Big Bang and Dopamine

[LabRat]

The world is poised, waiting to discover what the Big Bang experiment results will yield. What will they tell us about our world? What are religious leaders thinking about this pursuit of what is the disproval of various religious tenets? Beginnings interest me but I'm less interested in how the world began (how else other than the Big Bang?) and more interested in the first cause of zombies. What made the first one? Was it natural? Was it engineered? When did it happen? Rumours refer to black magic but as a scientist, I am sceptical of "magic" - what is magic other than a term to cover things that people can't explain? Take weather as an example... Unable to explain the weather, primitive man called it magic. Then it evolved into religion. Finally it was explained by science. The same can be applied to zombie creation, I'm sure. Although, it does imply a scientific advancement to whatever historical period zombies were first created that possibly didn't exist. This is an interesting and contradictory thought. However, if zombies were infected rather than engineered, viruses and bacteria occur naturally and perhaps the first was an accident of nature. At some point, I would like to have this debate with the rest of my team.

However, my own research continues frustratingly slowly. I persist in pursuing my theories about personalised responses to infection but it proves to be a path that is difficult to prove or disprove. All I can do is persevere.

In the meantime, one of my colleagues has been bemoaning the lack of live specimens to test on. Unfortunately they are difficult to capture and surprisingly difficult to keep alive. They seem to take barely any care of themselves "in the wild" and manage to stay alive and confound us but in captivity, with all their needs met, the exact opposite seems true. Several have seemed far more interested in eating themselves alive than the food provided for them. Perhaps zombie lore is incomplete and something unknown about them is being missed.

As a slight aside but one which I found quite interesting, one of my colleagues has been looking at the lack of coordination and struggle for motor control which zombies seem to exhibit. This led her to look at the effects of dopamine on humans. Interestingly, an article surfaced recently about the effect of sleeplessness on dopamine levels in the brain. It appears that lack of sleep increases dopamine levels. Dopamine has important functions in motor activity (impaired in zombies), cognitive ability (again, impaired if at all present in zombies) as well as motivation and reward (zombies seem to be motivated solely by eating humans). Increased dopamine levels would imply an increase in motor skills and cognitive ability or at least, a compensatory effect. Zombies have not been observed to sleep unless they do this in different ways to humans but zombies are essentially reanimated humans so following such a train of thought would be open-minded but somewhat foolhardy. However, sleep-deprived bodies would then have increased dopamine levels which would increase motor skills and cognitive ability but zombies, conversely, seem to lose these skills as they continue to exist. Having thought about this though, dead bodies do not need sleep, so perhaps dopamine levels are not even affected, if dopamine is still capable of being produced. If only we had a live specimen to investigate the presence of dopamine on. This will have to wait. In part because of the World Cup. Work seems to slow around here in direct inverse proportion to the amount of major sporting events. Almost nothing was done during the Olympics. Sometimes I wish people remembered that time is our enemy. With that, I should get back to the grindstone.