Abnormal infectious proteins, called prions, can block some parts of the brain while leaving others intact, creating a zombie out of a person. It may well be, but it's not that simple.

In the West African and Haitian teachings of Voodoo, zombies are human beings without a soul, their bodies are nothing more than shells controlled by powerful sorcerers. In the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, an army of bumbling, feeble-minded corpse eaters brought to life by radiation attacks a group of Pennsylvania natives. We're looking for something between Haiti and Hollywood: an infectious agent that will leave its victims half-dead, yet still living shells of who they used to be.

This effective agent will target and block specific areas of the brain, scientists say. And although the living dead have intact motor skills - the ability to walk, of course, but also the ability to tear, necessary to devour human flesh, their frontal lobe, responsible for moral behavior, planning and inhibiting impulsive actions (such as the urge to bite someone something) will cease to exist. The cerebellum, which controls motor coordination, will likely be functional, but not fully functional. This explains the fact that zombies in movies are easy to outrun or hit with a baseball bat.

Most likely, the culprit of such a partially destroyed brain is protein. More precisely, a protein-like infectious particle called a prion. It's not exactly a virus or a living particle, but it is virtually impossible to destroy and there is no known way to treat the disease these prions cause.

The first prion epidemic was discovered around 1950 in Papua New Guinea, when members of one of the local tribes were struck by a strange tremors. At times the sick people of this tribe burst into uncontrollable laughter. The tribe called this disease “kuru,” and by the early 1960s, scientists had discovered that the source of the disease originated from the tribe’s cannibalistic funeral customs, including eating brains.

Prions became widely known in the 1990s as the infectious agents responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. When a deformed prion enters our body, like a mad cow, holes form in our brain, like holes in a sponge. Scintigraphy of the brains of people infected with the prion looked as if they had been shot in the head with a pellet gun.

Scary assumptions

If we think that evil geniuses are planning to destroy our world, then all they have to do is attach a prion to a virus, since prion diseases spread very easily through the population. For things to actually get even more catastrophic, we would need a virus that spreads very quickly and that carries prions to the frontal lobe of the brain and the cerebellum. Targeting the infection specifically to these parts of the body will be difficult, but it is very important in order to create the shambling, stupid creatures that we need.

Scientists propose using a virus that causes encephalitis, inflammation of the cerebral cortex. A herpes virus will also work, but it is unlikely that it will be possible to attach a prion to a virus. After infection, we will have to stop the spread of the prion in the body so that our zombies do not become completely immobile and their brains completely useless. Scientists suggest adding sodium bicarbonate to stimulate metabolic alkalosis, which raises the body's pH levels and makes it harder for prions to multiply. In this case, the person will have seizures, convulsive muscle contractions and will look as terrible as a zombie.

MOSCOW, March 5 - RIA Novosti. Mathematicians have found that the zombie invasion can be stopped if the country where the “living dead” appeared has a sufficiently large army. So far, only North Korea is suitable for this role, reports the online publication MiceTimes of Asia.

“Our model contains not only two “classical” populations of living beings - aggressive zombies and defenseless people, but also the military. Our calculations show that military intervention in the fight against this epidemic will be a key factor in saving humanity from extinction,” Fernando writes Fernando Sato and his colleagues from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil).

"Zombie apocalypse" is one of the fantastic "end of the world" scenarios. The destruction of humanity occurs as a result of the rapid spread of a certain virus or bacteria, which turns its victims into an extremely aggressive and unreasonable creature. Such zombies do not experience any feelings other than hunger. When a healthy person is bitten, the infected person transmits his infection to him, turning him into a similar person.

Doctors are studying such “doomsday” scenarios in order to calculate the consequences of outbreaks of as yet incurable and deadly diseases, such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and Zika in Brazil, and find ways to contain them.

Sato and his colleagues noted that such versions of the "apocalypse" imply that people will not resist the infection, try to destroy the zombies, or create insurmountable barriers to them. On the other hand, even Hollywood films with their fantastic scenarios of invasion of the “living dead” assume that the army will make desperate, but usually unsuccessful attempts to destroy the infected.

Brazilian mathematicians created a computer model of a “zombie apocalypse” in which there were three “populations” of people - military, zombies and civilians. All these groups, as conceived by scientists, have their own goals and objectives and compete with each other for living space in the hypothetical city in which they live.

Periodically, representatives of these “populations” bump into each other, which ends in one of three possible scenarios - zombies kill people, people kill zombies, or the living dead or the military turn civilians into their own kind. Ultimately, one of the two sides of this conflict wins, or a kind of balance is established between them.

In classic models of this conflict, zombies always turn out to be the winners, but the presence of an army capable of killing the “living dead” more effectively than ordinary people radically changes the picture. Even if there are few military personnel, they, as calculations show, can significantly delay the time of complete extinction of humanity.

If the number of military personnel reaches 46 soldiers for every thousand civilians, then the zombies will be defeated. The army will destroy a sufficient number of "living dead" at the beginning of the epidemic, before it grows to uncontrollable levels.

As mathematicians note, only one country so far has such armed forces - North Korea. On the other hand, improving the fighting qualities of the army and creating vaccines that increase the resistance of the entire population to infection will protect both civilians and military personnel from zombies and infections more effectively than increasing the number of military personnel.

Zombie brand. Zombies in pop culture are a construct that the industry needs as a money-making dynamo. This image expresses a person’s deepest fear: what is invincible, aggressive, stupid and ominous, what one can encounter or what one is in danger of turning into if one loses oneself. And there are those who are ready to make money from it: they turned the handle, and money flowed from the zombie machine to the film corporation. This image was recently used in a commercial for phones that are better at photographing human faces in the dark. The language includes stable expressions and memes: for example, “I am a zombie” or “Man is a wolf to man, and zombies are zombies.” Films with such a plot reflect classic pop culture consumption: we know it’s harmful, but we buy it again. This strange image is the quintessence of civilizational self-irony and collective anxiety.

The image of zombies is reflected in its own way in different areas of world culture.

Movie. The first zombie film was released in 1932 by Victor Halperin's production company. It was called "White Zombie". The main role was played by Bela Lugosi. George Romero, who created the canon of this genre, said that he was inspired by Richard Mattson's novel I Am Legend, although the novel was about vampires. Literature. Two contemporary works are of greatest interest. In 2003, the American writer Max Brooks published a book, “The Zombie Survival Guide.” The script for the movie World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, is based on it. In 2009, American screenwriter, producer and novelist Seth Grahame-Smith released the mashup novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Games. Based on this novel, a video game was created where English ladies and gentlemen use martial arts to fight zombies. And the tower defense game Plants vs Zombies earned its first million dollars within nine days of release. Mythology. The idea of ​​zombies also existed in Japanese mythology in the form of buso spirits. And in German-Scandinavian mythology there are two similar images - Draugr and Nachzerer. Philosophical zombie. This is what they call a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind. This is a hypothetical being, indistinguishable from a normal person, but lacking conscious experience or the ability to sense. (Have you noticed this: thinking that you hit yourself, you automatically scream, and then you realize that it doesn’t hurt? It’s about the same thing.) Programming. A zombie process is a child process on a Unix system that has completed execution but is still listed in the operating system so that the exit code is counted. Education. Zombies as a cultural phenomenon are studied in several universities and colleges around the world. For example, at Columbia College Chicago there is a course on “Zombies in Popular Media”: students try to understand why so many films are made about zombies, and what interests people about this creepy idea. The image of zombies in sociology and psychology. Since 2001, the Zombie Walk, a mass procession of people dressed as zombies, has been taking place in different places around the world. This phenomenon is also studied by sociologists and psychologists.

The phenomenon of the good zombie. Recently, several films have appeared about kind, humane or simply kind zombies:

. “Warm Bodies” is about a handsome zombie whose love for a girl (although, probably, the devoured brain of her boyfriend) makes him human again.

. "Fido" (Fido is a traditional dog name in the USA) is a satire on the topic of "Who should really be classified as a zombie?"

. “A Zombie named Shaun” (the official translation of the title is incorrect, since “Shaun of the Dead” is a play on the title of the film “Dawn of the Dead.” The main character’s name is Shaun, but his friend turns into a zombie. However, after that he remains a harmless slacker with a games console, this smart and biting parody film from director Edgar Wright stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and is practically a zombie variation of Hot Fuzz.

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What does the good zombie phenomenon mean? The movie zombie is experiencing a crisis of identitylessness.

Dead end branch of cultural evolution. Zombie as a pop culture character is a “dead-end branch of evolution”: cinema cannot develop him as a personality character. In the life of a movie zombie, there will be no dramatic turns (well, except for the summary bullet to the brain), new love, career changes, weddings and the birth of children. He simply has nothing to do. This cultural construct has two interests: to eat and to destroy - not enough for cinematic collisions.

A satire on this topic is present in the film “The Warmth of Our Bodies”: in a city abandoned by people, zombies, having nothing to do, return to routine life-long duties and even try to communicate with sounds.

Even if we assume that “the zombies have won” in the movie: what will they do when they destroy everything? In the sense of the cinematic plot and script, they can either quietly decompose under a bush, or grow kinder, wiser and become human again.

The cinema has painted itself into a corner and is forced to turn back time: bring the zombie back to life (for example, through love, as in “Warm Bodies”) or at least make him a tolerable sofa member of society (as happened with Ed, Shaun’s friend in “Shaun of the Dead").

Another option is to think about people who, when confronted with zombies, show the full spectrum of humanity and truly become human.

In general, the most interesting thing is not the zombie theme itself, but the phenomenon of turning naive, and then “meat” zombie films into a poetic reflection on man, about the illusions we live in. In essence, we are so caught up in the game that civilization (and almost each of us as a part of it) is constructing that we do not see “the world as it is.” And the series “The Walking Dead”, now in its fifth season, has been giving us an anatomical theater of our illusions.

The roads in big cities are empty, but no one is happy about this anymore. There are expensive cars everywhere, but you can go further on a horse. The main character, police officer Rick Grimes, tries his best to maintain reason and nobility, but the more stress, the more violently he reacts to the cruelty of those who are still alive, but have lost their humanity - have become essentially the “walking dead”. After the zombie apocalypse, the absurdity of racism and hostility becomes clearer. Groups of able-bodied survivors of this hell are howling among themselves for safety and food. And it turns out that we are talking not only about canned food from the supermarket, but also about the people themselves, whom cannibals perceive in the same way as we now perceive animals on farms. An alcoholic is ready to risk himself and his comrades in order to snatch a bag with a bottle from a zombie. A farmer keeps his zombie family in a barn, hoping for a cure for the dead, and insists that the walkers be treated humanely. A once peaceful, law-abiding man, faced with terrible things, becomes a psychopath who stores zombie heads in an aquarium, sets up a torture room and a zombie coliseum. But there remains something humane in him - he takes care of his zombie daughter and later takes care of several living ones. Powerful ambitions and sadistic tendencies come to the surface in the context of a collapsed civilization and public morality. People count the days without deaths and rejoice at the “30 days without incident” sign. A person adapts to everything: a woman with a katana cuts off zombies’ arms and jaws so that they cannot harm her, and leads her along on chains - their smell makes her “invisible” to crowds of the dead. The captured walkers are also used as troops against a hostile group, filling a truck with them. In essence, “The Walking Dead” is a reflection on what a person is capable of in extreme conditions, what the price of our civilization is, why we don’t value anything and are so bored while everything is good with us.

The theme of the transformation of most of the planet's population into hordes of zombies roaming the streets, hunting for a handful of survivors, has been exciting minds for decades. Interest in zombies either subsides or resumes with renewed vigor. Interestingly, the main supplier of films, games and books about the risen dead is the USA. Moreover, it is there that they prepare for the zombie apocalypse seriously and with all responsibility. For example, we recently wrote about upcoming exercises in Kansas that simulate the end of the world with the living dead, and in the spring of this year it became known that they also have an action plan in case of such a cataclysm. And this is not counting the numerous “survivors” who stock up in their bunkers with canned food and crowbars to break the skulls of living corpses. So why is the topic of zombie invasion so concerning to Americans? Let's try to figure it out.

We will not touch on the mythological origins of the term “zombie,” since more or less everyone knows about voodoo, and Haitian zombies are very different from those half-rotten herd cadavers that we are used to seeing on movie screens. For the same reasons, we will skip the film “White Zombie”, turning directly to the great and terrible George Romero, who gave us the film “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968, setting the clichés and framework of a new genre - zombie horror. True, the director did not use the term “zombie,” replacing it with the word “ghoul,” which can roughly be translated as “ghoul,” but it was journalists who “zombified” Romero’s walking dead.

True, Romero himself has repeatedly stated that zombies in his films are nothing more than a symbol of the average person who does not want to think, is subject to the herd instinct and is ready to kill those who are not like him. However, later Romero revised his view of the living dead, making them in “Land of the Dead” almost Nietzschean supermen, raising a rebellion against a completely rotten world order. But in general, zombies for the director remained a metaphorical image of the silent but aggressive majority.

Despite the rather transparent hints with which Romero literally hit the viewer in the forehead, the average person never recognized himself in this “zombie mirror”, but began to fear the external form - the real living dead.

It didn't take long before zombies took over popular culture, appearing not only on movie screens, but also on the pages of comics and books, and later video games. The family tree of the walking dead has branched out, presenting to the public both absolutely creepy running zombies (“28 Days Later,” a remake of “Dawn of the Dead”) and even intelligent (“Land of the Dead”) zombies, as well as comical (“Carrion Alive”), touching ( “Zombies named Fido”) and even romantic (“The Warmth of Our Bodies”) cadavers.

Nevertheless, the fear of hordes of the undead hungry for living flesh is deeply imprinted in the subcortex of the ordinary American man in the street. Gun stores, seemingly as a joke, began producing anti-zombie kits, which, however, did not include toy machetes, knives and shotguns. The son of the famous comedian Mel Brooks, Max, added fuel to the fire by releasing his famous “Zombie Survival Guide,” which formed the basis for the truly scary and realistic (unlike the film adaptation) “World War Z.”

The generation that grew up watching the films of Romero and his imitators today occupies key positions in the American government, and the fear of the living dead prominences is breaking through into the activities of serious government agencies. As mentioned above, the Pentagon has at its disposal plan CONOP 8888, which provides for actions to repel an attack by a horde of the living dead and maintain public order among the survivors. True, the military claims that the image of zombies was chosen in order to avoid any political allusions, but it is difficult to imagine that Chinese paratroopers or Islamist sabotage groups would act like herds of the living dead, mindlessly darting under machine-gun fire, covering up fire points with their bodies.

State Governor Sam Brownback gives approximately the same reasons for holding exercises in Kansas, arguing that “if you are ready for a zombie apocalypse, you are ready for anything,” and the theme of the living dead is used solely to create additional excitement around ordinary exercises to practice actions in emergency.

Zombie topics are not avoided by the media, which periodically release news that, even if they are canards, inevitably make the heart beat faster, deep down, bypassing rational arguments of common sense, raising doubt: “What if?”

In 2002, for example, a “zombie” was reported to have washed ashore on the island of St. Thomas, part of the US Virgin Islands. According to local newspaper reports later circulated around the world, the body of a man “with severely flayed skin” washed ashore. When the police arrived on the beach, the drowned man jumped to his feet and attacked the law enforcement officers. At the same time, several shots at the body, fired by confused policemen, did not produce any effect, and the policemen were forced to make a tactical retreat, throwing away their service weapons. However, among the onlookers who had gathered to look at the dead man, there was one brave guy who picked up a pistol and shot the walker three times in the head, laying him on the ground. The body was later taken by military doctors, and the further fate of the “zombie from the Virgin Islands” is unknown.

In 2012, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, known, however, for her eccentric behavior, started talking about the zombie apocalypse. Before the significant date of December 21, 2012, when the world was supposed to end according to the Mayan calendar, she said she would protect Australians from any threat, including “bloodthirsty zombies.”

All this, of course, is funny, but in reality there are cases of zombie behavior. Also in 2012, on the streets of Miami, police shot and killed a man who attacked a tramp and literally gnawed his face off. According to police, the victim was missing skin on his forehead, lips and nose. At the same time, in order to kill the cannibal, it took six shots - what is not the same invulnerability of zombies? Later, several more similar cases were recorded, and in all cases the attackers were under the influence of a synthetic drug, better known as bath salts.

Drugs are drugs, but all these cases show that there are areas in the human brain that, when activated or disabled by chemical or other means, cause him to hunt and literally devour his own kind alive, while increasing the pain threshold and, probably, increasing muscle strength and reflexes. According to Tim Verstynen and Bradley Wojtek's study, Zombie Diagnosis: Brain and Behavior, that area of ​​the brain is the amygdala. In general, there is good scope for the imagination and research of chemical weapons developers.

This also includes wasps that lay eggs in the body of spiders, forcing them to weave protective cocoons for the wasp offspring instead of webs.

There is no need to talk about rabies, or rather its second stage: aggressiveness and “superhuman” strength are some of the symptoms of the disease in humans. But even the flu virus can control a person. Binghamton University of the State of New York noted that participants in the experimental group that were inoculated with the influenza virus, instead of a quiet and measured life, suddenly developed social activity, visiting crowded parties and bars where it was easier for the virus to spread.

It turns out that by genetically modifying the same cordyceps or the causative agents of rabies and toxoplasmosis, scientists may well obtain a zombie virus. And if he breaks free, then we won’t have to hope for a successful outcome: according to research by University of Ottawa professor Robert Smith, humanity will have very little chance in such an outcome. For example, a city with a population of 500 thousand will turn into a horde of the living dead in just three days if there is only one infected person in it. The threat can be neutralized only through clearly calibrated and well-organized massive attacks on walkers and a serious set of preventive measures, which is difficult to implement in the conditions of chaos that ensues in such a case.

It turns out that the danger of a zombie apocalypse, although not very high, still exists, and perhaps we should not ridicule those “survivors” who dig bunkers, stock up on provisions and blow off the heads of life-sized targets at shooting ranges.