The Scientific Way To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse – Extended
Let’s talk to a PhD neuroscientist about the zombie brain and the scientific way to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Bradley Voytek is a neuroscientist and cognitive scientist at UCSD. He did his PhD in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and post-doc research in neurology at UCSS.
He’s also one of the “leading experts” on the zombie brain and is currently writing a book on it for Princeton University Press.
How Can We Speculate On What Zombies Would be Like?
Bradley Voytek:
We can take a forensic neuroscience approach: we don’t have a zombie to examine, but we can try and infer what the brain would look like based upon observing their behaviors — by which I mean watching a bunch of zombie movies.
So what are the canonical behaviors that a zombie has? We basically break it down into a set of symptoms: lack of fine motor control, lack of goal-directed cognition, memory impairments, and aggression. And from that we try and infer what the zombie brain would have to look like.
And so depending on the sub-genre or the exact movie we have a couple of different symptoms, but from that we can make inferences about what the brain would look like.
(Bradley breaks down the specifics in this fun TED video.)
Which Are The Most Scientifically Accurate Zombie Movies?
Bradley Voytek:
- 28 Days Later: “It’s the best take on fast zombies, in my opinion.”
- Night of the Living Dead: “Fantastic for the undead version of the zombie.”
- World War Z: “Not so great. The idea of having zombies build a 50 foot person ladder to climb on… It was just biologically very implausible.”
- Walking Dead: “It does a very good version of the standard mindless, infected zombie.”
What Books Do You Recommend?
Bradley Voytek:
On zombies:
World War Z, Max Brooks
The Zombie Autopsies, Steve Schlozman
On the brain:
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — and anything else by Oliver Sacks.
What’s The Most Scientific Way To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse?
Bradley Voytek:
So if we’re going to say that zombies have memory problems and that they have motor impairments and they have aggression issues, then we can leverage our scientific knowledge about how the zombie brain works to help increase our odds of survival.
If they actually do have memory problems, which it appears that they do, then one tip might be to actually just hide from them and wait it out. So if you’re being chased by a group of zombies if you can somehow manage to hide, they’ll forget where you are after a couple of minutes. Given everything we know about how the brain works, that should be the case.
Another one is just try and get somewhere where they can’t reach you very easily, because they have terrible motor control. In the original “Night of the Living Dead”, people were hiding in a house for several days. And it wasn’t until the house got overrun that the problems occurred.
Also, based upon what we think about how their brains would have to be working, they’re also very distractable. This is actually used very effectively in the video game “Left 4 Dead” where you have a little beeping bomb that you can throw and the beeping captures all of the zombies attention. They go running after that and the bomb explodes.
A really effective way of getting around them would be to utilize all these:
- Distract them and run away. Because they’re pretty slow, you should be able to outrun them.
- Climb somewhere high that would hard for them to get to.
- Hide so they forget where you are.
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Part 2
Debunking Brain Myths
Bradley Voytek:
So there’s the 10 percent thing, which is totally not true. If anybody thinks that we only use 10 percent of their brain, then I would challenge them to remove 90 percent of their brain. I can guarantee that that wouldn’t lead to good things.
Cognitive aging is a big one. People think that as we get older our cognition declines and that’s just inevitable. And it’s true that certain things do change as we get older but other things do improve as well, so. Verbal memory actually gets better as we get older, for example.
The number of neurons, another thing is, like, people often say “We have as many neurons in our brain as there are stars in the galaxy.” It’s actually not quite true. It’s close enough to the order of magnitude. I think we have 86 billionish neurons in the human brain on average and there’s about 300 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy, but that doesn’t actually mean anything.
And the assumption that dopamine equals reward and there’s a brain area for love and stuff like that, none of that really even logically makes sense.
The brain is actually a very highly interconnected network of all these 86 billion neurons talking to each other and working together to give rise to complex behaviors. Not only talking to each other but also talking to the body. And so there isn’t a brain area that does x, y, or, z.
There’s a brain area that helps give rise to a behavior in concert with all these other brain regions. Same with neurotransmitters. Dopamine is not the reward chemical. Dopamine is implicated in reward in certain kinds of studies, in certain brain regions, but it’s not in and of itself, it’s not the rewarding chemical and I think that’s a big myth people believe.
How Did You Get Interested In Zombie Brains?
Bradley Voytek:
I do this with a friend of mine from grad school, Tim Verstynen. He did his PhD at Berkeley at the same time I was there. He’s now a professor at Carnegie Mellon. And this whole zombie brain thing totally came about by random chance.
So he and I used to hang out in grad school with friends and do zombie movie nights. Over a couple of beers you’re talking, a roomful of PhD neuroscientists, and everybody’s like, “Why do they move the way they do?” “Why do they act the way that they act?”
“Well, you know, it’s because their striatum is damaged or their cerebellum is damaged.” So we used to just joke about this stuff but then we got a call from Matt Mogk, who headed the Zombie Research Society.
Then Tim and I sat down and we actually tried to formalize “What is wrong with a zombie’s brain?” What could possibly happen in the brain of a person to make them behave like how we see zombies behave in movies?
Turns out it’s a really good teaching tool. If you try to get up in front of a crowd of non-scientists and explain that the cerebellum is doing all of these probabilistic calculations of motor control and things like that, nobody gives a damn, right?
But if you encapsulate it in something that’s kind of interesting and people can get, like zombies, then people actually listen. And not only that, they think it’s funny.
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