Harvard professor, author Steven Schlozman explores human condition through zombies
Depending on which Mayan or politician you pay attention to, the world will either end in 2012 or be overrun by zombies in the near future.
While video games like Resident Evil and television shows like “The Walking Dead” on AMC can help you learn the many ways to wipe out our eventual zombie enemies, Rhodes College is taking a more scientific approach as part of its Communities in Conversation Series Sept. 20.
The event will feature a lecture from Steven Schlozman, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-director and staff psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Schlozman is the author of the recently released book, “The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse,” a fictional account of a zombie plague as recounted by a neuroscientist.
The lecture will take a scientific approach to a zombie outbreak, said Jonathan Judaken, the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, who is helping to organize the event.
“The basic take is, unlike in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or classic zombie films, people wouldn’t be loading up guns to fire at these people, they’d be investigating the symptoms and studying them through quarantine,” Judaken said. “We’d do an analysis of a zombie brain to explain the human brain and how it responds.”
Judaken said the purpose of tying the lecture in to a zombie outbreak is to help teach people about the human brain, how it works and why humans respond in certain ways to certain events. The inspiration for the lecture is the 1970s television show, “In Search Of,” which took a realistic look at unusual natural phenomena and investigated the paranormal with host Leonard Nimoy.
Last year’s Communities in Conversation series featured a lecture about Noam Chomsky, which was timely because it coincided with the launch of the “Occupy” movement. That event was standing room only at the Blount Auditorium on the Rhodes campus, which holds around 200 people.
“It’s a crossover between sciences and humanities,” Judaken said. Where do truth and reality come together and how can we have a conversation that’s interesting to scientists, doctors and students as well as people interested in art and literature? It’s not just to teach people about the brain, but also why we’re so fascinated with zombies.”
A viewing of “In Search Of” will be held with Scholzman Sept. 19 at Crosstown Arts, 427 N. Watkins St.
Registration for both events can be completed online here.
~bizjournals.com
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