The key question surrounding the monsters and supernatural creatures that have populated the darkest collective fantasy is: do they really exist? It depends on what we mean by “exist”.
The origin of the zombie dates back to 1929, when William Buehler Seabrook published The Magic Island, a travel account in Haiti that inspired the film white zombie in 1932, and which in turn popularized the word «zombie.» It has been said ever since that zombies in Haiti are much more than a myth. But in reality, the zombie was some sort of fantastic invention, arose from the impact that voodoo practices caused in Buehler Seabrok (full of rites with divisions between the mind and the body).
From there, voodoo was seen as an evil practice that evokes the profane and satanic, or as if it was actually related to zombie practices. But the reality is that Voodoo is a religion that emerged from West Africa.later moving to Haiti, where beliefs in spirits are so strong that voodoo actually means spirit.
What a series of legends and myths (which have even invaded the internet in modern times) claim to be Haitian «zombies» are nothing more than practices within voodoo rites, which include the resuscitation of bodies. Priests, or voodoo «bokor,» can «separate» a person’s essences and handle them, but not for purposes of punishment or revenge, as has been popularized by zombie movies, the famous «voodoo doll» or cybernetic myths.
It just so happens that these priests use what an anthropologist named Wade Davis called “zombie dust”, made based on a very powerful poison called tetrodotoxin, derived from puffer fish. With this, according to Davis, the rites of death and reanimation of the bodiessomething that nevertheless is more related to possessions, spiritual pacts and requests, and not to what we understand and that Davis himself also called «zombification».
But, beyond the fiction of a novel or the cinema, the myth of the zombie grew by an article in the Haitian Penal Code that prohibited these rites, and that specifically prohibited the practice of “prolonged state of lethargy”. The law did not speak of «zombification», as has been disclosed in many portals. It is about an article as old as the French colony in Haiti which, as we well know in America, comes from a total ignorance of the native practices that terrified the man of the West.
But According to Neuroscience, Zombies Probably Exist
Zombies in fiction are created in many ways, but always it is a hypothetical infection that is transmitted by bites (bloodborne pathogens). This also happens in nature, with the poisons of various insects such as wasps. ampulex, which «hijacks the will» of insects like the cockroach, for reproductive purposes, and leaves them in a strange state of torpor. This occurs with an almost surgical technique, as the wasp injects its venom into a key point of the victim, to strip it of its movements and its neurological system, and then, to take control over it.
So some part of zombie fiction is real in nature. What cannot happen is that a virus or bacteria causes behavior like that of these monsters that feed on brains while in a state of unconsciousness, as if the bodies no longer had a soul.
In humans, no infection or brain damage could cause such behavioraccording to the neurologist bradley voytec, from the University of California, who has studied which areas of the brain would be active or inactive in a zombie. One of them is the cerebellum, which makes us coordinate our movements and that doesn’t work very well on zombies (that’s why they can’t open doors, like in the video game resident Evil).
The neurologist also found that in a zombie the frontal lobes would not work welland that his condition would be similar to that of patients with the strange disease called Wernike’s aphasiawhich damages many connections between the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain.
So zombies don’t exist. But some of its characteristics are real, such as infections, brain injuries or even those states of unconsciousness that are practiced in the voodoo religion and that leave people in a lethargy that would seem «zombified».
*References: The Secrets of Voodoo
Zombie neuroscience: Inside the brains of the walking dead
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