Terms of Use
Last updated 2026-07-26
CEREBRUM is a free website that simulates spiking neurons in your browser. It exists to show people what a brain simulation actually is. These Terms explain what you can expect from it, what it must not be used for, and what happens if something goes wrong. They are short because the site is simple: there is no account, no payment, and nothing of yours is collected.
1. Accepting these Terms
By loading or using CEREBRUM you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy. There is no sign-up box to tick, because there is no account and nothing to sign up for. Use is acceptance. If you do not agree with any part of this, close the page and nothing further happens.
In these Terms, "the site" means CEREBRUM at cerebrum-6xe.pages.dev. "We" and "us" mean the independent developer who built and hosts it.
2. What CEREBRUM is
CEREBRUM is a static web page that runs a real-time simulation of 262,144 Izhikevich spiking neurons on your graphics card using WebGL2. The neurons are placed at anatomical coordinates, connected procedurally, and allowed to charge, fire and rewire according to spike-timing-dependent plasticity. The waveforms, rhythms and states you see are computed on your device as you watch.
It is free, it runs entirely in your browser, and it is offered for education and curiosity. It is built and published by one independent developer. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by any university, hospital, research institution, journal, or the authors of the papers it draws on.
3. Not medical advice, not a diagnostic tool
CEREBRUM is not a medical device and gives no medical advice. It cannot diagnose, screen for, monitor, rule out, or treat any condition in you or in anyone else. Nothing it displays describes a real person's brain, including yours.
The states it demonstrates are model behaviour, not clinical events. The seizure, sleep, anaesthesia and lesion demonstrations show what a set of equations does when its parameters change. They are not a way to recognise, predict or interpret a seizure, a sleep disorder, an injury, or any other medical event. The traces it draws are computed from the model and are not an EEG recorded from a person.
Do not make any health decision based on this site. If you have a concern about your brain or anyone else's, speak to a licensed clinician. If you think someone is having a seizure, a stroke, or any other emergency, call your local emergency number immediately.
4. Educational use and accuracy
A human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons and something on the order of 150 trillion cortical synapses. This simulation has a quarter of a million neurons. That is about three ten-thousandths of one percent, and the difference is not only a matter of size.
The model is deliberately simplified so that it can run at real time in a browser tab. Its wiring is generated from a hash function rather than measured from a real connectome, because no complete human connectome exists. Its cell types, delays, neurotransmitter effects and regional boundaries are reduced to what is legible on screen and affordable on a consumer GPU. Those simplifications are wrong in ways that matter scientifically, and they are chosen for teaching rather than for fidelity.
So: use it to build intuition, not to reach conclusions. Do not cite it as evidence. Do not use it for research findings, clinical work, engineering decisions, coursework you are expected to verify, or anything where being wrong has a cost. Check the primary literature. We make no representation that any number, waveform, rate or region shown here is quantitatively accurate.
5. Not artificial intelligence, not anyone's brain
This is not artificial intelligence. There is no training data, no learned parameters, no model weights, no inference, and no language model anywhere in it. Nothing here was trained on anything. What runs is a system of differential equations integrated one millisecond at a time.
It is not a copy, scan, upload or reconstruction of any real person's brain, living or dead, and it is not a model of yours. It is not conscious, not sentient, does not perceive, does not understand, and has no experience of any kind. We do not claim otherwise, and you should not describe it as any of those things when you share it.
6. Acceptable use
You may view the site, use it, link to it, and show it to other people. You agree not to:
- use it for any clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic or emergency purpose;
- present its output as a medical finding, a scientific result, a real recording, or a real person's brain activity;
- claim it is artificial intelligence, or claim it does anything it does not do;
- attack the site or its host, including denial-of-service attempts, vulnerability probing, bulk automated requests, or evading security headers;
- copy, rehost, resell, or publish the site or its source as your own work;
- embed or modify it in a way that implies we endorse you, your product, or your claims;
- use it for anything unlawful.
The site accepts no uploads, posts, comments or messages, so there is no user content on it. We may change, restrict or withdraw access at any time.
7. Intellectual property
The code, simulation design, text, layout and visual design of CEREBRUM belong to its author. All rights are reserved. You may read it, run it, learn from it, link to it and quote it with attribution. You may not republish it as your own, strip its attribution, or present it as a project you made.
Third-party components remain the property of their owners and are used under their own licences: the Three.js library, and the typefaces served by Google Fonts. The scientific work the simulation implements belongs to the researchers who did it, including Izhikevich (2003) for the neuron model and Bi and Poo (1998) for the plasticity rule. Referencing their work is not a claim of their endorsement.
8. Copyright complaints
The site hosts no user-submitted material, but if you believe something on it infringes your copyright, email neilsgupta@outlook.com with: the work you own, the exact URL of the material, your contact details, and a good-faith statement that the use is not authorised. We will review it promptly and remove or correct anything that should not be there. If you believe material was removed in error, reply and say so.
9. Age requirement
You must be 13 or older to use this site, in line with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. If you are under 18, use it with a parent or guardian's permission. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone of any age, and the site is built so that there is nothing to collect. See the Privacy Policy.
10. As is, with no warranty
The site is provided "as is" and "as available", with no warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.
We do not promise that it will be available, that it will work on your device, that it is free of errors, or that anything it computes is correct. It requires WebGL2 with floating-point render targets, and on hardware that lacks them it will refuse to start. It may go offline or be discontinued without notice.
11. Assumption of risk
You use CEREBRUM at your own risk. Two risks are worth naming plainly.
Flashing and moving light. The simulation renders rapid, high-contrast changes in brightness, and the seizure demonstration produces fast synchronised flicker across the whole view. If you have photosensitive epilepsy, migraine triggered by visual patterns, or any sensitivity to flashing imagery, do not run it. Pause the simulation or close the tab if you feel unwell.
Sustained load on your device. The neurons run continuously on your GPU. Laptops and phones may get warm, fans may spin up, and battery will drain faster than usual. Older or thermally limited devices may stutter, and the browser tab can run out of memory and crash. Pause the simulation or close the tab if your device gets hot. You are responsible for deciding whether to run it on your hardware.
12. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, device damage, overheating, downtime, missed opportunities, or any decision made because of something you saw here, including any health or medical decision.
Our total aggregate liability for any claim relating to the site is limited to the amount you paid to use it, which is nothing. Some places do not allow certain exclusions or limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you; where that is the case, our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law permits.
13. Indemnification
You agree to hold us harmless from, and indemnify us against, any claims, losses, damages, liabilities and reasonable costs arising from your use or misuse of the site, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights.
14. Disputes, arbitration and class actions
In plain English, here is how a disagreement gets handled.
Talk first. Email neilsgupta@outlook.com and describe the problem. Most things end there. Both sides agree to try for 30 days before doing anything formal.
Then arbitration, not court. If it is still unresolved, you and we agree that the dispute will be settled by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its consumer rules, rather than by a judge or a jury. The arbitrator's decision is final. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead.
Individually, not as a class. You and we each waive the right to a jury trial and the right to bring or join a class action, class arbitration, or any representative proceeding. Claims are brought one person at a time. If the class-action waiver is held unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim goes to court instead and the rest of this section still applies to everything else.
Some jurisdictions, including many outside the United States, limit or forbid clauses like this for consumers. Where the law says you cannot be bound by it, you are not.
15. Governing law and severability
These Terms are governed by the laws of the site operator's state of residence in the United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If any provision is found unenforceable, it is severed and the remaining provisions stay in full effect.
16. Changes to the site and to these Terms
We may change, add to, break, pause, or shut down the site at any time, for any reason, without notice. It is free and nothing about it is guaranteed to keep existing.
We may also update these Terms. When we do, the revised version is posted on this page with a new date at the top. There is no mailing list and we have no way to contact you, so that date is the notice: if you want to know whether anything changed, check it. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated Terms.
17. Contact
Questions about these Terms, copyright notices, and anything else: neilsgupta@outlook.com.
18. About this document
These Terms were written by the person who built CEREBRUM. They were not drafted or reviewed by a lawyer, and they are not legal advice to you. They are an honest description of what this free educational project is, what it is not, and the terms on which it is offered.
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