SAN DIEGO — No, zombies aren’t real (at least not yet), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t sport in trying to analyze their mental faculties.

That’s the work of Bradley Voytek. The University of California at San Francisco neuroscientist has built a specialty in his field by mapping brain damage that would be caused by zombification.

“We would sit around and watch zombie movies and for a couple years we would talk about what zombie brains would have to look like, and it’s surprisingly taken off from there,” Voytek says in the Wired.com video above, referencing the early work he did with fellow zombie neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen.

Voytek and his colleague eventually used the research they did mapping the defects in cinematic walkers’ brains to make a field guide of sorts on how to survive a zombie outbreak. Voytek has become an expert in the field — he came to Comic-Con International this year, in part, to speak on panels about zombies. Plus, he sits on the board of the Zombie Research Society. (Yes, that’s a thing.)

Still, Voytek, who does real neuroscience research on strokes and memory, is the first to admit zombie studies are just for kicks.

“This all started as a grad-school lark,” Voytek says in the video, recorded during Comic-Con last month.