10 Times Video Games Got Science WRONG
2. Cordyceps Can't Actually Infect Humans - The Last Of Us
The Last of Us takes place in a world ravaged by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus, which infects humans' brains and transforms them into aggressive, mushroom-sprouting monsters.
Despite the game's grimly fantastical nature, cordyceps is in fact a very real fungus, albeit one which is (thankfully) confined to insects and unable to leap to humans. For now, anyway.
In nature, cordyceps will infect an insect's brain and control its motor functions in order to position the fungus for maximum reproductive success, at which point the insect will clamp down in place and be devoured by the fungus.
It would reportedly require hundreds of years of evolution for cordyceps to be able to manipulate a human's brain sufficiently to make it worthwhile, and given that insects are far higher in number and more easily controlled, they are clearly the most efficient means for propagation.
Furthermore, cordyceps by its nature doesn't turn the infected aggressive, so even if, centuries or more likely millennia from now, cordyceps somehow fluked its way into a human's brain, they wouldn't suddenly transform into the cannibalistic monsters depicted in the game.
Yet to be fair to The Last of Us, despite its grittiness, it has few pretensions to scientific authenticity, even if renaming the virus to something other than cordyceps might've been a good idea.