So, the first World War Z trailer is out. And the long-anticipated, Brad Pitt-starring, zombie-war-having adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel looks fairly cool, but the jury’s still out.
One question that it does raise, however, is: What’s up with all those zombies? Where are the slow-moving hordes like those in The Walking Dead or the fast-running lone rangers of 28 Days Later? What’s up with massive quick-moving throngs? Also, what’s the deal with the coordinated efforts of these things and all the body-ladder building? Are these raging dead actually — gulp — smart? According to zombie neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, they’re not. So Brad Pitt has one less thing to worry about.
“Unlike previous ‘fast zombie’ flicks like 28 Days Later wherein the zombies are basically acting independently of one another, the zombies here are showing what look like intelligent behaviors: clustering, swarming, and even coming together to form a ‘zombie ladder,’” Voytek, a neuroscience PhD who is on the advisory board of the Zombie Research Society, said in an email to Wired. “While people might be tempted to say that the WWZ zombies are therefore somewhat intelligent, I’d argue the zombie here are simply exhibiting emergent behaviors like what we see with ants.”
The behavior, Voytek said, can be akin to ants that work together to take down much bigger spiders or build bridges across large bodies of water. Meaning that even though they look like they’re forming a well-coordinated army to take on Pitt’s Gerry Lane and the rest of Earth, they’re actually just dumb lugs mimicking the actions of the rest of the horde.
“While these behaviors look very intelligent, they’re really a different kind of intelligence that emerges at a marco scale from micro scale, or local, interactions,” Voytek said. “It’s like when you see a flock of birds or a school of fish all turning together: there’s not an organizing intelligence directing them all where to go, rather each individual is tuned into its nearest neighbors.”
Heh. Stupid zombies.
World War Z swarms theaters June 21, 2013. To find out more about zombie neuroscience, watch the animated version of Voytek and fellow zombie scientist Tim Verstynen‘s Ted-Ed zombie diagnosis below.
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