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Smart Reads: Bradley Voytek’s ‘Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?’
When neuroscientists Bradley Voytek and Timothy Verstynen got together for regular beer and horror film sessions, they naturally started wondering what was going wrong in the brains of zombies shuffling across the screen. Now, they’ve buckled down and delivered an exhaustive report on the science of zombie symptoms in their new book, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?: A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain. We recently got a chance to chat with Voytek about the neuroscience of the undead: (Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.) World Science Festival: So what is the most plausible way for “zombieism” to be transmitted? Bradley Voytek: I like to joke that I know nothing about the human body once you get below the brain. So if you’re asking me about immunology and epidemiology and genetics and infection, I have no idea. The canonical method is usually some blood-borne or bodily fluid-borne virus or infection of some sort. If we’re going to go for plausibility, there’s certain things in the animal kingdom like the Cordyceps fungus, which infects ants, and causes their behavior to change—the ant will climb up onto a leaf and bite down and hold on so they …
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