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From Michigan State University’s Brian Biodiversity Bank, The Human Brain Atlas looks like just the cool sort of thing that anyone with an interest in neuroanatomy would like to play with.

In this atlas you can view MRI sections through a living human brain as well as corresponding sections stained for cell bodies or for nerve fibers. The stained sections are from a different brain than the one which was scanned for the MRI images. Furthermore, for the stained sections, the brain was removed from the skull, dehydrated, embedded in celloidin, cut with a sliding microtome, passed through several staining and differentiating solutions, and mounted on glass slides. Each step of these procedures changed the shaped of the brain and of the sections. Therefore the stained sections will be quite a different size and shape than those of the MRI sections. Nevertheless, comparing MRI images with stained sections from approximately the same level can greatly increase understanding of the internal architecture of these brains.

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