We’ve heard this song and dance before from the ZRS and professional Zombie haters like Dr. Scholzman: “I watched some highly inconsistent Anti-Zombie movies and now have deduced *the* best, entirely fictional, all-encompassing, heavily biased ‘explanation’ of what makes Zombies tick!”

Sort of like phrenology for the 21st Century:

In case you missed it, Wired.com recently ran a feature of the work of ZRS Board Members Bradley Voytek, PhD and Timothy Verstynen, PhD.

Verstynen is a neuroscientist at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh, specializing in human brain imaging and neural network modeling, and Voytek is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley studying the role of neural oscillations in communicating brain networks. Together they authored a groundbreaking paper on zombie brain function titled “The Living Dead Brain”, in connection with their development of a complete three dimensional model of a zombie brain.

Naturally, the extent of this ‘research’ consists of watching a few Anti-Zombie movies, ignoring their internal inconsistencies and deviations from the imagined ‘norm’, then retrospectively designing a brain that would mimic the author’s unjustified assumptions about both the Zombie movies they claim to love and real world Zombiism:

Believe it or not, the guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse is actually derived from real neuroscience. The charts are largely based on a presentation (see video below) by UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, who re-created what the zombie brain would look like based on cognitive problems observed in films like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and The Return of the Living Dead.

Based on that map of the zombie brain, Voytek and a fellow neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen established that the walking dead suffered from a condition they called Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. CDHD is characterized by “the loss of rational, voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, the inability to coordinate motor-linguistic behaviors and an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”

…

In their research, the scientists were able to determine that humans can exploit many zombie deficiencies. For example, abuse the undead’s poor motor skills by running fast, take advantage of their amnesia by hiding until they forget about you, or activate their Capgras delusions by mimicking their actions so they don’t attack you.

“This entire endeavor is partly an academic ‘what if’ exercise for us and partly a tongue-in-cheek critique of the methods of our profession of cognitive neuroscience,” Verstynen said.

Honestly, I don’t know what these two are thinking. The ‘Zombies’ contained in those three films have, Anti-Zombie stereotyping aside, completely and radically different sets of portrayed behavior. In ’28 Days Later’ the Infected are depicted as semi-rational individuals capable of learning, observation, hunting and tracking, but overwhelmed with aggression. They are not, however, conventionally Undead – and in fact, their complete inability to eat is a MAJOR PLOT POINT which one might assume that a viewer would notice since the other characters extensively discuss it on screen as their one and only hope to save the world (or at least England). What do the Infected *want* to eat? The viewers are never told, but one thing is certain – they never so much as snack on human flesh.

In ‘Return of the Living Dead’, the Undead are shown to retain their full pre-Undeath intelligence; they are mentally equivalent to their Living selves, albeit unfortunately suffering from a very painful medical condition. Again, a person might expect an alleged academic to notice this, since there is an extended scene where a restrained Russo ‘Zombie’ is tied down in the mortuary and interrogated. As for outrunning these alleged Zombies due to poor motor control, you’re kidding me, right? ‘Return of the Living Dead’ is the movie most important historically for popularizing the ‘Fast Zombie’ subgenre! Inability to coordinate ‘motor-linguistic’ behavior? The film’s ‘Zombies’ form an army and defeat the police in a street battle! Remember ‘Send more cops’? Seems pretty coordinated to me, not to mention obviously linguistic.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ is the only movie to demonstrate a majority of the behaviors these two researchers asign to their ‘Disorder’ in its fictionalized Zombie population, however, ‘Shaun’ too belies their pigeonholing and hasty prejudicial treatment by showing that the Undead are in fact capable of learning to peacefully coexist with the Living and by the end of the film this process is already well underway.

Oops.

All these missteps, while fascinating evidence of the inability of your average Anti-Zombie movie fan to sit through a film and actually observe the events on screen with any degree of accuracy and recall, are tangential to the essential point that here we once again have a group of academics leveraging their credentials to promote intolerance of the Differently Animated.

Perhaps the ZRC should propose a syndrome of its own: ‘Anti-Zombie Attention Deficit Disorder’. Symptoms include the inability to note and later recall basic facts about a film’s plot if it involves the Undead, a lack of sympathy for those whose Vitality Status is different from one’s own and a desperate craving for the attention and acknowledgement of other fans of Anti-Zombie media.

Prognosis is grim to say the least, and untreated leads to a lifetime habit spending large amounts of money on entertainment that the viewer apparently cannot comprehend, let alone remember later. However, there is hope, in the form of education and outreach. The first step is to acknowledge you have a problem!

The ZRC will be happy to provide the sufferers of AZADD with counseling and sensitivity training, along with a notepad and pencil so that they can attempt to learn basic note-taking skills before they write extensively about movies, given their own poor observational and recall skills. Perhaps a bit of tutoring on proper study behavior would help.

If it prevented just one of these Quasi-science pop science pieces from percolating through the media, believe me, it’d be worth the effort.

Tags: Academia, Anti-Zombie Attention Deficit Disorder, Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.