This colorful video was created using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to visualize the white matter connections and grey matter activity of a real human brain at rest. The short film, created by Martijn Steenwijk, took top prize in the 2012 Art of Neuroscience competition in the Netherlands and has a rather interesting soundtrack. A description (.pdf) from the contest website explains:
The background music was composed by assigning a musical instrument to the ten strongest functional patterns in the brain. The intensities of these patterns vary over time as the person is at rest in the scanner - these are the "spontaneous" brain fluctuations that are now receiving much attention in fMRI research both in healthy people and in disease. By linking the intensity of each pattern to the pitch of its respective musical instrument a melody is generated, thereby making resting state brain activity hearable.
