This ASU professor found talking about the zombie apocalypse is good for our brains

What does the zombie apocalypse and serious academia have in common? Well, for Athena Aktipis, a lot.

Aktipis is a psychology professor who directs the Cooperative Futures Institute at Arizona State University. And she is the founder of potentially the most unusual academic conference out there: the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting — where, each year, academics gather to talk about “the science, medicine, art and culture of managing apocalyptic risks.”

The whole thing happens as if we are living in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. One example? A talk on the nutritional value of eating a brain.

It’s a way for academia to tackle what Aktipis calls scary futures — which, she told The Show, can be a bit taboo in academic settings.

Full conversation

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Often times in academia, if you’re dealing with really big, scary things or, honestly, even just topics that are not yet kind of part of the canon of what people are looking at in academia, you can be seen as fringe, as alarmist, as somebody who kind of isn’t part of the culture of academia that has certain topics and certain framings that it uses.

LAUREN GILGER: Any examples of this that come to mind for you? What are you thinking of when you’re thinking about “scary futures” and trying to tackle them in your research?

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Well, I think the easiest example, although it’s not pleasant, is the prospect that we have now for many, many different kinds of hazards and risks that we’re facing — whether we’re talking about another potential pandemic, if we’re thinking about issues with changing climate, if we’re thinking about even conflict between countries.

We’re at a time right now where there’s a lot of uncertainty, and even our future with technology, right? That’s a huge issue that we’re all kind of grappling with now, how do we navigate a future with this new kind of entity, set of entities, that are computational and that we don’t fully understand?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, the rise of AI. OK, so you are kind of advocating for using a very kind of novel approach to this in academia, which is camp, right? First, just kind of define that for us. What do you mean by camp?

ATHENA AKTIPIS: So I would say that camp is essentially when you deliberately embrace an approach that is maybe ironic, funny, you’re being playful and a little bit subversive, too. So you’re not just following the standard ways that people are approaching a problem. You’re kind of coming at it from the side and having a little fun, honestly.

LAUREN GILGER: Having a little fun in academia? What? Right. So how does this work? You use this in particular, this form of camp, as the zombie apocalypse. This comes up in your research, it’s how you present your research often. Explain this to us.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: The reason that I started talking about zombies in the zombie apocalypse is actually because I discovered it was a really great way of communicating about some complex issues. So both on the side of understanding what happens to our brains when we get taken over by things that aren’t us, whether it’s parasites or bad relationships or social media. Many of these things actually have similar mechanisms underlying them, and kind of talking about getting zombified was a way of unifying all these different kinds of ways that we can have our brains and bodies taken over.

LAUREN GILGER: You write like when a roomful of people imagine the zombie apocalypse together, they are building a shared mental model of a possible world. It gives everybody a baseline of understanding what it is you’re trying to get at that’s bigger here.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Yeah, and the zombie apocalypse, it’s also this way of kind of summarizing many different kinds of potential disasters. You can do something called all-hazards preparedness, where you’re like, “Oh, how do I be ready for anything?” But that feels really overwhelming.

But being like, “Oh, am I ready for the zombie apocalypse?” That feels a lot more fun and tractable, right? I’d much rather go in my garage and be like, “Am I ready for the zombie apocalypse?” than be like, “Am I ready for a tornado, for a flood, for a pandemic?” That doesn’t sound as fun.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, but it kind of gets people to the same frame of mind.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Yeah, and it gets them there together. And one thing that I didn’t anticipate when I put together the first Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting — I don’t even remember how many years ago now, long time ago — is that talking about things in terms of the zombie apocalypse, and I told everyone, “You’re going to write your talk like it’s the zombie apocalypse.” The talk is about how we’re using science and all of these approaches in this context.

So everyone was using this framing, and we had such fun talks. And on top of that, it made everybody stop using their jargon and gave everyone across all these disciplines a shared language to use. So there were a lot of cool surprises that just came from this sort of first experiment of saying, “Well, let’s have a conference that’s about the zombie apocalypse.”

LAUREN GILGER: So it sounds like it’s much more than kind of making some very serious and very scary topics fun or interesting. It can very well go beyond that, and the academic fruits of this labor might be much deeper.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Yeah, yeah. For example, a few years ago we got a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to look at collective risk management. And that really came out of a lot of what we developed in this context of kind of being playful about disasters and about how we as social organisms deal with big challenges.

And I think one of the other lessons is you don’t necessarily have to just be focused on conventional deliverables and sort of immediate instrumental outcomes coming from doing these kinds of things, because what you’re doing is actually you’re creating an environment that allows people to self-organize, to find each other, to find new ways of approaching problems, and new ways of working together that can be extremely generative.

Obviously we should be thinking about what are the problems we need to solve, how can we solve them, and making progress towards those goals. In fact, a huge focus of my work now with the Cooperative Futures Institute is, how do we apply the science of cooperation to solving all of these issues?

But we also need to make spaces where as humans we can interact with each other, we can cooperate with each other, we can leverage our own capacities to process information as individuals and as collectives to understand these problems and figure out how to approach them better.

Because as humans, we’re built not just for individual cognition, we’re built for collective cognition. Storytelling and music and arts, those are big parts of how people in small-scale societies process things, and process them collectively, and get shared attention on them.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. It seems like it’s coming at such an apropos time, right, because as you’re getting at there, we’re in a moment that in very many ways seems very end-of-the-world. Like the scary futures thing feels here in a lot of ways.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Yeah, yeah. My last book is called “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times.” And it’s all about how we need cooperation and community and a sense of adventure and playfulness and a readiness to kind of get out there and interact with the world and with others.

And I think we have to be proactive about setting those environments up and making it permissible for people to step into a place where they can play a little bit and they can explore things that they haven’t explored — whether it’s intellectually or socially, or even in terms of physical environment. We’re a very exploratory species, and we’ve got to lean into that now.

LAUREN GILGER: Got to lean into that. Athena Aktipis, director of the Cooperative Futures Institute at ASU, where she’s also a psychology professor. Athena, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Thanks for explaining this to us and giving us all something to think about.

ATHENA AKTIPIS: Thank you.