Cinema Junkie
BONUS CJ The Undead Podcast
TRT 53:27
Note: This is an automated transcript and may contain inaccuracies.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Bradley Voytek is a neuroscientist who loves zombies…
BRADLEY VOYTEK
This talk will contain clips of graphic violence, gore, and pictures of real brains. I can always— if I give a talk like this, I can always judge the audience by their response to that phrase.
BETH ACCOMANDO
He is also good with Jello brains and dissecting them for an enthusiastic audience.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
From here forward is the frontal lobe, so we're going to do a little bit of a Hannibal kind of thing. Does anybody want some frontal lobe?
KID
I'll take the first one.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
You'll take the first one? All right. Either future neuroscientist or future serial killer. I like it.
Cinema Junkie Theme bump 1 (drums)
BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to listener supported KPBS Cinema Junkie, I'm Beth Accomando.
Cinema Junkie Theme bump 1 (Horns)
BETH ACCOMANDO
I have know Brad for years and we have bonded over our love for zombies. Okay you know the basics of being a zombie – you die, come back from the dead, crave human flesh and brains, and can only be put out of commission by destroying the brain or removing the head. But what makes them appealing is also what makes them terrifying… they look like us but they’re not us. That also makes them a perfect metaphor for real conditions like Alzheimer’s or dementia, diseases that can take away that spark that makes us us. Brad explores this and more in his brilliant book Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? Which uses zombies to teach about neuroscience. Here’s an except from his book.
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BRADLEY VOYTEK
There are 3 major symptoms that we see in the modern zombie that makes us think that these deep brain systems regulating sleep are dysfunctional. First, zombies never really appear to sleep. They can wander around day and night looking for prey without rest. This extreme form of insomnia suggests that the reticular activating system is chronically engaged and may never shut off. This is similar to what you see in animals with lesions, localized tissue damage to the sleep-promoting VLPO neurons. Second, while they're awake enough to move around and act, zombies appear to lack definite forms of awareness that are the hallmark of being completely awake. Instead, they appear to move with stupor and slowness that we all experience in those liminal moments between being asleep and being awake. Thus, there appears to be some engagement of the sleep-promoting neurons in the deep brain. This, at first, seems counterintuitive, given the first symptom of insomnia, but remember, the switch between awake and asleep normally happens in fast cascades in the brain. If the cascades don't happen in such a fast flip-flop fashion, then you get sleep disorders like somnambulism. Third, zombies appear to have horribly deficient spatial and experiential memories, such as are encoded by the hippocampus. They get lost fairly easily, even in the indoor malls where they've been stuck for weeks. We know that the creation of this form of memory is a sleep-dependent process. This further supports the hypothesis that zombies do not have well-formed sleep cycles.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Since I am always looking to spread my love zombies, Brad was the first person I thought of when KPBS asked me to do a live podcast at the San Diego Book Festival. But if we were going to talk about zombies it would have to be an undead podcast. I need to take one quick break and then I will rise from the grave for a special Cinema Junkie The Undead Podcast… recorded live.
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CHRISSY NGUYEN
I’m Chrissy, the arts editor. Welcome to the Cinema Junkie panel, the Undead Panel Podcast. We're live taping…
BETH ACCOMANDO
Undead taping… Do you want the baby in or out? Can you hear the baby?... I might deliver during this…
CHRISSY NGUYEN
I’ll hand it over to Beth.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah, we hope you are all very brainy people, because if I get hungry during the podcast, I don't want to like dish up some empty brains. So afterwards you can help yourself to a brain Brad will dissect the brain for us. Prepare what you'd like to see removed. The temporal lobe? I don't know. We don't have a—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
You don't have a temporal lobe there.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh, darn it. All right. Well, we'll figure out what parts of the brain you might be able to actually get to. All right, well, thank you everyone for coming to the Cinema Junkie Undead podcast. I'm thrilled to be here at the KPBS Book Festival, and when they asked me to do this One of the first people I always think of is Bradley Voytek. Why? Because he's a neuroscientist who talks about zombies. And I love zombies, okay? They are everything to me. One of the reasons I love them so much is there's a description in Shaun of the Dead where they're trying to imitate zombies, and what the actress tells them to do…
CLIP Look at the face. It's vacant with a hint of sadness. And a drunk who's lost a bet.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And the thing about zombies is there's this core of humanity inside them that makes them really interesting. And I'm going to have Brad talk about the book, but first, I want you to know what he does, like, for a real job.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Unfortunately, my real job is not nearly as fun as zombies. I can't figure out quite how to make a living out of that yet. So I'm a professor at UC San Diego. I'm the chair of the Department of Cognitive Science, and I run a large neuroscience research lab. Uh, there we've got 14 PhD students or PhD scientists, and we work at the intersection of neuroscience, so brain science, cognitive science, which is trying to understand cognition intelligences of all forms, and data science. So that's the boring day job stuff, but working with Beth and zombies is the thing that, you know, kind of keeps me getting out of bed in the morning.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So before I mention the book, Let's do a little lead-up to what led to this, but you were at a convention and you put up something that ended up drawing a lot of attention.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Yeah, so I moved to San Diego— back to San Diego. I grew up here off and on as a kid, but I moved back to San Diego in 2014 to start this job at UC San Diego. I finished my PhD in neuroscience up in the Bay Area at Berkeley in 2010. 2010. And every year I go to, like many people in my field, a conference. It's called the Society for Neuroscience Conference, and it rotates every 3 years between San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. And as a PhD student at Berkeley, I taught neuroanatomy classes for very high-achieving Berkeley pre-med undergrads. And I had a very difficult time as an undergraduate student. I actually failed out of my undergrad and had to sort of reapply to get back in. So I kind of understood the difficulty of that process. And so I taught neuroanatomy for years. It's incredibly difficult. There's no shortcuts. It's just a ton of pure rote memorization. And so as a joke one year, a friend and I, well, kind of came out of like lots of movie watching and stuff and just organic arguments that apparently PhD students have with each other when they're watching zombie movies.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And we ended up creating a like fake clinical classification description of zombie brains. of zombieism that we called— what did we call it? It was— oh, geez, it's such a weirdly contrived phrase. It's CDHD, which is Cognitive Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. No, Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. And so we created this research poster. So for people who aren't familiar with these kinds of conferences, if you remember high school poster fairs, Society for Neuroscience research conference is like that, except there's 30,000 people that go to this conference every year. Serious scientists from all over the world presenting the latest and greatest research. And so we created a fake one about CDHD and stuck it off in a corner and presented it as though it was like real cutting-edge brain science research. And, you know, we had obviously ridiculous— we had a photo of like a friend of ours drew like a severed zombie head taped in, duct taped inside of an MRI machine, stuff like that. And like that started kind of spreading around. Twitter at the time. This is 2010 or so. And some of the people that worked at this convention center, so security guards and folks, they started coming over.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And one guy read it, and then he called his friend over. And I have a photo of a security guard standing there and reading this. And I've been going to this conference since 2002, and I've never seen anybody, like staff at these conferences, stop and read one of these posters. And so that was kind of how this whole nonsense started.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So So the idea that using zombies to talk about neuroscience sparked this idea that maybe that was a good way to engage people, and so the book is Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? This uses zombies to take us through some neuroscience, and actually there's a lot of really fun, like, illustrations and stuff in this too. So explain a little bit about what is it about using zombies to talk about neuroscience that— engages people better than if you just talk to them with straight information?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Yeah, so like I said, when I was teaching this neuroanatomy class, it really is just a ton of rote memorization. I had the, the great fortune of working with— she's since passed, but she's quite infamous— uh, Professor Marian Diamond. She was at UC Berkeley and taught neuroanatomy. She published her first scientific research paper before my parents were born. She was in her 80s when she was teaching neuroanatomy. The way that she taught this class was she would go up to the whiteboard and she'd bring in a hat box, like an old-school hat box. And she was this like short, 80-something, very thin, active, amazing woman. And that was her first class. She'd come in with a hat box and she'd welcome herself to the class and introduce herself, and then she'd open the hat box and pull out a human brain and put it on the table. And it was just such an amazing visual and such a striking like, capture your attention kind of moment. And during the quarter when she would teach, she had a box of colored chalk, and she would draw both halves of the brain and the ascending and descending spinal cord tracts and all this stuff simultaneously with both hands in different colors.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
She'd been doing this for decades. She was amazing. And so I took this class from her as a PhD student and fell in love with her and the course, and then offered to teach her anatomy lab, which is 2 4-hour labs a week. So 8 hours a week for 15 weeks trying to teach brain anatomy. And it's a slog. It's a real slog. And so trying to figure out ways of getting people to memorize and have fun with it. And so I'd bring in clay of different colors and they'd have to 3D mold the clay into different brain structures. Like, what are all the thalamic nuclei? And to really give them a sense and make it kind of fun. And so my wife and I and our friends at the time, all very big zombie And as PhD students, we'd get together and we'd watch zombie movies.
CLIP [Dawn of the Dead] When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And we started arguing. I studied a brain region called the basal ganglia during my PhD, and my friend studied a brain region called the cerebellum. It was a movie that had fast zombies.
CLIP [28 Days Later] Running from the infected.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And that was a big contentious thing. thing in the zombie world when Fast Zombies first came out. Are they zombies? Are they not? So we began— I was like, you know, I wonder why you've got these like different kind of subtypes of zombies. Why are they fast versus slow? And my buddy was like, well, surely it's got to be something to do with the cerebellum. And I was like, well, no, I don't think so, right? Because the cerebellum is more about— and so we got into it. I was like, I think it's more basal ganglia. And we started arguing about this. And my wife, who's not a neuroscientist, she's like, you guys are ridiculous. Like, this is a real conversation that you need to calm down. Because none of this is real, but this is absolutely hilarious.
CLIP {Day of the Dead] I thought we were going to stop work on the neurophysical and concentrate on something more practical…These spines are central to the condition… I will not stop any work that might lead to an answer, let alone on an area that is central to the condition.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And so I brought this up to the undergrads in the neuroanatomy class, and like suddenly they had strong opinions about what the basal ganglia versus the cerebellum did in fine motor control. And I'm like, oh my gosh, they actually care about this now. And so my buddy Tim Versteinen, who is the co-author of this book with me, we sat down and we really started thinking about, oh, this is pretty fun. I wonder, can we talk about other aspects of what are the things that are the hallmarks of zombieism? And can we use that as a hook to try and talk a little bit more about actual brain anatomy?
CLIP The amygdala is part of the Papez circuit. This system was discovered by James Papez, who used the rabies virus to lesion different areas in the cat's brain. He found that the amygdala was physically connected to another region called the hippocampus, a little seahorse-shaped area that is needed to turn short-term memories into long-term memories. It's thought that this connection between the amygdala and hippocampus links emotion and memory together so that you remember really emotional stuff better than boring everyday things. Yeah, like Patient HM. In the 1950s, surgeons removed both his left and right hippocampuses to treat his epilepsy. But after the surgery, he couldn't remember any new information for longer than a few minutes. Zombies appear to be pretty forgetful, wouldn't you agree? Absolutely. Between the amygdala-related aggression and memory deficits from the hippocampus, Papez may have actually accidentally created the first zombie cat.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So we tried to use it to talk about real neuroscience in a way that was also poking fun at all the pop-sci books that were coming out at the time.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So can you give us an example of an aspect of zombieism, like maybe the craving for brains or human flesh? And what could be going on in the brain that might dictate that kind of behavior?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Craving— OK, so the craving to eat brains, this also turns out to be a contentious thing that we discussed because— The trope about zombies eating brains was not part of the initial sort of zombie lore, right? That I think grew out of Return of the Living Dead.
CLIP [Return of the Living Dead] Why do you eat people? Not people.Brains. Brains only? Yes. Why? The pain. What about the pain? The pain of being dead. It hurts to be dead. I can feel myself rot. Eating brains, how does that make you feel? It makes the pain Go away.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
That aspect, and then also why does mimicking zombies— like, you opened with Shaun of the Dead, and very classically also in like the very first season of Walking Dead, in the comics better, they did this as well. Why does mimicking them also make you immune or fool them? Gosh, that was really, really difficult. We like, we had to, we went through some pretty long intellectual journeys to try and figure out how to contrive a response for that one. Some of the other ones are much easier, like the walking fast versus slow, the language difficulties. And so something like, you know, they don't speak or communicate really, depending upon— going back to Return of the Living Dead, when Tarman first comes out of this barrel, he does go, brains, right? And also there's a police officer After the police show up and all the zombies eat the police officers and everybody else, one of the zombies gets on the radio and says,
CLIP [Return of the Living Dead] Command dispatch, send more paramedics.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So the language one is a little bit easier. This is like a very long, roundabout way of saying, I don't want to answer your actual question, so I'm going to answer my own because it's too hard. But it really came down to— and this is actually what was kind of difficult for us. A lot of what we know about how the brain works and doesn't work comes from people who've actually suffered. And so one of the really hard things that we tried to do in this book is we had to walk this very fine line of making something engaging for people while also not belittling really the history of neuroscience. And I got into it because of family members that had neurodegenerative diseases. We talk about— we text about this sometimes, our experiences with this and our fears about this. And so trying to say, well, here's what we know about something like language. And here's what we know about the forefront of language. Inability to talk can come from several different things, but if it's an instantaneous or a very rapid onset of not being able to talk, that likely comes about due to damage to a specific set of brain structures, which is something that can happen to real people. And that's how we know that this happens. And so it was mostly trying to figure out how do we talk about that stuff and using the historical, like what we know. So I'm going to give a very concrete example. One of the things we talk about in the book is, um, in Day of the Dead— is that the one with John Leguizamo? Uh, the years later—
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh no, that's Land of the Dead.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Land of the Dead, thank you. It was Dawn, Day, and then much— many years later, uh, Land of the Dead. They start using fireworks. How come you guys always go out at night?
CLIP [Land of the Dead] Wouldn't it be safer in the daytime? Fireworks, kid. Stenchers can't keep their eyes off them.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And so they shoot off fireworks at night to capture the zombies' attention so they can run and do something else. And they show the zombies like all staring up and looking, you know, at the fireworks. And there's actually something that really does happen to people. It's very rare, but it's something called Balint syndrome, or Balint's, technically apostrophe S. It's named after a physician, B-A-L-I-N-T, where if you have damage to— Bilateral posterior parietal cortices. So it's very rare, but it can happen from a stroke. You've got these major arteries that come out of the heart on both sides that feed feed a huge amount of oxygenated blood to the brain. And they come up this way, kind of like this, if I put my fingers like that, which is great radio. And if both of them get occluded, then you can lose both of these. And that causes Balint's syndrome, which has a simultaneous effect of— you have what's called stroboscopic vision. So we experience the world in relatively smooth, continuous fashion, barring a couple of hallucinogenic kinds of experiences. In stroboscopic vision, You see things in, like, snapshot still frames. There is no smooth continuity of perception. And if I go— and I'm going to try not to do this on the radio— but, like, if I, like, clap really loudly, or somebody came in that door and went, blah, everybody would turn. Your attention is automatically captured. You almost can't help it. If I tell you what's going to happen, and I say, in 10 seconds, somebody is going to come into this room screaming. Do your best not to look at them. You can suppress that. 4, 3, 2— I'm just kidding, that's not actually gonna happen. Okay, but if it did happen, you can suppress it. It's very difficult, but you can. Somebody with Baylen syndrome, they can't. You just cannot. Your attention is automatically captured. And so it's talking about these historical cases and trying to leverage what we know about these sort of rare instances to talk about, you know, some of the tropes that we see in zombie films. You know, and somebody like George Romero and the people that made these films, they didn't have a neuroscience background. I had the honor of being able to actually, like, interview George Romero, at ZombieCon one year. So for people who don't know Romero, he made the original, arguably created the whole modern zombie— Modern zombie, mm-hmm. So the original Night of the Living Dead was directed by Romero. And we're on stage at the ZombieCon, and I was like, okay, you know, this is the hot topic right now. Like, so why did you make the zombies initially slow? And, you know, instead of like the more modern fast zombies? And he's like, you have a PhD? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, well, I made them slow because They're dead. And I was like, cool, all right. Yeah, all right, thanks, moving on.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You mentioned one of the things that got you into neuroscience was a family member who had— was it dementia?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Parkinson's disease that led to dementia also, yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So one of the things that appeals to me about zombies is it kind of reflects my fear of things like Alzheimer's, which is like the most terrifying thing I can imagine in the real world. Because it's you, but it's not you. You've lost like that spark or that core of humanity. So kind of explain a little bit about that connection between how you can use zombies maybe to talk about those kind of diseases that are impacting the brain and making you behave in a way that is not you often.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Yeah, I think this is horror in general, but zombies specifically, there's something— Years ago, I was on a panel at Comic-Con with Max Brooks of World War Z fame, and also Mel Brooks's son, so also kind of famous for that, but a great author in his own right. And World War Z is a great book. And we're on this panel, and somebody asked a question, and he said, you know, paraphrasing here, but he said something along the lines of, zombies are such a lasting trope because they, they can be used to reflect just about any kind of cultural concern, and they can be adapted to address that. And so the original Night of the Living Dead you know, was made in the 1960s, and it was all about like race relations in the United States. And then the follow-up was all about consumerism and rampant consumerism. Even Return of the Living Dead, which was like the sort of tongue-in-cheek trope, was kind of about like nuclear fallout and fears of acid rain and this kind of stuff. And, you know, as we get more and more modern, very amusingly, Shaun of the Dead actually has all of them kind of in the background. You don't know what causes the zombie outbreak. And like, in Shaun of the Dead because it's a little bit of everything. But like, you know, 28 Days Later is like these rage-infected monkeys, right? So it's all about genetic engineering and tweaking with all this kind of stuff, right? So every kind of era of technology, I would be shocked, there might already be, is there some sort of like AI-powered zombie now? That's gotta be a thing, right?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Mm-hmm.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Like, if not, there's gotta be something along those lines like in the works right now, right? Because it's such a great, you can imagine like, you know, people like ChatGPT get some kind of virus that like, It's kind of like Pontypool, right?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh, Pontypool.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
I don't know if people saw that one. You can tweak Pontypool to make it like an AI-powered thing.
AUDY MCAFEE
Anyway.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So let me just say, Pontypool is one of the most incredible zombie films. It's sort of a zombie film without zombies, but the infection is spread through language. A word can infect your brain. And the most terrifying scene in that movie is like this little girl is supposed to be singing a song from a musical, I can't remember how it ends.
AUDY MCAFEE
I can't remember how it ends.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
How what ends, Faraj?
AUDY MCAFEE
It just keeps starting over and over and over and over. And it's not called The Lawrence and the Table, is it?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Not anymore, no. Prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah, prah. Like, literally in front of your eyes, a brain just evaporate and disappear. It was so— it's so disturbing and scary and kind of reflects what can happen to you in a real sense when you get diseases like dementia or Alzheimer's, where you forget what words mean or how to speak.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And that's a very common trope in zombie films, right? Is that loss of Self. 28 Days Later does it fantastically. Spoiler alert for a decades-old movie. But when the father gets infected from the crow, a drop of blood in his eye, right? And he knows it's about to happen, right? And these moments when you know it's happening and like, what do you do and how do they react to it when you know it's coming? Hannah, I love you very much.
CLIP [28 Days Later] Keep away from me. Stay where you are. Dad? Keep away from me! Dad? Keep away from me! Keep away from me! Keep away! Keep away! Keep away! What's wrong? Dad!
BRADLEY VOYTEK
You know, do they remove themselves? Do they try and fake it and hide it? Like, these are, like, very obviously Tropes and allegories for that sense of self and what happens when we start to lose that for whatever reason. And it's encountering and trying to give a physical manifestation to those fears. And that's, that's what makes the whole zombie genre, I think, so fascinating, is that it can be replicated in different ways to tackle these different kinds of things that really are deep-seated concerns about us. And sometimes, you know, with humor and things like that, help you face them in a little bit more of, like, hopefully a mentally healthier way than just constant panic.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And one of the other things you do in the book, aside from the zombies, is you talk a bit about neuroscience, like the history of neuroscience, the development of it. One of the things that I thought was absolutely fascinating that I did not know was the birth of neuroscience can sort of be traced back to a doctor working with gladiators? Explain that.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So, in the gladiatorial days of Rome, there was a physician named Galen. G-A-L-E-N. He actually has several pieces of anatomy named after him. There's the great vein of Galen in the head. And it turned out that, unsurprisingly, gladiators had a lot of head trauma and spine trauma due to the nature of the position that they were in. And Galen was one of the first to note that damage to specific parts of the brain and the spine led to sort of very reliable and replicatable deficits in people. So, you know, initially noticing that if you— if the spinal cord is severed in certain kinds of ways, you might become paralyzed if it's fully cut. If half the spinal cord is cut, you're only hemiparetic, so only on half side. but it's only the other half, but it depends on where it's cut, then it's down. And like, so it's very specific about where the spinal cord is severed. And so he was one of the first ones to really note this and actually did experiments on like pigs and stuff to try and like causally show these sort of relationships. But that sort of fell by the wayside for centuries until sort of the more modern medical era reemerged. But people went back and, you know, found Galen's old writings. There is a great book called The Idea of the Brain. It was written a couple of years ago. And so if people are interested in sort of the history of these things, that goes into all of these historical contexts of how we discovered these various aspects that we touch a little bit in our book, but it's not a historical piece of nonfiction, right? But it is incredibly fascinating. Like, the people maybe know left half of the brain controls right half of the body, right half controls the left, right? Do people know where like the visual part of the brain is, the visual cortex? All right, a couple people in the back. Right, very odd design that you have, you know, the eyes, and they have to send these optic nerves all the way back to the back of the brain. And the reason that we initially— we found that out is due to the design of helmets in World War I. You had these skullcap helmets, and they would not quite cover the very bottom, and shrapnel would get up under sometimes and damage very specific And people would survive. They'd get like little pieces of shrapnel in, you know, through the skull and in the brain. But sometimes they'd survive, but the helmet didn't cover all the way down. And people would report that they are blind, but only right here, or only right here, or only right here. So they had a scotoma or something like that, it would be called, where you just have one little tiny blind spot, or sometimes very large, but it's very specific. And, and, uh, one of the physicians at the time started mapping, OK, this patient can't see here, and their shrapnel is right here. And this patient can't see right here, and their shrapnel is right here. And mapped out this, where's the blind spot relative to where the shrapnel hit. And that was the first attempt at what we would now call a retinotopic map, which is your retina, where the light comes in and hits the eye, sends fibers back. And everybody has a pretty clean retinotopic mapping of space to brain. Like, you can, you can sort of decode where somebody is attending to, like, in the world, based upon what parts, what neurons, what part of their visual cortex is active at a given time, because it's so reliable.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, you don't have an opportunity to work with gladiators, but—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Not yet.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You do—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
It's very hard to get IRB approval.
BETH ACCOMANDO
They're tough these days. Um, but you do take advantage of opportunities where there is patient who has part of the skull removed or something, you take the opportunity to see if you can find additional information mapping out the brain. How do those things come up, and how do you make use of them?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Yeah, so in neuroscience, you have a couple of different ways of trying to interrogate the brain. If you work with animals, oftentimes you will just perform some kind of— you can do genetic modification on them, Perform a surgery to implant electrodes directly into the brain. And the reason that people that work with animals do that is because, you know, as useful as the skull is for day-to-day living, it's very annoying from a neuroscientific perspective because it prevents us from being able to actually get high-resolution recordings of brain activity. So stuck inside our heads, we've got approximately 86 billion, with a B, neurons. Hard to count, but somewhere, somewhere on that order of 86 billion or so. And at least as many, if not 10 times as many, what are called glial cells, glue cells, that hold everything together, clean up and remove old neurotransmitter, and so on. So you've got on the order of maybe a trillion cells inside of your head. And if I do something like non-invasive brain imaging, it would be called the general class, non-invasive meaning I'm not getting into the skull. People are pretty familiar with those, I think, at this point. So there's EEG, which is almost 100 years old, invented in 1929-ish by Hans Berger, who was a physician that was trying to prove that psychic powers were real. True story. History of science is fascinating. Putting electrodes on the surface of somebody's head and showing that you can measure the voltage, which is sort of the currency that neurons use to talk to each other, these little voltage fluctuations. Except just like a wave hitting a rock wall, When you have the voltage of all of these billions of neurons hitting the inside of the skull, it splashes and smooths out and smears out. And so you cannot, with 64 electrodes on the skull, infer what 86 billion neurons are doing. You get a very rough approximation. It's like putting a microphone outside of a domed stadium. You can hear when everybody's cheering, so you know something happened, but you don't know why they're cheering, where they're cheering from, and so on. The other one is fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. It's like an MRI machine, but now it can measure changes in blood oxygenation, which is a tertiary effect of these neurons, brain cells, sending electrical firing. So if a neuron sends a little electrical signal, that uses energy, glucose. And then in order to resupply energy to that brain region, it gives oxygenated blood. And it's the flow of oxygenated blood that the fMRI machine is doing. And that gives you resolution down to a millimeter or so, which is pretty small, but it's a tertiary measure. It's this blood oxygenation, which happens plus or minus 10 seconds after the brain was active. So you have no idea what the brain is doing. And so people often work with animals. I don't work with animals, but we do work at UC San Diego and with collaborators at University of Iowa and Stanford and a couple of other places, people who have very severe forms of epilepsy. So So something like 1 to 3% of the population has epilepsy, which is the disease that causes seizures, a disease that can cause seizures. And for some reason, some small percentage of that small percentage have a very severe form of epilepsy that causes like multiple consciousness-losing events per day. Vast majority of people, that's treatable using anti-epileptic drugs, but for some reason those drugs don't work in some people. And so their recourse at that point is to choose to undergo a brain surgery, which is a series of brain surgeries that take a couple of weeks to remove the part of the brain causing the seizure. It's usually around the size of a pea. It's very small, and it's hard to localize using noninvasive brain imaging. And so what they do is they bring him into the epilepsy monitoring unit at Thornton, UC San Diego. We work with Dr. Sharona Ben-Haim. She's the brain surgeon that we work with. Jerry Shi, who is the epileptologist. And they'll do scalp EEG to get the microphone outside the dome stadium view of the seizures, because seizures manifests as these sort of sharp voltage fluctuations. And they say, okay, it's more coming from the right than the left, and it looks like it's more like right posterior and maybe a little bit medial. And so once they have a rough idea, they do a surgery where they remove a part of the person's skull and implant a bunch of electrodes around where they think the seizure is coming from, deep inside the brain, on the surface of the brain, because now that gives them a high-resolution mapping of where that seizure is likely it has come from so that they can then remove the part of the brain. But they have to have enough seizures for them to identify where it's coming from, and that can take up to 2 weeks. And so they're hanging out at the epilepsy monitoring unit with a bunch of electrodes coming out of their head, just sitting there like playing video games, like on their phone, watching TV, reading, sleeping, napping, talking with their friends and family, waiting to have seizures. Once they identify where the epileptogenic zone is, the epilepsy genesis, the start of epilepsy. Funny medical words that make everything more complicated than they need to be. See how it shakes like that? If you've ever seen a brain dissection or something, it's like this sort of hard, rigid— you can cut into it. This is more the consistency of what the living human brain is like. It's very soft and truly Jell-O-like. And so what they do is they remove all the electrodes, they bring the person to the operating room, and forgive me, you know when you go to the dentist and they put that little vacuum to suck out the spit? Basically, they— and they suck out the little part of the brain causing the seizure, and they're basically cured. And then they put the skull back on, and that's it. It's amazing. It's an amazing thing to witness. But during that week or two when they're hanging out with all of these electrodes inside of their head, we approach them in my lab and we say, this is a very unfortunate, obviously, situation, but truly, this is an unparalleled opportunity to understand how does the living human brain give rise to complex behaviors that we can't study in animals. You can't do a language study in animals. We can work with songbirds and stuff to kind of get at it obliquely, which people do, but studying true language or very complex cognition is something that can only be done in humans. And so this is an incredible opportunity to do that. And so those are the kinds of folks that we work with. Now, I will say there is one other situation where instead of removing the part of the brain, there's an FDA-approved device Which is a permanent brain stimulator that they implant instead. And so we work with those patients now too. So instead of removing the part of the brain causing the seizures, they implant permanently a thing into the brain. It's a stimulator. It's called a closed-loop stimulator. So it's an electrode that's constantly reading the brain activity, and machine learning algorithms are detecting the start of an onset of a seizure, because it's very clear when a seizure is about to start. And then once the algorithms on this device detect— and they have a battery that they sneak up through the skull and down and implanted in the chest to power this thing. And the battery has to get replaced every couple of years. When it detects the onset of a seizure, it sort of like noise-canceling headphones where you can play a sine wave of the opposite voltage and it'll cancel out. They noise-cancel out the start of the seizure, so it stops it before it spreads. And so these people have invasive electrodes implanted deep into their brains and they're just walking around. And so now we can get brain recordings from people that are just walking around in the world. So like, how does memory form in a real-world environment? Like when you're walking from here over to get food and you're learning the path and you're visualizing in your head, being able to work with those kinds of people is pretty remarkable.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Does anybody have any questions that they'd like to ask?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
My name is Yazdi. I'm from San Diego. My question, as a neuroscientist, are you able to have a good idea of what parts of the brain would have to be impacted to have zombie-like behavior. So I'm thinking of a movie script where somebody becomes a zombie, but they use science to reverse it because they can understand what parts are kind of impacted. You know, you can— what? Oh gosh, what is it? You can use love. We've already seen this. Love can reverse zombieism, right?
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was, yeah, the Romeo and Juliet one.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Anyway.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Warm Bodies.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Warm Bodies.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
I mean, we try to do that in this book, right? We try to say, okay, given I mean, that's the whole point, right? Was given that you have these like slow versus fast zombies, what must be disrupted in the brain to cause like a slow, slow kind of movement behavior? What might be disrupted in order to result in the lack of ability to maybe understand, or yes, understand, but not communicate language? You know, why, why might like covering yourself in zombie gore make them think that you're one of them, right? And so it's a whole cluster of brain regions. I mean, we actually, like my friend Tim Verstein in here, He's a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And he actually does structural brain imaging of human brains, like MRI and stuff. And so he took the human brain, healthy human brain— I think it was his own— and then he digitally removed or altered parts of it that we said was the cluster of things that would be altered in zombie brain to see what would a zombie brain have to look like. But yeah, I think it's a great idea that you could create a script where you could You know, use some more advanced technology to try and undo or reverse the damage. That's a cool idea.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, it also depends what kind of zombies you're dealing with, because if it's a virus-type thing, then there could be this scientific cure or antidote or things like that. But if you're one of the died, buried, risen from the dead, there might be a larger hurdle to—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Bigger problem.
BETH ACCOMANDO
—to jump. to get them to return to normalcy. But yes, and those of us who like zombies will argue these things out, like for hours comparing films. Any other questions?
AUDY MCAFEE
Hi, I'm Audie. I'm with KPBS and I live in San Diego. And this is very much related to what we're already talking about. And you were talking about 28 Days Later, but I don't know if you've seen 28 Years Later/The Bone Temple. And for anyone who hasn't seen it, so sorry for spoilers. But within that story, there's a doctor, and he pretty much cures zombieism because he realizes that zombies see other people who are not zombies as zombies that want to hurt him. And with whatever doctor stuff that he had, he was able to kind of make this zombie wake back up. And he was talking. And unfortunately, the doctor went through some stuff that they could not connect anymore. But the zombie— or his name was Samson— literally said thank you to that doctor. And I just thought that was really cool, and that just going off of what everyone's saying, that there is those possibilities of change, and that it is just a mental disorder.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So related to that, I mean, it's great. It's very emotional and impactful, right? But one of the things that got me into neuroscience— so I'm a failed physicist. When I alluded earlier that I got kicked out of undergrad, it's because I failed out of my physics major as an undergrad. I wanted to study cosmology, but my loved one, my family member, had Parkinson's and declined very quickly cognitively. And I sort of went through this whole thing of like, what does any of that mean when this can happen? Right? And so I switched. And one of the things that led me to that switch is there is an author, Oliver Sacks, maybe not as famous anymore, but he's wrote a number of tremendous books where A lot of the books are case studies, so the most famous being The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So he was a neurologist, a British neurologist that saw many patients over the years through his practice. Robin Williams played him in a movie called Awakenings, which is based off of his book called Awakenings, when he was in the 1960s in New York City, in the Bronx Hospital actually.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And in that book, he talks about these patients that he saw in— was it— maybe it was Brooklyn actually. I want to be right. My borough knowledge is week, but they had encephalitis lethargica, which doesn't really exist anymore, but it was during World War I, World War II, there was this sort of strange outbreak. And these people were catatonic for decades, wheelchair-bound, living in a home. And he did this radical thing where he gave them hyper— like, very strong levels of levodopa. So dopamine, people probably know as, in sort of the Malcolm Gladwell-ified simplified version of things, the pleasure chemical. It's not that simple, but it is what is selectively destroyed in Parkinson's disease, dopaminergic neurons. And also apparently is what was damaged in these patients. Dopamine is, it's a macromolecule. It's too big. It can't cross the blood-brain barrier. Forget it. Give it to somebody. But Oliver Sacks wrote about his experience of giving levodopa, which is dopamine precursor that it does. And if you give it to people, still to this day it's a treatment for Parkinson's, then it'll spur on the dopaminergic neurons that's still alive to produce more dopamine. And these people who had been catatonic for decades woke up and they talked about their experience.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
They were conscious all during those decades, but everything moved so slowly and like the days just, they, they, everything kind of blurred together and they like called their loved ones again and had those moments, but it stopped working because that hyper amounts of dopamine started killing off the cells that were still producing dopamine, and then they reverted. And so there's a whole piece in there about, is it better to have had them back for a bit so they could say hello to their loved ones again or not? And that kind of blend of the humanity with the science is really what drew me to neuroscience specifically, was reading his accounts. So well worth reading. I recommend it highly.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Okay, so we're starting to run out of time, so I'm going to say for the next question, if you have something to ask about dissecting this brain so that he can demonstrate, I will pull out a— not quite a scalpel, but does anybody have a question about the human brain, about what part—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
This is heavier than a real brain. It's only— your brain is only about— human brains are about £3 or so, plus or minus, depending. And approximately this big, if you put both your fists together, that's roughly the size. So this is pretty big also.
BETH ACCOMANDO
It's Samson's brain.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And so, okay, really quick, right? So we can cover some of the basics. So this here, right, that separates the 2 hemispheres of the brain. So for whatever reason, evolution is such that we evolved bilateral symmetry, more or less. The brain actually isn't perfectly symmetrical. For whatever reason, there's like sort of this like torsion that happens where one side is like farther back and one side is farther forward. We don't know why. We don't know if it matters. But almost everything is replicated on both sides except for the pineal gland, which Descartes was like, well, it's the only thing in the brain that's centralized, so that's where consciousness is. It's not. But we have this sort of bilateral symmetry, and those 2 halves of the brain are very heavily interconnected through what's called the corpus callosum, which— I mean, this is a Jell-O brain, so we'll just cut it down the middle.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Go ahead, cut it.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
It's not going to be in there.
BETH ACCOMANDO
We're dissecting, for those of you who are listening only. The brain has been bisected.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So this is the front and this is the back. I'll separate them out of the way. But the corpus callosum— Let's see if I can— oh, just mangle the brain is what I'm gonna do. All right, it roughly runs along here, and the brain has the cortex, the outer layer, which is what you can see with all the folds and the valleys. And cortex literally means bark in Latin. It's the bark of the brain, and that's where the white— sorry, the gray matter is. That's where most of the action potential carrying neurons in the brain exist. Although technically, at the very back, which is not on here, you have something called the cerebellum, the little brain. So you've got this big brain here, and then you've got this little other thing down here off the brainstem. The cerebellum contains about 50% of all the neurons in the brain. If you lose it, it gets damaged and it goes away, or you have cerebellar agenesis, you don't have one because it never grows, you're kind of pretty okay. Make of that what you will. But for, for these 2 cerebral hemispheres, you have this corpus callosum, calloused hand.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
It just is like this sort of bridge that connects the two. One of the old treatments for epilepsy used to be severing the corpus callosum. So you would prevent the epilepsy, the seizures, from spreading from one half to the next. That led to some very interesting results. So if a patient had a severed corpus callosum, so one half of the brain couldn't talk to the other, you would have things like one hand would be buttoning up the shirt, and the other one would be following it, unbuttoning it. And the patient had no idea. that that was happening or why. One hand would open the fridge to grab something, the other hand would slap it and close it, and they just had no idea why. It's like 2 separate consciousnesses existing in the same physical space. We don't do that surgery anymore, not that severely anyway. We, as though I'm a real doctor. I'm not a physician. I don't do any surgery legally.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You do them on Jell-O brains.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Just on Jell-O brains. And so now they'll cut like maybe one little piece. Like, they're much more precise about it if they have to. And so, yeah, so the front, the back, people already mentioned earlier that the back, that's the visual parts of the brain. Front, that I'm gonna cut off and take a bite. This is a good piece of frontal cortex here. Peach flavored.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, human brains are peach flavored, in case you didn't know.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
People listening love the sound of people eating and chewing on the microphone.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Eating some gray matter. So you said we couldn't do a frontal lobotomy on this because which part is missing?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Well, so the frontal— you could do a frontal lobotomy.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh, okay.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
We are missing the temporal lobe.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So you have the frontal cortex approximately here and it comes down to about here and then you've got the temporal lobe which is here. Again, great radio for saying things like here and gesturing. But the whole— oh, the lobotomy, that's a whole— I could talk about lobotomy for a very long time. Nobel Prize, won a Nobel Prize for lobotomy. Walter Freeman, who used to do speed lobotomies, would just line dozens of people up and just go in with an ice pick and do them while they stood there. For anything and everything, mild Migraine? Sure, let's do a lobotomy. You feel bad today? Lobotomy. It was wild that that won the Nobel Prize. We don't do lobotomies anymore. But anyway, that's a whole separate story. So lobotomy is just, you're cutting out a part of the brain. But for lobotomies and leucotomies, it's very specific sort of brain regions that they thought would help people that were having Like I said, any kind of bipolar disorder, depression, anything, they would just sort of do this. The whole history of neuroscience and mental health is fraught with danger. Yeah, so like I said, I taught neuroanatomy for years.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And doing these kinds of things where you actually— I used to be able to— I was hoping today— I couldn't get one. I was hoping to bring a real human brain in, the hat box trick—
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh, jeez.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
—of Marian Diamond that I mentioned earlier. It's sometimes hard to get one on last-minute notice.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Bradley did dissect a dolphin brain for us at our horror marathon. And actually, one of the things you mentioned about the dolphin brain that was interesting was that, as you see here, all these little like twists and turns, and that the dolphin brain actually had more of these like—
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Oh, dolphins and cetaceans in general, also super fascinating. They sleep one hemisphere of the brain at a time. And we think that's so they don't drown, right? Because they have to keep coming up for air. And so if they slept, slept, they would, they would sink. And so they sleep one half of the brain at a time. And it appears that like certain kinds of like sea lions maybe do as well. Or they'll do these like rapid microsleeps. So they'll sleep and they kind of like corkscrew down. And once they hit a certain depth, where the pressure is high enough, that pressure wakes them back up and they'll come back up. And then they fall asleep and corkscrew like a falling leaf back down and then come back up. There's some really neat research where they tagged to track them, the sea lions, and also did EEG on them to like see when they slept. So it was like EEG of sea lions out in the wild as they fell asleep. Anyway. And so you have all of these, this outside, these sort of folds in the valleys, the sulci and the gyri. And so the human brain in particular is heavily folded in and of itself.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
And again, we don't know why, but we think it's maybe so that we can fit more neuron surface area into the same volume. If you fold it up a lot, you can fit more brain cells in there. And other species have much smoother cortices. So like mice and rats, they're pretty smooth. They don't have these kinds of folds. And But yeah, dolphins in particular, cetaceans in general, they're even more folded. It looks like they have more neurons per, like, unit volume in their head than we do. More isn't always better. We don't really know what that means or anything like that. There is a little bit of the scaling that, like, the— what we consider to be the more intelligent species do have more, like, folded with higher neuron counts, but that's not always always the case. Biology is complicated.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And the brain.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Yeah.
JILL LINDER
My name is Jill. I'm from San Diego. Are the folds symmetrical?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
No.
AUDY MCAFEE
No.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
So the question of, are the folds symmetrical— not even are they not symmetrical. Like, working with these patients that have these brain surgeries, we have to be very— we have to get very detailed maps of their individual brains. If I want to say that You know, neurons in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in working memory. I really have to make sure, am I in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or not? And so you have the inferior frontal naming of brain regions. You've got the frontal cortex because it's in the front, and the orbital frontal is because it's above the orbits of the eyes. And then generally speaking, you've got an inferior, middle, and superior frontal gyri. So not on here, but you've got these longer grooves that go this way. that separate the frontal cortex into a lower, middle, and upper. And so when you do these, we have to do very high-density MRI— high-resolution, I should say, MRI— to make sure we know exactly where these electrodes are implanted. And every now and then, somebody just has another one. You've got the inferior, middle, frontal, and then extra-frontal higher gyrus. They're not even consistent across Is it like a fingerprint?
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Very much so. You can absolutely fingerprint somebody from their sort of gyrosulcal folds.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, I'm sorry to say we have to end this conversation. The Cinema Junkie Undead Podcast has to return to the grave. But I want to thank Brad once again. It's always fascinating to talk to you. I always learn something new. So thank you so much.
BRADLEY VOYTEK
Thank you.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Thank you for coming. And please feel free to come up and join us. You listening, I'm sorry, you can't have any brain. But there are brain cookies and Jell-O brain, and Brad says it actually tastes good. It is peach. So thank you all so much for coming. Really appreciate it. Does anybody dare to have a piece of brain?
BETH ACCOMANDO
That wraps up another edition of KPBS listener supported Cinema Junkie. If you enjoy the podcast, then please share it with a friend because your recommendation is the best way to build an addicted audience. You can also help by leaving a review.
Till our next film fix, I’m Beth Accomando your resident Cinema Junkie.
