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Brodmann map both faces of the hemisphere · click an area to highlight it
The two faces are a line map of the classic Brodmann scheme, descending from Brodmann’s own 1909 figures: every area outlined and numbered, nothing drawn beneath. Pick an area, here or in the list, and it fills in its colour on the face that shows it. Anterior is on the left in the external view and, as the scheme is conventionally drawn, on the right in the internal one. The drawing is a schematic — where each area actually sits in a real head, with the atlas’s own boundaries, is what the scan above shows. Brodmann Areas diagram adapted with permission from IFEN – Institute for EEG-Neurofeedback / Neurofeedback Academy.
Brodmann numbered the cortex in 1909 by how its cells are layered, not by what it does — which is why the numbers wander about the brain and why several of his 52 have no agreed human counterpart. The 41 drawn here are those the shipped atlas labels; 12–16, 31, 33 and 49–52 are absent. Each area is bilateral: Brodmann described cortical types, not hemispheres, so where a function is strongly one-sided the note says so rather than the atlas splitting the area. The boundaries are an approximation to begin with — they were drawn from a handful of post-mortem brains, and no two people's cortex is folded the same way. This particular volume descends from the Talairach Daemon, whose labels were grown outwards to fill the brain: 14% of what it marks lies in white matter that the AAL atlas does not count as cortex at all, and label 48 has become a catch-all for the peri-Sylvian region rather than the small area Brodmann gave that number to. Read a boundary as a neighbourhood, not a border. Educational, not diagnostic.
Highlighted regions
Add a region or a Brodmann area above and what it does appears here, stacked by layer: cerebrum at the top, the limbic midbrain beneath it, the reptilian core at the bottom, and the Brodmann areas in a block of their own.
The three layers are MacLean's triune scheme. It stacks a brain map tidily and it is poor evolutionary history — the “reptilian” structures are not reptilian, and every layer here is present in every vertebrate with a brain. The grouping is a way of reading the map, not a claim about how it was built.
Receptor density
How thickly each receptor sits in each region, from two open sources: in vivo PET, one group-average tracer map per receptor or transporter, averaged over each AAL region; and ex vivo autoradiography, absolute densities in fmol/mg protein from post-mortem cortex, mapped onto the regions area by area. The two measure different things and are never put on one axis. Click a region’s name and it lights up in the viewports above as a highlighted region like any other; whatever is highlighted above lights its bar here in the same colour, and a Brodmann area lights the regions most of it lies in. Pick a receptor and what binds it and what it sits in are drawn beneath the chart, with its source, tracer, sample and caveat under those.
Receptor types a reference of sub-types, families and mechanisms
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