Brain Nav
A human brain you can fly through, built from an MRI-derived model, where things happen. Press “play a sound” and a pulse leaves each cochlea, climbs through the brainstem nuclei and the thalamus, and lands in Heschl’s gyrus about thirteen milliseconds later. Flash a light in the left visual field and watch the fibres cross at the chiasm, so everything ends up in the right occipital lobe.
Under the glow it tries hard to be honest about what is measured and what is drawn. The geometry is the HuBMAP reference brain. White-matter routes follow real population tractography (HCP-1065) wherever an atlas bundle exists, and the provenance view shows exactly which stretches do and which are schematic. Missing nuclei come from open atlases of the hypothalamus, brainstem and basal ganglia. Cortical areas come from the Glasser parcellation, sampled onto this brain’s own folds. Latencies are taken from the evoked-potential and single-unit literature, cited per pathway. There is also a connectome view, and a real fMRI recording of someone watching a short film, played across the cortex.
The clinic tab is where it becomes a teaching tool. Conditions change how signals propagate rather than just recolouring tissue:
- In Parkinson’s disease, the basal-ganglia loop brakes the motor thalamus.
- Levodopa or deep-brain stimulation releases it.
- MS plaques slow and block whatever passes through them.
- A cord hemisection produces the classic crossed pattern of loss.
- An antipsychotic shows its effect on all four dopamine pathways at once.
A split view runs a healthy twin beside the affected brain, and guided lessons walk through the comparisons.
It is a teaching model with illustrative severities, not a clinical tool. Data credits and licences are in the app’s help panel.