Katrin Amunts, the project leader at the Forschungszentrum in Jülich, said: “The Big Brain is a three-dimensional atlas of the human brain with microscopic resolution. We had to make ​​more than 7,500 histological sections of a human brain, which then were reconstructed three-dimensionally. Which means that finally we have a mass which we can study. Actually it works just the way we do with Google Earth, where we can also zoom in to specific cities, look at certain roads. The brain atlas is quite similar.”

The research was recently published in the journal Science and can be accessed freely online.

The European Human Brain Project is a one billion euro fund aimed at simulating the brain using high-performance supercomputers to better understand how it functions, Big Brain is part of that.