I mean real zombies, not the zombies in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Pullman describes zombies as human beings who have been "intercised," or artificially separated from their souls. The scientific version is people who lose consciousness for a brief time and still act in a purposeful way.
"Automatisms" do occur in real life. Sometimes they happen during sleep. Sleep-walking is the most famous example. There is even "sexsomnia," when people suddenly perform sexual acts during unconscious sleep. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17580590
Zombie automatisms can happen after brain injuries, after drug overdoses or in dissociative states. In rare cases, epileptic patients can start singing or humming without knowing it. A French patient started to say, "What is it? What is it?" in English during a seizure. In some cases epileptic seizures can be followed by psychotic episodes, and even by violent actions. After a skiing accident, one man left his bed, ran upstairs and tried to throttle his wife. Afterwards he had no memory of the event. It was probably an unconscious automatism --- a zombie episode. Zombie strikes are rare, fortunately, and medical conditions like epilepsy can be treated.
In a different way, all of us have a zombie side: It is our automatic actions that are so highly practiced that they can pop out even when we don't want them. The famous pianist Glenn Gould could never control his tendency to hum along with his music; the trouble is that while he played beautifully, his vocal hum sounds creaky and grunty. In some of his most famous recordings you can hear Glenn Gould grunting right along with the piano part. He couldn't stop himself.
Obviously Gould was not unconscious when he was playing the piano. But he was so deeply absorbed in his piano playing that he could not be conscious of his humming. There is only so much that we can be conscious of at any moment.
You, too, can be a zombie, but you have to practice an awful lot, like Gould's humming. Some habits become so automatic that they can take off when you get distracted. Some parts of the brain (the basal ganglia) are believed to control unconscious zombie actions. They allow you to go on automatic for a little while, when you are driving a car and talking to a friend at the same time. But they can't be allowed to take over when a child suddenly runs across the street.
Overpracticed automatisms have been blamed for car accidents and major airline crashes. In a deeper sense, they may be responsible for the times when people seem to be mentally "stuck" in beliefs that are harmful, but which they can't seem to change.
Since we can't stamp out our inner zombies, we might as well learn to love them. Be nice to your zombies, and your zombies will be nice to you. But don't let them take over.
Please!
