One of the rabies symptoms is a fear of water, also called a hydrophobia.
Wikipedia article on rabies even shows a diseased trying to drink water but still unable to.
My question is: how it works on the biological level? Is it happening in consciousness, subconsciousness, or where? How does the sickness knows the water is approaching the mouth? How? Can one trick the sickness by making person close their eyes? Or by putting water in a closed box and then moving it towards the patient? Etc?
In: 98
Searching for ‘hydrophobia’ yields two earlier topics, of which /r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7n7g8i/eli5_how_does_rabies_induce_hydrophobia/ has a nice explanation that it just works on the muscles involved with swallowing. The hydrophobia is then developed autonomously by the victim.
Same way getting bitten by a dog can make you scared of dogs but that doesn’t mean the bite itself had some biological/neurological pathway directly to the brain to cause the fear, it’s the person’s observation and instinct that then forms this behavior.
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