Nell’s Brain

γνῶθι σεαυτόνknow thyself. Carved over the temple at Delphi; here, taken a little literally.

Preparing the viewer…
About this scan, labels, and privacy
ImagingT1 MRI, approximately 1 mm isotropic presentation
AnatomyFreeSurfer segmentation and DKT cortical atlas
RenderingLive WebGL volume rendering in your browser
InterpretationEducational and artistic, not a diagnostic service

Fine cortical and deep-brain labels come from atlas-backed segmentation. Broad skin, muscle, fat, and bone classes are derived tissue labels; the three bone groups are approximate. Facial colour and studio lighting are cosmetic presentation layers and do not alter the MRI anatomy. The public viewer receives the same static atlas as every visitor and uploads nothing.

This is my actual head, scanned as a T1 MRI at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences — a small digital backup of my brain, every fold and fissure of it, displayed live in your browser. Spin it as a solid object and cut it open, colour it by anatomy — thalamus, hippocampus, the cortical gyri, from my own brain map — or switch to slices and travel through it plane by plane. Real voxels — no download, no plug-in.

Slices are shown in radiological convention — my left is on your right. This scan has also served in AI interpretability experiments, matching activations in artificial minds against the structure of a real one. Prefer the real thing? The full-resolution scans (whole head and brain-only, NIfTI) are yours to download — one file of just the brain, one of the whole head; the full body and the high-res connectome I’ll hold back, if you don’t mind. More to play with on the Playground; and What If We Feel? is, cover to cover, the argument that all minds deserve such interpretability.