You all know my philosophy by now: survival is the province of the insightful. If you want to live you need to not only be in good physical condition, but if you’re a lazy or poor thinker all the muscles and endurance in the world will do you no good. You must also be able to think in the abstract, to think outside to box to see threats and solutions that others might miss. For instance, if you’re in the South or the Midwest, will you travel at twilight or in the heart of the summer knowing that mosquitoes are about? What if a mosquito has drank the infected blood of a zed and has the capacity to spread it to you?
There appears to be one company that understands all this and they’ve devised a way to prepare kids for the horrors they are certain to face in adulthood.
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Let’s face it, not every young person believes that zombies are a possibility, let alone a near certainty that will one day dominate the lives of whichever members of the next generation are lucky enough to survive. This program is clever in that it prepares those children for the future with so much stealth that they’re never the wiser. They think they’re only learning about science, technology, engineering, and math.
“The neural anatomy that we go into is really the jumping off point in this particular activity, and the actual activity is about what would happen if a virus that was turning people into zombies were to spread,” Bialik told WIRED. “This presents the opportunity for modeling, for teaching about graphing, for teaching about disease progression, for teaching about the problem-solving that would be involved if you were to, for example, work for the Centers for Disease Control and had to analyze this.”
Wait. What? Zombies? Yes. It turns out certain zombie behavior can be used to show the effects of damaging certain areas of the brain. Let’s say, for example, you want kids to learn about the group of nuclei at the base of the forebrain known as the basal ganglia. Show them Night of the Living Dead and explain that the loss of coordination the undead display in Romero’s masterpiece can be caused by damage to that region. To teach students about the regions of the brain that handle problem solving and impulse control, tell them zombies have highly compromised frontal lobes. Want to explain the cerebellum? Tell students — or, using the TI software, show them — that we know zombies must have damage to that area because they can’t walk well.
If you’re wondering, it’s over-stimulation of the hypothalamus that makes the undead so hungry for flesh.
Positively brilliant.