Halloween Special 🎃: Why Zombie Theories Cling to the World of the Living—Cargo Cults, Religion, and Psychotherapy. Towards the end, I even teach you the secret magic formula for conjuring your favourite defunct theory back to life.
Halloween is my favorite holiday. Generally speaking, all the big holidays celebrate something positive and joyous - something that takes no effort to embrace and feel good about. But Halloween is different. It attempts to do the impossible: to make us grow fonder of the things we fear and dread.
Essentially, as I understand it, Halloween is the time when we celebrate our demons. And, as the old saying goes:
Keep your angels close, and your demons closer.
The importance of which every psychotherapist will understand.
What Gives Me Creeps
There are, of course, the classics. The Grim Reaper & co. Don't particularly like him.
But those of you who follow this blog will know I am also no fan of zombies. I was genuinely scared by The Walking Dead and eventually had to stop watching because it gave me gruesome nightmares. However, it's a different type of zombie that truly gives me the creeps in real life: Zombie Theories, especially at my favourite intersection of neuroscience and psychotherapy.
I have already written an entire blog post about this topic a while ago, so I am not going to repeat everything. But here is the gist of it:
Zombie theory is a false idea or theory that sticks around.
Sometimes a zombie theory was once believed to be correct but has since been made obsolete or discredited by newer research. Other times, a zombie theory might have been based on problematic or spurious findings from the start.
I borrowed this idea from Eiko Fried, who developed it in a blog post, using the search for a gene for depression as an example of a Zombie Theory. In psychotherapy, a classic Zombie Theory is the right brain/left brain myth, which remains alive and well despite never being considered to be true in the first place.
But Why They Cling?
Recently, I have stumbled upon a comment on a similar topic that posed the following question:
How come that after all the debunking that has been done, all of these neuro-myths still cling on and persist? What is the social function of these myths that would explain their persistence?
This opened my eyes to the fact that I might have been asking the wrong question all along.
Maybe the right question to ask is not "What is true?" but rather "Why we believe something to be true?"
But then, it is knowledge and science we are talking about here, not religion and beliefs. Or are we?
As I pondered this question, a concept I heard about years ago popped into my mind.
Cargo Cult Religions
Cargo cults are an anthropological curiosity.
During WWII, U.S. soldiers used certain Pacific islands populated by native communities as bases, building runways and bringing in goods (cargo) for their troops via planes.
Once the war ended and the troops left, the islanders, not fully understanding the context of the war, the aircraft technology, or the source of the supplies, began performing rituals to mimic what the soldiers had been doing, hoping these actions would somehow bring back the planes and the cargo they carried. They carved wooden replicas of the headphones the military personnel had used while guiding airplanes to land. They performed the same landing signals on the runway as a ritual to attract the planes with their precious cargo. They even reproduced aspects of the military drills they had observed while the U.S. soldiers were stationed there.
But, of course, they were missing the crucial piece of the puzzle: the full context and the understanding of underlying mechanisms. As a result, the planes - and the bounty they once carried - never returned.
I first heard about the concept of cargo cults in a talk by Richard Feynman, the illustrious physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Professor Feynman takes no prisoners in his talk subtitled "Some Remarks on Science, Pseudoscience, and Learning How Not to Fool Yourself", where he compares certain lax scientific and pseudoscientific practices to a "cargo cult," calling it Cargo Cult Science*. By the sounds of it, Professor Feynman could teach us a thing or two on the matter.
While the idea of the Cargo Cult has somewhat fallen out of favour due to its colonial undertones, the point I am making, I suppose, is to appeal to its universal nature: we all might be practising a cargo cult of sorts, only not being aware of it because we are embedded in our own culture.
Consider the following anecdotes and hopefully you will be able to see how Cargo Cults are relevant to us.
In class, my yoga teacher told us that we all "live" in our hippocampus because we are constantly thinking - which, by the sound of it, did not seem like a good thing. She was also very specific about its location, saying that the hippocampus can be found right in the base of the back of our skull.
(Love yoga . Not sure about the neuroanatomy though.)
In another instance, in a peer group of therapists, a senior colleague taught me that if I shape my lips into an "O" and take deep breaths while following a specific set of movements - as if we were adhering to a carefully crafted scientific protocol - it would stimulate my vagus nerve (?) and help me feel less overwhelmed at the prospect of public speaking. I must admit I never tried it, so I can’t speak to the effectiveness of this specific...hmm... ritual?
Now, can you detect any resemblance between these two anecdotes and the Cargo Cults? Yeah? I thought so.
Zombie theories, Neurobollocks and Cargo Cult Neuroscience
Science and magic seem to be worlds apart, but to an uninitiated eye Science is Magic.
Are you with me?
Let’s take the concept of the cargo cult and transpose it to the modern day. Could it be that we are using neuroscience language and concepts in place of carved wooden headphones and waving imaginary flags on the runway? Just like those islanders, are we missing the understanding of the context and the underlying mechanisms, only perceiving what is visible to the eye? In the same way the cargo cult islanders hoped to conjure the power of the mighty aircraft and their bounty that never arrived, could we be engaging in outlandish rituals that resemble science, hoping to summon its magical powers?
I don't know. For me, it is an idea worth considering.
Secret Magic Formula
A wise man once said:
The biggest brain myth is that we use it.
Wait. Wait. Think. Now laugh.
That is just so funny.
While this specific myth may never be dispelled (!), the overall conditions might improve with time. Zombie theories might finally find their way into the graveyard of ideas, and "neurobollocks" might vanish from the face of the Earth.
But humans are surprising. Creatures of habit, we become oddly attached to things even if they are not good for us (I should know, I am a therapist).
So even when the Zombie Theories are long gone and dispelled, in case of emergency, if a wave of nostalgia washes over you, all you need to do is say the following words three times:
Neurobollocks ... Neurobollocks ... Neurobollocks
And your favourite Zombie Theory will make its appearance back from the underworld, just like Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most.
Happy Halloween gang, neurogeeks and beyond. 🧟
Remember to keep your angels close and your demons closer.
As always, thank you for reading.   For updates you can follow me on BlueSky or Twitter or subscribe to my mailing list.
*While the transcript of Cargo Cult Science talk may feel somewhat outdated due to its culturally insensitive tone and casually sexist remarks, if you can get past those, it’s actually an interesting read. Professor Feynman discusses flotation tanks and the Esalen Institute - where, among other things, Gestalt therapy was developed by Fritz Perls - and by extension, it is linked to many contemporary psychotherapy schools, such as Transactional Analysis and IFS.
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