A 21st-century version of an older question.
This site is an experiment in seeing the mind through a brain-encoding model. What follows is what the model is, what it isn't, and the people whose work it builds on.
A model that learned the map from stimulus to fMRI.
Meta's TRIBE v2 was trained on thousands of hours of recordings in which participants listened to, watched, or read material while inside an MRI scanner. It learns to predict where in the cortex a given stimulus tends to light up — not in any one person, but on average.
Neurosynth + HCP-MMP-360 underneath, a small backend for Mirror.
Behind every brain visualization on this site sits a precomputed activation map from Neurosynth — a meta-analysis of more than 14,000 published fMRI studies — projected onto the HCP-MMP-360 parcellation (Glasser 2016). Each room loads its own composition: the Atlas page for IFG reads the 'language' term map; the Faust passage on the wager reads a weighted blend of 'reward anticipation', 'value', 'reward', and 'self referential'. The composition is named under every brain visualization on the site, so what drove the pattern you're looking at is never hidden.
The Brain Mirror room is the exception. Its predictor runs on a free-tier serverless backend (fastembed BGE-small) that takes the visitor's text and returns a 20-region activation profile via embedding similarity against a region-anchor cache. When the backend is asleep, the Mirror falls back to a cached prediction. Both paths feed the same HCP-MMP-360 visualization underneath.
These are not measurements of any individual brain. They are what published research and meta-analysis indicate about the average brain under the relevant stimulus. The model is not the mind.
Honest limitations, surfaced unapologetically.
The model is trained on English. Cross-cultural Brain shows what happens when you feed it Thai: the language regions respond less, the prediction degrades, and the silence is real. A model that can't carry a language carries fewer minds.
fMRI itself is slow. The hemodynamic response trails the neural one by roughly five seconds. Anything you see here is, by design, a prediction of a measurement that lags behind the thought.
Region labels are a working vocabulary, not anatomy. The brain is networked; functions are distributed; mapping a feeling to a single bright spot is a story we tell because the story is useful. The model does not believe in the story. Neither should you.
The disclaimers above are the architecture. The site only works if you keep them in view while you watch.
In the early 20th century, Carl Jung gave us a vocabulary for parts of the mind that don't speak. A century later, brain-encoding models are trying to render those parts visible. Different language, related project.
— a footnote, lightly
Neuroscience and depth psychology, held in parallel.
Carl Jung built a phenomenology of inner experience — a vocabulary for patterns he observed in dreams, art, myth, and clinical work. He was not doing neuroscience. He was naming the felt structure of the psyche, with the rigor that careful observation allows when mechanism is out of reach.
This site does not claim that brain regions ARE Jungian concepts. It does not claim that neurotransmitters correspond to archetypes. It does not claim that synchronicity, the collective unconscious as literal storehouse, or active imagination have direct neuroscience grounding. Some of what Jung saw was right in different language; some was wrong; much lives in a register where neither side can fully claim the territory. Holding the tension honestly is the work.
A small number of contemporary thinkers do this bridge work with care. Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring argues for an affective basis of consciousness that touches both neuropsychoanalysis and Damasio's somatic-marker framework. Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, despite a pop appropriation that has been worse than the book itself, is rigorous about hemispheric specialization without overclaiming. Oliver Sacks' clinical neurology is what it looks like to take both mechanism and meaning seriously. These are the company this site keeps.
The temptation to mystify is real. Energy, frequencies, vibration, manifestation — words that have done damage to both neuroscience and to Jung's actual project. The discipline of refusing them is part of the site.
The opposite temptation — to reduce — is also real. 'The brain' as the only legitimate explanation, with everything that can't be reduced to mechanism treated as illusion or as not-yet-mechanism. The discipline of refusing this is also part of the site. Some questions are larger than any one vocabulary for them.
You are not your brain. You are not your unconscious. You are whatever it is that gets to wonder which of those it is.
He was a person, working with what was in reach.
This site holds Jung's work seriously without treating him as an oracle. He was a person — brilliant, prolific, wrong about specific things, right about other specific things, the way people who try hard for a long time generally are. Honoring his work means being honest about both columns.
That consciousness is the small part of mind, and most of what produces thought, feeling, and action happens outside it. Predictive processing, default-mode work, implicit memory, and automatic appraisal have made the scale visible.
That memory is reconstruction, not retrieval, and that the past is continuously rewritten in service of present meaning. Reconsolidation research has given this a mechanism.
That disowned content does not vanish — it gets projected onto others, often with strange intensity, and the cost of not seeing it grows. Inhibition and suppression research describes the mechanism for holding it out; the cost is convergent.
That symbolic and figural cognition is not a primitive layer beneath rational thought but a parallel mode of meaning-making with its own legitimacy. Right-hemisphere narrative + figural work is real.
That recurring images across cultures — circle, quaternity, hero, shadow, mother — point at structural features of how minds organize themselves, not at coincidence.
The collective unconscious as a literal inherited storehouse of ancestral content. Contemporary biology does not support inherited memory in this sense. The convergence of imagery across cultures is better explained by shared cognitive primitives than by a transgenerational reservoir.
Synchronicity as a meaningful acausal connecting principle, on a par with causation. The phenomenology of meaningful coincidence is real — people do experience it — but the metaphysical claim he made around it has no scientific foothold.
The strict male/female binary that organized his anima/animus theory. The underlying observation about a contrasexual interior figure survives in weaker form; the binary that framed it has aged poorly, and contemporary depth-psychological work has corrected the vocabulary.
Some of his readings of non-Western traditions — Eastern thought especially — were more about Jung than about the traditions. He acknowledged this in parts of his work and missed it in others. His cultural reach was real but not unlimited.
Specific archetypal figures (wise old man, anima, animus, trickster) as universal psychological constants. The figures recur, but the strength of cross-cultural specificity he claimed is not what contemporary anthropology actually supports.
Both columns are part of what makes him still worth reading. A theorist who was right about everything would not have been close enough to the actual texture of mind to be useful. Jung was close. He was sometimes too close to see clearly. He was, in this respect, a person.
Eight books that informed this site.
Solms, M. The Hidden Spring. 2021.
The affective basis of consciousness, from neuropsychoanalysis.
Damasio, A. The Feeling of What Happens. 1999.
Somatic markers, the felt self, the body in the brain.
Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. 1985.
Clinical neurology written in a humane voice.
Kandel, E. R. In Search of Memory. 2006.
The molecular basis of memory as reconstruction.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1963.
Recorded by Aniela Jaffé. The clearest entry to his thought.
Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. CW 9i. 1959.
The technical statement of the archetypes.
McGilchrist, I. The Master and His Emissary. 2009.
Hemispheric perspectives. Better than its pop reception suggests.
Seth, A. Being You. 2021.
Predictive processing and the controlled hallucination of being a self.
Standing on the shoulders of well-cited giants.
Every strong claim in this site points at one of these papers. When you read a line about Broca's region or the default-mode network or the amygdala that doesn't feel confident, this is where the confidence comes from.
- 01
Broca, P. (1861). Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé, suivies d'une observation d'aphémie (perte de la parole). Bulletins de la Société Anatomique de Paris.
- 02
Wernicke, C. (1874). Der aphasische Symptomencomplex. Cohn & Weigert, Breslau.
- 03
Otto, R. (1917). Das Heilige (translated 1923 as The Idea of the Holy). Oxford University Press (English ed.).
- 04
Scoville, W. B., & Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11 - 05
Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, vol. 9i). Princeton University Press.
- 06
Jung, C. G., recorded and edited by A. Jaffé (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Pantheon Books.
- 07
Geschwind, N. (1965). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man, Parts I and II. Brain.
doi:10.1093/brain/88.2.237 - 08
Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological Types (Collected Works, vol. 6). Princeton University Press.
- 09
O'Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research.
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Sacks, O. (1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Summit Books.
- 11
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: history and current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
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Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In: The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, eds.), Oxford University Press.
- 14
Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews.
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Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.
- 16
Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin.
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Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace.
- 20
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
- 21
Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature.
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Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
doi:10.1073/pnas.98.2.676 - 24
Schacter, D. L. (2001). The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Houghton Mifflin.
- 25
Zatorre, R. J., & Belin, P. (2001). Spectral and temporal processing in human auditory cortex. Cerebral Cortex.
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Catani, M., Howard, R. J., Pajevic, S., & Jones, D. K. (2002). Virtual in vivo interactive dissection of white matter fasciculi in the human brain. NeuroImage.
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Greicius, M. D., Krasnow, B., Reiss, A. L., & Menon, V. (2003). Functional connectivity in the resting brain: a network analysis of the default mode hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2003). People thinking about thinking people: the role of the temporo-parietal junction in 'theory of mind.' NeuroImage.
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Anderson, M. C., Ochsner, K. N., Kuhl, B., Cooper, J., Robertson, E., Gabrieli, S. W., Glover, G. H., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2004). Neural systems underlying the suppression of unwanted memories. Science.
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Bechara, A., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). The somatic marker hypothesis: A neural theory of economic decision. Games and Economic Behavior.
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Catani, M., Jones, D. K., & Ffytche, D. H. (2005). Perisylvian language networks of the human brain. Annals of Neurology.
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Phelps, E. A., & LeDoux, J. E. (2005). Contributions of the amygdala to emotion processing: from animal models to human behavior. Neuron.
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Amodio, D. M., & Frith, C. D. (2006). Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
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Cavanna, A. E., & Trimble, M. R. (2006). The precuneus: a review of its functional anatomy and behavioural correlates. Brain.
doi:10.1093/brain/awl004 - 35
Kandel, E. R. (2006). In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. W. W. Norton.
- 36
Northoff, G., Heinzel, A., de Greck, M., Bermpohl, F., Dobrowolny, H., & Panksepp, J. (2006). Self-referential processing in our brain — a meta-analysis of imaging studies on the self. NeuroImage.
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Vogt, B. A., Vogt, L., & Laureys, S. (2006). Cytology and functionally correlated circuits of human posterior cingulate areas. NeuroImage.
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Amaral, D. G., & Lavenex, P. (2007). Hippocampal neuroanatomy. In: The Hippocampus Book (Andersen et al., eds.), Oxford University Press.
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Dronkers, N. F., Plaisant, O., Iba-Zizen, M. T., & Cabanis, E. A. (2007). Paul Broca's historic cases: high resolution MR imaging of the brains of Leborgne and Lelong. Brain.
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Hassabis, D., & Maguire, E. A. (2007). Deconstructing episodic memory with construction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
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Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
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Olson, I. R., Plotzker, A., & Ezzyat, Y. (2007). The Enigmatic temporal pole: a review of findings on social and emotional processing. Brain.
doi:10.1093/brain/awm052 - 43
Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
doi:10.1038/nrn2277 - 44
Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
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Seeley, W. W., Menon, V., Schatzberg, A. F., Keller, J., Glover, G. H., Kenna, H., Reiss, A. L., & Greicius, M. D. (2007). Dissociable intrinsic connectivity networks for salience processing and executive control. Journal of Neuroscience.
doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5587-06.2007 - 46
Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
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Catani, M., & Thiebaut de Schotten, M. (2008). A diffusion tensor imaging tractography atlas for virtual in vivo dissections. Cortex.
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Fransson, P., & Marrelec, G. (2008). The precuneus / posterior cingulate cortex plays a pivotal role in the default mode network: evidence from a partial correlation network analysis. NeuroImage.
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Hare, T. A., Camerer, C. F., & Rangel, A. (2009). Self-control in decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFC valuation system. Science.
doi:10.1126/science.1168450 - 50
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.
- 51
Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., Swallow, K. M., & Zacks, J. M. (2009). Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science.
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Adolphs, R. (2010). What does the amygdala contribute to social cognition? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
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Andrews-Hanna, J. R., Reidler, J. S., Sepulcre, J., Poulin, R., & Buckner, R. L. (2010). Functional-anatomic fractionation of the brain's default network. Neuron.
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Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2010). The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas. Brain.
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Destrieux, C., Fischl, B., Dale, A., & Halgren, E. (2010). Automatic parcellation of human cortical gyri and sulci using standard anatomical nomenclature. NeuroImage.
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Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2011). The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
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Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y.-Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Da Costa, S., van der Zwaag, W., Marques, J. P., Frackowiak, R. S. J., Clarke, S., & Saenz, M. (2011). Human primary auditory cortex follows the shape of Heschl's gyrus. Journal of Neuroscience.
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Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology.
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Naselaris, T., Kay, K. N., Nishimoto, S., & Gallant, J. L. (2011). Encoding and decoding in fMRI. NeuroImage.
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Small, S. A., Schobel, S. A., Buxton, R. B., Witter, M. P., & Barnes, C. A. (2011). A pathophysiological framework of hippocampal dysfunction in ageing and disease. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
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Wallentin, M., Nielsen, A. H., Vuust, P., Dohn, A., Roepstorff, A., & Lund, T. E. (2011). Amygdala and heart rate variability responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story. NeuroImage.
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Yarkoni, T., Poldrack, R. A., Nichols, T. E., Van Essen, D. C., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data. Nature Methods.
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Blanke, O. (2012). Multisensory brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
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Fedorenko, E., Duncan, J., & Kanwisher, N. (2012). Language-selective and domain-general regions lie side by side within Broca's area. Current Biology.
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Meta AI / FAIR
TRIBE v2 brain encoder. The site uses the cached checkpoint only; no Meta-specific data leaves the page.
Anthropic Claude
Engineering scaffolding and prose drafting were produced with Claude (Anthropic, model versions across 2025–2026) under anonymous editorial direction and final review. All factual claims, citations, region attributions, and editorial decisions were human-verified. The site's voice and structural choices are the author's; the implementation labor was shared with the model.
Chulalongkorn student, Faculty of Psychology
A Faculty of Psychology student at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. The Thai stimulus pairs come from here.
Public-domain works behind every room
Each room carries a single historical work at very low opacity — visible as texture, not illustration. The choice of work is thematic: writing as substrate for the Mirror, an autograph score for the Music Lab, a Phra Malai manuscript for the Cross-Cultural room, Cajal's Purkinje cell for the descent into Cellular. All sources are public domain.
- Home · Threshold · default
Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris … Historia (1617–1621). Microcosm-macrocosm engraving. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- Mirror
Folio from the Voynich Manuscript (15th c., undeciphered). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 408. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- Music
Johann Sebastian Bach, autograph manuscript of cantata Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn, BWV 56 (1726), first page. Berlin State Library. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- Cross-Cultural
Folio from a Thai illuminated samut khoimanuscript of the Legend of Phra Malai (Central Thailand, c. 1800). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.76.93.2. Public domain. Source: LACMA Open Access / Wikimedia Commons.
- Archetypes
Michael Maier, emblem from Atalanta Fugiens(1617). Alchemical emblem book. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- Cellular
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, cortical drawing showing Purkinje cells (c. 1899). Instituto Cajal, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- About
Andreas Vesalius, plate from De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel, 1543). Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The background system can be disabled at any time with⌘⇧B(Ctrl-Shift-B on Windows / Linux). The setting persists across visits.
A short guide to the affordances.
The site has more entry points than the home page suggests. The list below names the discoverable ones — the small affordances that turn a beautiful piece into a navigable research instrument.
- Deep night
Press D for deep night.
- Search
Press Cmd-K (or Ctrl-K on Windows / Linux) anywhere on the site to open a keyboard-first search palette. It indexes every region, every Bridges section, every tour, every long-form essay, and a small set of cross-cutting concepts. Type a researcher's surname, a disorder, a Jungian concept, a brain region — the palette finds it.
- Atlas
The Region Atlas has twenty pages, one per region we surface. Each page carries seven sections: anatomy, function, cell types, connections, clinical context, history of discovery, and the depth-psychological thread. Every functional claim cites a peer-reviewed primary source; hover any superscript in the prose to see the reference.
- Bridges
Where neuroscience and depth psychology touch, the Bridges page rates the empirical correspondence — tight, partial, distant, or none. Each Atlas page's Thread section carries a bridge-strength card linking to the matching Bridges section. Following the cards is the cleanest way to see how the two layers of the site interlock.
- Connectome
Each Atlas page has a Connectome panel in the sidebar listing the white-matter tracts that have an endpoint in this region. Toggle a tract and it appears inside the persistent brain as a glowing curve. The geometry is stylized; the endpoints, function, and discovery credits are faithful to the literature.
- Cellular descent
The Cellular View is the deepest scale on the site — reconstructed individual neurons and a frame-by-frame synapse simulation with selectable neurotransmitter. The macro brain is hidden while you are there so the cellular canvases own the visual field; clicking back into any room restores it.
- Guided Tours
Six choreographed two-to-three-minute experiences in which the brain animates through a sequence of activations with synchronized narration. Watch them rather than navigate them — the pacing is deliberate. Each tour links into the Bridges page or the relevant Atlas region at the end.
- Depth Psychology
A separate section for the depth-psychological layer of the site: Bridges as the synthesizing index, long-form pages on Aion, the Red Book, and Gestalt therapy, and adjacent essays in Field Notes, Threshold, and Archetypes. The voice is restrained and the cross-references back to the empirical side are explicit.
None of this is hidden. None of it is gamified. The affordances are here for the reader who wants them; the reader who doesn't can ignore them and have the cinematic version of the site instead.
What still wants building.
Four things genuinely remain. Real TRIBE inference wired to a FastAPI backend — the predictor currently runs locally on lexical features and the architecture-faithful model loader is in place, but production inference is not. A native Thai review pass on the machine-assisted translations across every page; the EN/TH toggle exists and the Thai prose is awaiting one careful read. Public-domain or CC-BY audio for the three NeuroMusic Lab slots, plus a contribution affordance for new pairs and recordings on the Cross-Cultural and NeuroMusic rooms. A final accessibility and performance audit across every route, with screen-reader labels on every brain region and OG cards for every page.
What we're building is small. The intention is not.
— more soon