On Topic: Brain mapping, marketing and The Walking Dead

I admit I've arrived late to the zombie party.

“The Walking Dead,” a television series on AMC that's based on a graphic novel (“adult” comic books with nicer binding), features new episodes on Sundays, repeats on other days, and older showings in black-and-white later in the week. (The season finale is Sunday evening.)

And right after the Sunday airing comes a program in which regular folk and “celebrities” chat breathlessly about “The Walking Dead.” For a full hour. It's called “The Talking Dead.”

It is essentially a 60-minute infomercial for the show you just watched, with a goal not to sell bulky underwater wristwatches or exercise equipment that accomplishes pretty much the same thing as a bunch of sit-ups, but to extend eye contact with this particular show's advertisers.

Now I really have no idea precisely what's going on plot-wise on this program, other than dead people who aren't really dead want to convert the few remaining living people to a similar line of work.

But right after I first witnessed this “Walking Dead”/“Talking Dead” marketing approach, my very second thought was, Why hasn't someone done this before with TV drama? (Hasn't sports been doing this here's-what-you-just-saw piggybacking for years?)

Right after an episode of “The Good Wife,” why not come on with an extended discussion of the sharp suits worn by the law firm of Stern, Lockhart & Gardner, sponsored by, gee, I don't know, some clothing brand? Or about the casual wear on “Hawaii Five-O”?

Beyond fiction programming, marketers could further rally loyal consumers after a major political campaign pitch - hey, wasn't that a great idea about debt reform put forward by candidate X? Let's hear what this fan in Iowa has to say … .

Before you pass this off as futuristic marketing run amok, consider what the attendees at February's annual meeting of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston were talking about.

Some of the reports looked at progress on brain mapping. Through this work, molecular biologists and other scientists hope to achieve a better understanding of identifying human behavior and talents.

Elsewhere on the AAAS conference, social scientists discussed how a small group with one viewpoint could use social media and other mediums to transform the thinking of larger groups.

Too Orwellian, you say? Dirk Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and scientific coordinator of the FuturICT project, spoke about his organization's work to put together a computer model of the whole of society. All of it.

As

he explained at an earlier conference in San Francisco, self-described “complexity scientists” are bringing together data, models and people in a new age of hyper-connectivity, “to get a better multi-perspective view of complex matters … .”

With this model, they then would have a better handle on guessing how people would react to external events - to a stock market crash, a rise in grocery prices or a choice among political candidates (my examples, not Dr. Helbing's).

Put all this together, and are we so very far from smoothing the path to thinking good thoughts about a zombie apocalypse? Sounds like advertising to me.