Nell’s Brain
γνῶθι σεαυτόν — know thyself. Carved over the temple at Delphi; here, taken a little literally.
Drag to orbit · Tap or click to pin anatomy · A/D sideways · Q/E down/up · W/S zoom
Slice controls
Loading photo texture…
Colour →
Portrait calibration
—
Orientation and controls
Radiological convention places my left on your right. R and L mean right and left; A and P mean anterior and posterior; S and I mean superior and inferior. Drag a crosshair, use the mouse wheel, or press the arrow keys to travel through slices.
The 3D canvas displays MRI-derived anatomy. Use Find anatomy to select a named structure, or press Enter on the canvas to name the structure at its centre.
About this scan, labels, and privacy
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. Skin colour, freckles, surface veins, studio lighting and subtle upper-ear contouring are cosmetic presentation layers. The photo texture is an artistically generated adaptation of my portrait, fitted to the scan’s closed eyes and neutral expression, and upscaled to 8K from a detail-enhanced version of that image. In the photo view, small eyelid gaps and nostril surface artefacts are corrected, and a cosmetic flesh-coloured cap closes the scan’s lower boundary. The MRI data, slices and exposed anatomy are unchanged. Every visitor’s browser receives the same static atlas, and the viewer 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, and nothing to install.
Slices are shown in radiological convention — my left is on your right. This scan has also been used in AI interpretability experiments that compare activations in artificial minds with the structure of a real one. Prefer the raw data? The full-resolution scans are yours to download as two NIfTI files, one of just the brain and 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 case for caring about minds we cannot yet see inside.