The Human Brain in Color
This video lets you peek inside the human brain, highlighting the neuronal fibers that enable communication across the brain. This communication is vital to all brain functions, including learning, sensory systems, language processing, short-term memory, and more.
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DownloadThe Human Brain in Color
This video lets you peek inside the human brain, highlighting the neuronal fibers that enable communication across the brain. This communication is vital to all brain functions, including learning, sensory systems, language processing, short-term memory, and more.
What am I looking at?
This video is a 3D model of a subset of the neuronal fibers that enable communication throughout the brain. As the video progresses, different pathways appear, each of which is involved in a distinct process in the brain. The colors of the fibers indicate the direction in which they send signals: fibers sending signals between the left and right sides of the brain are in red, fibers sending signals between the front and back of the brain are in green, and fibers sending signals between the top and bottom of the brain are in blue.
Biology in the background
The brain is an incredibly complex organ, and we are only just beginning to understand how its physical properties translate into thoughts, emotions, and bodily control. One of the first steps to understanding how the brain functions is to understand the communication pathways between areas of the brain.
Like the rest of your body, your brain is made up of cells. For the brain to function properly, brain cells called neurons in one area of the brain need to communicate with neurons in other areas of the brain. During development, pathways or projections from neural cell bodies contact cells in other areas of the brain that they need to “talk” to.
This video highlights some of the pathways that these neuronal projections form. First, you’ll see pathways in and originating from the limbic system, which is involved in emotions, learning, and memory. Next you can see pathways from the eyes, which send visual information to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, which processes and compiles that information into what we think of as sight. Finally, you can start to see the fibers that send information to the brain’s cortex, which is involved in a wide range of cognitive processes, including problem-solving, language processing, short-term memory, and more.
An average human brain weighs about 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds).
Technique
This video used data gathered from MRIs of the human brain to digitally reconstruct neuronal pathways.
Arthur Toga and Mary Stevens, Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute in Los Angeles