Embracing Your Inner Zombie by D. Trull Enigma Editor dtrull@parascope.com Everybody loves zombies. There's something deeply fascinating about a soulless, reanimated corpse wreaking blind havoc on the living. Maybe it's because Hollywood zombies help us come to terms with our mortality: at least resting in peace is a damn sight better than crawling out of the grave with a hankering to eat human brains. But the fact of the matter is, all of us are already zombies -- or half-zombie, anyway. This is the central element of a new way of understanding the nature of consciousness, which says that we all possess our own personal zombie that resides inside our brains -- the very organ that fictitious zombies find so irresistibly tasty. The concept of the great divide between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind is nothing new, of course. Science has long known about the autonomic responses that cause us to pull our fingers away from a hot stove before we actually feel the pain, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline drill that gets us hyped up in times of stress and danger. And then there's all that subconscious crap from Sigmund Freud. The zombie theory builds upon these ideas about consciousness and takes them a step further. In short, psychologists and neurologists are realizing that the unconscious mind is a whole lot smarter than we've given it credit for. More than being just a subservient "lizard brain" catering to the almighty conscious mind, the unconscious is a powerful entity in its own right, which has been lovingly nicknamed the zombie. The zombie's hitherto undiscovered skills may explain some phenomena that have previously seemed like intuition or psychic abilities. "We have this assumption about ourselves that mind and consciousness are synonymous, that we're aware of everything that's important," said Philip Merikle, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The more we establish the unconscious influence, the more we realize we're not." The key to the zombie theory is that our conscious and unconscious minds process information about the outside world in fundamentally different ways. The conscious mind is always in an interpretational mode, divining meanings out of the raw data from our senses and filtering out everything deemed unimportant. The zombie, on the other hand, is not so choosy. It takes in all information on a literal, concrete level, with the practical concerns of successfully interacting with the environment and avoiding hazards. Psychologist Benjamin Libet proved in the 1970s that there is a distinct lag time between unconscious and conscious perception. He found that test subjects took about half a second to consciously detect a stimulus from an electrode, by which time all sorts of unconscious responses were already registered. The conscious mind is delayed by its complex process of assembling information into a meaningful whole, while the zombie is instantly up off its ass and getting to work, a half second ahead of you. In emergency situations, unconscious reactions can save your life before you even know what's going on. The zombie can outsmart the conscious mind in areas where life and limb are not at stake, as well. Psychologist Mel Goodale demonstrated this phenomenon with a simple optical illusion test. He created an arrangement of poker chips, in which one chip was surrounded by a ring of very small chips, and a second chip was circled by very large chips. The two central poker chips were the same size, but when test subjects were asked to compare their sizes, they nearly always responded that the one surrounded by small chips was larger. But when the same people were asked to reach out and pick up the chips, they held their fingers apart in exactly the same way to grasp both chips. The zombie is not tricked so easily. Charged with the dirty work of coordinating the body's visuomotor system, the unconscious records the actual size of the poker chips, and not what size they "look like." Now let's get into some of the more funky aspects of what the zombie can (apparently) do. Some findings have suggested that the workings of the unconscious mind may account for the decidedly unscientific human attribute called intuition. We've all had gut feelings or trusted our instincts on a particular course of action, for no reason that we can express rationally. Psychology has generally regarded these hunches as the product of mere chance, or educated guesses. But it could be that our unconscious mind, working with collected information to which the conscious self has no access, is making valid decisions which only seem to come out of nowhere. In an experiment by psychologist Michael Rugg, subjects were shown a lengthy series of words on a TV screen; a five minutes, they were shown another series of words, which had some of the first group of words mixed in. They were asked to identify the words they'd already seen the first time. The subjects failed recognize to some of the words, but their brain wave activity flared up every time a repeated word appeared. The zombie remembered what the conscious mind could not. In another experiment, test subjects given a multiple choice list could identify a scent that was present in the room at too low a concentration to be consciously smelled. More controversial is the question of how much the zombie can actually learn and solve problems on its own. One type of experiment presents subjects with a problem-solving computer game in which specific unstated rules of input affect the outcome. After a period of trial and error, people become better at solving the game. But when asked to identify the rules that govern success in the game, they cannot say. They claim that they just "know" what sorts of things are right to do. Conventional psychology would say that this is not a learned behavior, arguing that you can't know something unless you can put it into words. But some in the field are beginning to think that the zombie knows -- it's just not telling. If that's true, the zombie's knowledge could legitimize people's sense of intuition in their areas of expertise, whether it be quantum mechanics or crossword puzzles. It stands to reason that when you devote a large volume of mental energy to a certain endeavor, your unconscious could internalize tons of useful do's and don'ts that you are not aware of possessing. For instance, I happen to have a knack for proofreading, and it's as if my zombie enables me to glance at a page and have misspelled words jump out at me almost magicly. (Just testing your zombies, there.) The zombie's cogitative prowess could also explain the benefits of sleeping on a difficult decision, as well as the sudden flashes of "Eureka!" insight that seemingly come out of nowhere. These are the results of the zombie working out a problem even when we're not intentionally thinking about it. Conversely, in some cases a snap decision is often better than what we can come up with if given lots of time to consciously agonize over a decision. As you might guess, this could be explained with three simple words: zombie knows best. Yep, that zombie is one smart son of a bitch. In some instances, the zombie's feats might even give the impression that something paranormal is happening. Consider the familiar stories of a set of twins who have such an intimate rapport that they can seemingly read each other's minds, or the mother who can sense when something is wrong with her children, or the well-drilling expert who can "dowse" the correct spot to dig for water. In many cases like these, it's not evidence of psychic activity, it's just the zombie doing its thing, once again. The zombie model of the unconscious mind has yet to become widespread in the scientific world at large, and there's reason to suspect it may never be. Although the zombie is a useful new way of thinking about psychological processes that have previously been overlooked or misunderstood, it is ultimately an inadequate metaphor that to express the infinite complexity of intelligent consciousness. Any attempt to break the human mind down into simple separate pieces will lead to gross oversimplifications. Such has been the fate of the formerly ubiquitous "left brain/right brain" theories, which have fallen out of favor as the forward march of research has revealed deeper intricacies inside our noggins. Psychologist Guy Claxton has summed it up nicely: "It's not as if intuition happens in one place, and logical thought happens somewhere else. It's that intuition and logical thought are different modes of functioning of the brain as a whole." So it would behoove us not to get carried the idea of the zombie inside us as a distinct being split apart from ourselves. In other words, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. I am the zombie. Koo koo katchoo. Ah, brains. Nature's perfect food for thought. Source: New Scientist web site. © Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc. Click Here for More Fortean Slips! Fortean Slips message board: Share your views