Clare Wilson, features editor
(Image: Science Museum)
If a friend was secretly a zombie, would you know? Believe it or not, the living dead feature in several thought experiments that explore the neuroscience of consciousness. Imagine an intelligent being that could react to its environment and plan for the future, yet lacked conscious self-awareness. If such a zombie could do everything we do, then why did consciousness evolve in the first place?
That is only one of the intriguing questions raised by the London Science Museum’s latest event, Zombie Lab. Its take on the science of zombies encompasses everything from hard-core neuroscience to animal parasitology and mass experiments to study crowd movements during evacuations.
The event is held this weekend, but in the Wednesday night preview the museum embraced its theatrical side, unleashing on the crowd hordes of realistic, groaning zombies, along with their biohazard-suited handlers and campaigners for zombie rights.
You see, these weren’t dead zombies. These were the victims of a new virus that causes skin necrosis, cognitive deficits and an insatiable hunger for raw meat. That premise invited us to consider, in a mock jury trial, just what it takes to deserve human rights, an important issue when it comes to moral and legal questions surrounding abortion and how we treat people locked into coma-like states.
(Image: Science Museum)
Some of the games and interactive exhibits did have queues, so those planning to visit should get there early. There was standing room only at a curator’s talk on Luigi Galvani’s first demonstration of “animal electricity”, when he used primitive batteries to make frog legs twitch. The connection to zombies is that Galvani’s followers progressed to sticking their electrodes up the rectums of recently hanged criminals, giving the alarming appearance of reanimating the dead. Such grisly experiments were the inspiration behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Sometimes the theatrics spiced up the serious science, as when protestors from the Zombie Liberation Front broke into the lecture theatre during talks by neuroscientists from the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, UK. Anil Seth had been explaining how our consciousness is intimately embodied in our corporeal selves, using cases ranging from the famous rubber hand illusion to phantom limb syndrome. Such cases show, said Seth, that our perception of inhabiting our bodies is “maybe just the brain’s best guess at reality”.
The audience probably enjoyed the interruption, as a good fraction had come dressed as zombies themselves. Those wanting to get into the spirit could take advantage of the zombie make-up stall, have their photo taken with zombie props or learn the steps to Michael Jackson's Thriller. I passed on that opportunity, as once they saw my moves, no one would have been seen dead on that dance floor.
Zombie Lab lives on this weekend at the Science Museum, London
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Zombies take over the museum
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Zombies take over the museum
