UM atUM [S05-ep02]: Toward Cognitive Virology?
This week on "UM at theUM ," Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget from the Montpellier Institute for Infectious Disease Research talk to us about cognitive virology. Our report takes us to the dendrochronology lab at the Montpellier Institute of Evolutionary Sciences with Benoit Brossier, and finally, our last-minute guest, Nathan Roure, will introduce us to the Sud de Sciences. A program broadcast every Wednesday on the radio station Divergence.
On November 28, the newspaper *Le Monde* published an op-ed written by a group organized around Solenn Tanguy, president of Winslow Public Health, titled“The symptoms of long COVID only make sense when linked to their cause.” This op-ed followed another one also published in Le Monde on November 4 under the title“Alongside the science of diseases, we advocate for the science of symptoms.” That piece, written by researchers and clinicians, argued for a psychosomatic approach to Long COVID.
This serves as proof that, six years after its emergence, Long COVID remains a contested condition in France.
Yet numerous studies document and confirm the persistence of long-term cognitive impairments 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 who were similar in terms of age, sex, and education level. The result is chilling:“It’s as if these patients’ brains had undergone an accelerated aging process equivalent to 20 years,” says one of the authors.
And COVID isn’t the only virus that causes cognitive impairment: West Nile virus, chikungunya, rabies… All of these pathogens have become experts in the art of infiltrating our brains, and they don’t always do so without leaving a trace, as explained by Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget, researchers at the Montpellier Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IRIM) and authors of an article titled “When Viral Infections Alter Neural Circuits: Toward Cognitive Virology, published in the journal *Sciences Direct* on November 7, 2025.
See also:
- A Strategist Named Zika, Lum Magazine
In the second half 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, the press relations officer at the University of Montpellier, introduces us to the Sud de Sciences festival, which began on December 2 and will run through the 7th for its8th edition.
AtUM , you’ve got the schedule—let’s get started!
Co-production: Divergence FM / University of Montpellier
Host: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interview: Lucie Lecherbonnier / Aline Périault
Report: Aline Périault
Director: Alice Rollet
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