Digital Brain Project

Open-sourcing the modeling of brain activity
for science and medicine

The Goal

How the human brain reasons, plans, and decides in complex tasks remains largely unknown. While brain responses to passive tasks start to be captured my modern AI models, how these neural activations govern intelligent behavior remains elusive. The Digital Brain Project aims to assemble the data necessary to build a functional model of the human brain during intelligent behavior.

The Approach

Neuroscientific teams across the world will collaborate to record the brain activity of participants while they perform interactive games inside brain scanners. The resulting dataset will be used to train a digital model of the human brain, which will then be validated against cognitive and reasoning benchmarks.

Naturalistic Interaction
Complex Games

Rich, interactive stimuli spanning visual, language, and auditory modalities—capturing reasoning, planning, and decision-making in action.

Train
Digital Brain
Digital Brain

Trained on 5k hours of
naturalistic brain activity
during interactive game play

Evaluate
Controlled Evaluation
Cognitive Benchmarks

2.5k hours of Cognitive Science tasks probing perception, memory, attention, and executive function.

Reasoning Benchmarks

2.5k hours of AI-benchmarkable tasks measuring planning, logic, and structured problem-solving.

Project Design

10
Labs (up to)
100
Subjects
70
Sessions / subj.
90 min
Per session
10k h
Total recording
$5M
Budget
$500k
Per team (up to)
fMRI
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
MEG
Magnetoencephalography
iEEG
Intracranial Electroencephalography
Typical Recording Session · 90 min
e.g., 5 game + 5 eval blocks
R
Game
Eval
Game
Eval
Game
Eval
Game
Eval
Game
Eval
R
Rest Game (train) Eval (held-out)
Tasks
50%
25%
25%
Games (train) Reasoning (eval) CogSci (eval)
Timeline · 3.5 years
Setup
Ramp
Steady-State
Release
What Each Selected Team Does
1
Design Tasks

Design cognitive and reasoning tasks that probe planning, decision-making, and complex behavior.

2
Acquire Brain Data

Record a few subjects over many sessions, building dense individual brain maps of intelligent behavior.

3
Share Standardized Data

Contribute BIDS-formatted data to the central pool for cross-lab modeling and public release.

Deliverables
Public Data Dissemination

Deidentified dataset released openly under CC BY NC SA for the global research community.

Co-authored Scientific Papers

Joint publications across teams advancing neuroscience, medicine, and AI.

Governance

Independent Scientific Committee
Review and Guide Awardee Selection and Project Execution
Executive Committee
Drive Project Execution
Rothschild Foundation Hospital
Coordinates project:
grant admin, legal & ethics, cross-lab standards, data governance
Université de Montréal
Advises project execution
External Teams · Parallel Data Acquisition
Team 1
Team 2
Team 3
Shared Data-Processing Pool
10,000 hours standardized brain recordings
Dataset Release

Open Science & Impact

The full de-identified dataset will be released for open scientific research.

Brain Imaging Data Structure
Open Data
Reproducible Processing Pipelines

Improve Neuroscience

Better understanding. The project enables unprecedented in-silico experimentation. By aligning deep neural networks with brain data, we can predict high-resolution brain responses to novel stimuli without requiring new physical scans, recovering canonical neural responses and mapping the fine-grained topography of multisensory integration.

Help Medicine

Foundation for tomorrow's healthcare. Modeling the healthy human brain serves as a critical foundation for the future of neurological and psychiatric healthcare. This paves the way for integrating neuro-developmental trajectories and clinical pathology to capture the full diversity of the global population and better understand brain disorders.

Guide AI

Efficient architectures of intelligence. The representational alignment between deep neural networks and the primate brain helps identify the most efficient architectures of intelligence. AI foundation models help decode the brain, while insights from human brain data inform the design of more robust, human-like artificial intelligence.

Join the Digital Brain Project

Want to join the team, help design the tasks, acquire data, and build a better model of the human brain?

Each selected team will receive up to $500,000 in funding.

Apply Now