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Old 12-07-2019, 12:11 PM   #6
dcarson
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Default Re: Living Zombies [Horror/Zombies]

A story I like had a nice scientific version.

Quote:
But the prion is a serious problem. We irradiated some of our sample so we could track it, and we tried testing it on chimpanzees. It goes straight through the blood-brain barrier and creates specific lesions. There’s a lesion between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex, so the victim loses the ability to recognize the people he knows as the people they are. So he loses all friend-or-foe identification.”

“Like Capgras Syndrome?” Alex asked.

There was a big pause. “Umm, yes, exactly like some forms of Capgras Delusion, down to the usual location of the brain damage.
Quote:
The lieutenant went on, “To make things worse, lesions also appear on the hypothalamus and prefrontal cortex in places we associate with control of aggression and predation.”

“Aaaand this means…”

Lieutenant Marshall concluded, “We end up with a chimpanzee that will attack any threat without hesitation, and it will not recognize anyone or anything except as a threat. We ended up with four chimpanzees that would just sit perfectly still and then launch themselves at anything that came their way, and would not stop until the threat was gone or extremely dead. After a while, they weren’t interested in food or sleep or sex or anything but waiting for a threat to attack. I think this means exposed people would become killing machines. They wouldn’t do anything except kill everyone and everything in their range, and then they’d hunt down everything else and try to kill them too.”
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