MALECNS V1.0
Meet the Brain
The nervous system behind Human vs Brain.
Human vs Brain is built around MaleCNS v1.0, a reconstructed connectome of the adult male fruit fly central nervous system.
Interactive 3D visualization of 500 representative MaleCNS neurons within the brain and ventral nerve cord. Non-pointer users can find the same scientific information in the text below.
Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoomDrag to rotate · Pinch to zoom
THE VIEW
A real nervous system
What you are looking at is not an artist's impression.
The shapes come from reconstructed neurons in MaleCNS v1.0, a mapped adult male fruit fly central nervous system. The surrounding structure shows the brain, optic lobes and ventral nerve cord in their anatomical positions.
For this interactive view, we selected 500 reconstructed neurons representing 500 annotated neuron types. This keeps the model responsive enough to explore in a browser while preserving genuine neuronal morphology and spatial relationships.
Why 500 neurons?
The complete MaleCNS dataset is vastly denser than a useful interactive web scene needs to be.
Showing every neuron would make the visualization heavier without making the anatomy easier to understand. Instead, this view uses a representative selection spread across different parts and classes of the nervous system.
It is a window into the connectome, not a rendering of every neuron it contains.
How this relates to the game
Human vs Brain uses connectivity derived from the MaleCNS connectome to create the computational opponent used in the challenge.
The anatomy above is the biological structure behind that system.
It does not show live neural recordings, consciousness or a simulated mind. Neural activity used by the game is computationally simulated over connectome-derived structures.
Challenge the brain