This YouTube video highlights research in which a parasitic worm uses genetic manipulation to zombify and control its host. Neurologically, zombies exist. A zombie is one in a mental or neurological state who is not in control of his or her mental/neurological functions as he or she should be. Zombification can make you, proven by the infected cricket in the video, kill yourself.
You Are Your Brain's Zombie
If you hold your breath until you pass out, you are in control. Once you pass out, your brain takes over and breathing resumes. That 'you' you cannot control; your nonconscious/nonvolitionary brain is more primary than conscious you.
My Zombie, Myself
How can you tell if you're a zombie? Ultimately, you can't. William James wrote that the question of free will vs. determinism didn't make sense because we have to act as if our wills are free. So it is with zombiedom.
A little zombiedom shouldn't matter because you always find yourself in the middle of life, which no one has total control over. You don't think yourself up from nothing. The idea of being a zombie is only rigor-mortifying to those who are slaves to their moral/ethical 'certainties.'
What you can do to be less of a zombie is to have an active mind and question things. The cricket in the video can't ask itself if jumping in the pool is a suicidally stupid thing to do, but your mother may have asked you if Mr. Bad Influence jumped off a bridge, would you do it too. She was asking you to think, not to blindly obey or be influenced. If something has control of your brain, you have no choice. This is true of your own brain controlling your conscious mind, but it isn't true of all your beliefs/thoughts/decisions/actions.
It is, in part, up to you. Are you going to have an active mind or are you going to be a docile body?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5220551385066049121&ei=UnVXSoDsHsW8lQeB1sCnDg&q=zombie&hl=en
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