Alice Rollet

Listen to the program “A l’UM la science” on Divergence FM 93.9

Keywords: Science at UM, Research, Company