The tangled circuitry you see here represents a few of the billions of nerve cells that are firing away at any given moment inside your noggin.
The “sparks” of light show the spikes of electrical activity that travel nerve cells, hauling bits of information between different parts of the brain.
Believe it or not, what you see here is a mere fraction of the total number of cells found in the brain. The empty spaces between neurons are but a mirage -- in reality, they are packed with other cells.
We grabbed this image from an animation developed by researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The work contributed to the planetarium show "Gray Matters: The Brain Movie," which debuted in 1999.
Image courtesy Greg Hood, John Burkardt, Greg Foss, of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
