Potential of a zombie attack considered by guest speaker
Aside from campus-wide stagings of zombie attacks, when the world faces a real pandemic infection that results in blood-thirsty dead people causing utter pandemonium, one Harvard professor has studied the ins and outs of zombiehood and brought his knowledge to USU.
Dr. Steven Schlozman, psychiatrist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, discussed how to survive a zombie apocalypse in a talk he gave in the TSC Ballroom Tuesday night.
“My weapon of choice would be to keep my head, because when we start to react emotionally, we start to get ourselves in trouble,” Scholzman said.
With Stanford, Brown and Harvard diplomas under his arm, Schlozman said he served as a panelist at the 2011 Comic Con in San Diego, at which he verbally sparred with other zombie experts, fans and even director George Romero, of the zombie movie genre.
In his speech “How to Survive (the Inevitable) Zombie Attack (in 8 Simple Steps)” Schlozman gave a checklist of skeletal essentials on how to survive the cultural obsession. He also spoke about the content of his book “The Zombie Autopsies,” and listed a medical breakdown of how to effectively recognize a progressing case of what he coined “ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome.”
He said his tips may seem rudimentary, but freshman should pay attention.
“Be more coordinated, don’t accidentally kill a human because you think he’s a zombie, know your enemy, don’t think like an adolescent, walk fast — because they often fall and are slow, bring a snack for your zombie — but you’ll probably need to heat it up, hide well, know yourself and control your emotions,” he stated.
Schlozman said his research began in 2009 when he was invited to present a paper prior to a movie showing and then found inspiration from watching “Night of the Living Dead.” He said within a zombie’s brain synapses dance back and forth. He also discussed how a zombie might exist physiologically.
His medical research lends preference to a slow-moving, decaying zombie breed with progressive degeneration, he said. Far different from the other, quicker Hollywood zombies.
“I prefer the slow ones, because I think they are scarier, and they lend themselves better to medical ideology,” Schlozman said. “Having time to think is the worst thing humans can have, because if we have enough time to think, we have time to screw up and things go south.”
This omits fast-paced films such as “Zombieland” and “28 Days Later,” he said, which feature sprinting reanimated, flesh-hungry corpses that arguably aren’t zombies at all and therefore deserve a different form of physical discription altogether.
Schlozman focused heavily on the composition of the human brain, and the functions that drive our actions. He compared the brain of a zombie to a crocodile, which is urge-driven to eat anything warm blooded. But, he said, a zombie is more like a drunk crocodile, lacking coordinated movement, depth perception or balance.
He presented case studies of “morning briefs” in which a new patient would be introduced to a doctor. The odd behavior would be considered a drug case, or “PCP until proven otherwise,” he said. After routine checks to diagnose the cause, zombies would fail tests for drugs and vital signs would be failing, with increased white blood cells fighting infection. The biggest clue, he said, would be when they tried to bite the doctor’s nose off when he tries to get a better view.
After the medical presentation, Schlozman explained why popular zombie movies are such common venues for social commentary.
“Most zombie movies aren’t about zombies, because zombies aren’t very smart,” Schlozman said. “They are about how humans screw things up. You could eat a sandwich and get away if you kept your wits about you. Zombie movies are a blank slate, by definition; there is nothing there. They allow us to bring out our worst.”
He said they also allow us to display our most basic human instincts — to band together for common purposes and relate to each other’s pain.
Students asked questions after Schlozman finished his speech. He responded while maintaining perspective about his survival techniques and further entertained the small crowd.
He also said killing zombies unnecessarily, zombies who act simply out of hunger impulses from the brain, could be the wrong thing to do.
“There is a balance between the higher and lower brain that makes us human,” Schlozman said. “It’s not about you, so you can’t be mad at a zombie, and the more we shoot, hit, kill something that looks like us, the more it takes a toll on us; it dehumanizes us.”
Schlozman said there are a couple upcoming cable specials: “The History of the Living Dead,” running Oct. 26-31 on the History Channel and “The Walking Dead,” that begins its second season on AMC Sunday, Oct. 15.
– m.p.dahl@aggiemail.usu.edu