About

Why we made this site

In this section, text in purple was written primarily by a human; the rest was written primarily by Claude, relying on human input. (If you can’t see the different colors, see the distinction a different way.)

This site is a work in progress. I am a graduate student taking a course on AI-assisted programming. This site is a way for me to explore AI-assisted programming while also, perhaps, creating something useful for students enrolled in a section of Introductory Psychology that I am teaching. One of my concerns with working with an LLM is that it is hard to know what portion of the final product is my contribution and what portion was generated by the predictive text of the LLM. To partially address this concern, I decided to document my process. You can read more about that on Wrestling with AI.

This is version 1, made without a budget. It used AI for some work that people should do, including drawing the brain scans. See Wrestling with AI for more about these problems.

Acknowledgments

This site was inspired by teachers and scientists who used zombies to teach about the brain before us, including:

M. M. Masicampo’s post on the Society for the Teaching of Psychology blog, “Zombie Brains and Metacognition,” which led to the idea for this site.
Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek’s book Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain, in which two neuroscientists “diagnose” the zombie brain region by region.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln honors seminar “The Neuroscience of Zombies,” in which students identify the nervous-system damage behind zombie behavior in film clips.
Caitlin Goodpaster’s article “The Neuroscience of Zombies: Unmasking the Zombie Mind” on Knowing Neurons.
The Society for Neuroscience’s free 3D Brain on BrainFacts.org.

The brain science relies mainly on Psychology 2e from OpenStax, a free, openly licensed textbook. Our approach to accessibility draws on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the 10 Principles of Disability Justice (Sins Invalid), DisCrit, the Design Justice Network Principles, Building Access (Hamraie), and the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines.

We use a few small Plants vs. Zombies images for teaching, under EA’s content policy for fan projects and fair use. They are © Electronic Arts and are not covered by this site’s Creative Commons license.

Learn more: free textbooks

Want to go deeper? These open textbooks are free to read online:

Psychology 2e (OpenStax), the textbook this site relies on most because the relevant sections were assigned reading for my students
Brain and Behavior (CUNY), an open textbook on biological psychology by Jill Grose-Fifer
Introduction to Psychology (A Critical Approach) (CUNY)

Behind the science

Sources don’t always agree. When they disagree, we follow Psychology 2e. Some examples:

What’s in the limbic system? Psychology 2e names the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus as the most important parts; one chapter also includes the thalamus. We teach the first three as the core.
Habits. Psychology 2e credits the cerebellum with skill memory. Other research also gives the basal ganglia a big role in habits, so we include both.
EEG. Psychology 2e says EEG doesn’t show where activity happens. We say it is poor at showing where, which is more precise.

References

Zombies and teaching

Albin, A. (2019, October 30). Honors course bites into zombie braaaains. University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://news.unl.edu/article/honors-course-bites-into-zombie-braaaains (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Goodpaster, C. (2023, October 30). The neuroscience of zombies: Unmasking the zombie mind. Knowing Neurons. https://knowingneurons.com/the-neuroscience-of-zombies-unmasking-the-zombie-mind/ (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Masicampo, M. M. (2021, January 4). Zombie brains and metacognition: How to use the undead to help students increase learner agency. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. https://teachpsych.org/E-xcellence-in-Teaching-Blog/9655569 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Verstynen, T., & Voytek, B. (2014). Do zombies dream of undead sheep? A neuroscientific view of the zombie brain. Princeton University Press. (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Brain science

Cleveland Clinic. (2022, August 5). Basal ganglia. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23962-basal-ganglia (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Guertin, P. A. (2009). The mammalian central pattern generator for locomotion. Brain Research Reviews, 62(1), 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresrev.2009.08.002 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A., & Squire, L. R. (1996). A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science, 273(5280), 1399–1402. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.273.5280.1399 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.03.010 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Society for Neuroscience. (n.d.). 3D brain. BrainFacts.org. Retrieved October 9, 2026, from https://www.brainfacts.org/3d-brain (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020). Psychology 2e. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Accessibility and design justice

Annamma, S. A., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Design Justice Network. (2018). Design justice network principles. https://designjustice.org/read-the-principles (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Hamraie, A. (2017). Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. University of Minnesota Press. (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Sins Invalid. (2019). Skin, tooth, and bone: The basis of movement is our people: A disability justice primer (2nd ed.). https://www.sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-primer (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

World Wide Web Consortium. (2023). Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

AI costs and energy

Anthropic. (n.d.). Pricing. Claude Docs. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Vahdat, A., & Dean, J. (2025, August 21). Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference. Google Cloud Blog. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

You, J. (2025, February 7). How much energy does ChatGPT use? Epoch AI. https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Images, licenses, and privacy

Electronic Arts. (n.d.). EA’s content policy. Retrieved October 9, 2026, from https://help.ea.com/en/articles/security-and-rules/ea-content-policy/ (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

GitHub. (n.d.). About GitHub Pages. GitHub Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)

Plants vs. Zombies Wiki. (n.d.). Plants vs. Zombies/Gallery. Fandom. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://plantsvszombies.fandom.com/wiki/Plants_vs._Zombies/Gallery#Zombies (source of the Basic Zombie and Newspaper Zombie images, © Electronic Arts) (Unchecked by a person; AI research only.)