March 27, 2026
Mind blown, literally
Chopping my brain into bits – turning my brain into a 3D model on the web
One man put his brain online in 3D — and the internet can’t look away
TLDR: A med student turned his own MRI into a clickable 3D brain, using free tools that label each part. The crowd is split between wowed fans, DIY brain‑science dreamers pushing “scan → learn → rescan,” and privacy worriers asking if posting your literal brain is genius, risky, or both.
An Australian med student took his own MRI and turned it into an interactive 3D brain on the web — and the crowd is spiraling with it. Fans are calling it the ultimate selfie, with one user gushing it’s “an honor” to peek at the mind behind the project. Skeptics? They’re clutching their skulls over privacy and accuracy, asking if putting your literal brain online is the new overshare. The vibe: equal parts awe, science fair, and Black Mirror.
Under the hood, he used free tools like FreeSurfer to digitally “strip” the skull and label parts like the thinking surface (cortex), wiring (white matter), and fluid pockets (ventricles), then visualized them with apps like ITK-SNAP. It took hours, but the result is a labeled 3D model — and yes, it even spits out brain size stats. That lit up the comments: jokers demanded a “brain size leaderboard,” while self-quant folks plotted experiments. One hot take proposed a personal study: scan now, learn Mandarin for a year, scan again, and see if memory hubs change. Meanwhile, the timid warned about “brain doxxing.” But most agreed on one thing: it’s wildly cool to see a mind made visible.
Key Points
- •The author received a raw brain MRI from a University of Melbourne research study and extracted scan metadata, including dimensions.
- •FreeSurfer’s recon-all pipeline segmented the brain into labeled structures (cortex, white matter, ventricles, thalamus, hippocampus, caudate, amygdala).
- •The segmentation process took about four hours and included skull/neck/eye removal, alignment to templates, and tissue boundary estimation.
- •Quantitative measurements (e.g., structure sizes) were produced alongside labeled anatomy.
- •ITK-SNAP was used to overlay and visualize the segmentation, enabling creation of an interactive 3D brain model.