Friday, July 15, 2011

Mad science: "Activite their Capgras" sounds more humorous said aloud than it reads off the page.


Wired online has a short article and video presentation on the curious work of UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek. Voytek - who is not helping fight the pervasive stereotype that UC Berkeley is some sort of really expensive summer camp for really smart weirdos - has assembled a neurological picture of zombiism by translating zombie behaviors seen in a handful of popular flicks into known neurological conditions. From the article:

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.”

After settling on a brain-model for the reanimated, Voytek extrapolated some survival tips for the zombie apocalypse. Notable exploitable bugs in the zombie-brain: Zack's probably got crap memory, so if you come up with a really neat way to kill zombies, feel free to keep it in rotation as long as you please. Also, Voytek speculates that zombies probably have difficulty visually tracking more than one moving object at a time. Certainly the resourceful zombie hunter could put that to good use.

4 comments:

bradley.voytek@gmail.com said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bradley.voytek@gmail.com said...

Okay, so Berkeley's a little weird (and my spelling sucks). But, in my defense, beer.

CRwM said...

And what other defense is ever needed? Keep up the drinking and the good work!

bradley.voytek@gmail.com said...

I will promise to continue one of the two.