If you’re in a crowded room with someone who starts coughing — not a “clear your throat” cough, but a gross, phlegmy one — you might respond by moving away from them, covering your mouth or donning a facemask. But it turns out that external reactions to someone nearby indicating that they might be sick aren’t the only ways in which your body responds to the possibility of infectious disease nearby.
That’s one of the big takeaways from a paper published this week in Nature Neuroscience. Its authors sought to better understand how the nervous system reacts to the prospect of disease around it. As they wrote, what they learned “[suggests] an integrated neuro–immune reaction in humans toward infection threats” as opposed to leaving the immune system to its own devices.
The scientists used virtual reality to show their test subjects virtual reality images of “human faces displaying clear signs of infection.” They detected neurological responses to these faces in a way that differed from two other types of faces also shown to participants, labeled as “neutral” and “fearful.”
In addition, the researchers also found differences in blood samples from the study participants who had seen the infectious faces in VR, suggesting that the neurological and immune systems were working together.
Turns Out Human Skin Has Its Own Immune System
This could lead to more efficient vaccinesWhat are the implications of these findings? Writing in Nature, Katie Kavanagh observed that the results of this study could prompt public health workers to use virtual reality to boost the effects of certain vaccines. That said, the results do leave some questions unanswered — the paper’s authors pointed out, for one thing, that they ran their tests on young adults, so the effects of age on these phenomena remains to be measured.
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