Mapping the human brain's connections — the connectome — and sharing the data and methods openly.
Purpose
The brain does its work through connections: tens of billions of neurons wired into circuits that give rise to thought, memory, and feeling. A complete map of those connections — a connectome — is the reference every other question about the mind depends on.
Open Neuron is 42.AI's effort to build that map and release it in the open: open data, open methods, and open collaboration, so any researcher can verify, extend, and build on the work.
Explore a connectome
An interactive, simplified model — hover, tap, or use your keyboard to explore how brain regions connect. Illustrative, not an anatomical atlas — see sources & credits.
Research & writing
Foundations
What a connectome is — and why a complete map matters
The word "connectome" was introduced in 2005 by Olaf Sporns and colleagues, who argued that a comprehensive structural description of the brain's connections should be treated as foundational infrastructure for neuroscience — much as the genome became for biology.
Their case was simple but far-reaching: you cannot fully explain how the brain computes without knowing how it is wired. A shared, complete map of neural connections would let researchers relate structure to function, compare healthy and diseased brains, and test theories that are otherwise impossible to pin down. Two decades later, that vision still frames the field — and it is the premise Open Neuron is built on.
Reference
Sporns, O., Tononi, G., & Kötter, R. (2005). The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain. PLoS Computational Biology, 1(4), e42. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010042
State of the art
The map keeps getting sharper: 180 regions per hemisphere
In 2016, a team led by Matthew Glasser and David Van Essen published one of the most detailed maps of the human cortex to date. Combining several kinds of MRI data from the Human Connectome Project, they delineated 180 distinct areas in each hemisphere — nearly 100 of which had never been formally described before.
What made the result trustworthy was not just its resolution but its method: the map was built on multiple, independent signals and then validated on a separate group of brains. It is a working example of the standard Open Neuron holds itself to — reproducible, multimodal, and openly shared so others can put it to the test.
Reference
Glasser, M. F., Coalson, T. S., Robinson, E. C., Hacker, C. D., Harwell, J., Yacoub, E., Ugurbil, K., Andersson, J., Beckmann, C. F., Jenkinson, M., Smith, S. M., & Van Essen, D. C. (2016). A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex. Nature, 536(7615), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18933
Tools & ecosystem
Open Neuron doesn't start from scratch. We build on open scientific software and learn from the teams already turning connectomics into real-world impact.