A $15M fund to open source neural data and model the human brain for science and medicine
Rothschild Hospital Foundation
The research community answered our initial challenge with extraordinary enthusiasm, and we are proud to announce the scale-up of the Digital Brain Project to a total $15M USD. This will enable us to further accelerate open science by collecting and openly sharing neural data, develop foundational AI models of the human brain, and fast-track advances in neural disease diagnosis and treatment.
How the human brain reasons, plans, and decides in complex tasks remains largely unknown. While brain responses to passive tasks start to be captured by 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.
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.
Rich, interactive stimuli spanning visual, language, and auditory modalities—capturing reasoning, planning, and decision-making in action.
Cognitive Science tasks probing perception, memory, attention, and executive function.
AI-benchmarkable tasks measuring planning, logic, and structured problem-solving.
Design cognitive and reasoning tasks that probe planning, decision-making, and complex behavior.
Record a few subjects over many sessions, building dense individual brain maps of intelligent behavior.
Contribute BIDS-formatted data to the central pool for cross-lab modeling and public release.
Rothschild Foundation Hospital
Université de Montréal
The full de-identified dataset will be released for open scientific research.
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.
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.
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.
We're thrilled to welcome the following teams as the inaugural cohort to the Digital Brain Project, contributing world-class expertise in neuroscience, brain imaging, and cognitive research.
