The key question regarding the monsters and supernatural creatures that have populated the darkest collective fantasy is: do they really exist? It depends on what we mean by “existing.”
It dates back to 1929, when William Buehler Seabrook published The Magic Island, a travel account in Haiti that inspired the 1932 film White Zombie, and which in turn popularized the word “zombie.” It has since been said that zombies in Haiti are much more than a myth. But in reality, the zombie was a kind of fantastic invention, arising from the impact that voodoo practices had on Buehler Seabrok (full of rites with splits between the mind and the body).
From then on, voodoo was seen as an evil practice evoking the profane and satanic, or as if it were actually related to zombie practices. But the reality is that voodoo is a religion that emerged from West Africa, later moving to Haiti, where beliefs in spirits are so strong that, in fact, voodoo means spirit.
What a series of legends and myths (which have even invaded the internet in modern times) claim to be Haitian “zombies” are nothing more than the practices within voodoo rites, which include the reanimation of bodies. The priests, or “bokor” of voodoo, can “separate” the essences of a person and manage them, but not for purposes of punishment or revenge, as has become popular from zombie movies, the famous “voodoo doll” or of cyber myths.
It happens that these priests use what an anthropologist named Wade Davis called “zombie dust,” made from a very potent poison called tetrodotoxin, derived from pufferfish. With this, according to Davis, the rites of death and reanimation of bodies are carried out, something that, however, is more related to possessions, spiritual pacts and requests, and not to what we understand and that Davis himself also called “zombification.”
But, beyond the fiction of a novel or cinema, the myth of the zombie grew due to an article in the Haitian Penal Code that prohibited these rites, and that specifically prohibited the practice of the “state of prolonged lethargy.” The law did not speak of “zombification”, as has been made known on many portals. This is an article as old as the French colony in Haiti which, as we well know in America, comes from a total ignorance of the native practices that terrified Western man.
But according to neuroscience, zombies probably exist
Zombies in fiction are created in many ways, but it is always a hypothetical infection that is transmitted by bite (blood-borne pathogens). This also happens in nature, with the poisons of various insects such as the Ampulex wasp, which “kidnaps the will” of insects such as cockroaches, for reproductive purposes, and leaves them in a strange state of torpor. This occurs with an almost surgical technique, since the wasp injects its venom into a key point of the victim, to deprive it of its movements and its neurological system, and then begin to take control over it.
So some zombie fiction is real in nature. What cannot happen is that a virus or bacteria causes behavior like that of these monsters that feed on brains while in a state of unconsciousness, as if the bodies no longer had a soul.
In humans, no infection or brain damage could cause this behavior, according to neurologist Bradley Voytek of the University of California, who has studied which areas of the brain would be active or inactive in a zombie. One of them is the cerebellum, which makes us coordinate our movements and which does not work very well in zombies (that is why they cannot open doors, like in the video game Resident Evil).
The neurologist also found that in a zombie the frontal lobes would not function well, and that their condition would be similar to that of patients with the strange disease called Wernike’s Aphasia, which damages many connections between the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain.
So zombies don’t exist. But some of its characteristics are real, such as infections, brain injuries or even those states of unconsciousness that are practiced in the voodoo religion and that leave people in a lethargy that seems “zombified.”
*References: The Secrets of Voodoo
Zombie neuroscience: Inside the brains of the walking dead