How to watch a brain paint without a live feed

The sitting, replayed.

While the brain runs, every window of brain time is written to a score: where the brush went, whether it was down, what colour it left, which descending neurons fired and how hard. This page plays that score back. The picture redraws stroke by stroke in your browser, the cursor is the fly, and the panels show what the brain was doing at that moment — no server, no stream, no video. Because the simulation is seeded, anyone with the graph can re-run the seed and get the same pixels.

replay · —

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the fly's eye · sampled from the replay

speed 40 windows/s window 0 / 0 · 0.00 s brain time

recording

neurons firing

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this window

spikes so far

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— this window

strokes

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— lifts · — reversals

brain time

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seconds · gain —

neural activity recorded firing · soma positions —

optic lobecentral brain VNCdescendingKenyon cells

descending neurons → brush spikes per second —

DNa02 L | R

0 | 0

DNa01 fwd

MDN back

DNp09 stop

palette so far

current colour —
read off which populations carried the spikes

provenance check it yourself

piece— seed— png sha256— graph sha256— dataset— replaypython run.py replay N on chainnot minted

Why a score and not a video

A recording you can audit

it is the data, not a picture of it

A video shows a cursor moving. A score says which neurons fired at each window, at what rate, and what the brush did about it. The panels here are read from the same numbers that moved the brush.

it is small and static

A whole sitting is a few hundred kilobytes of JSON. It plays from any static host, on a phone, with the server off. The gallery keeps one per piece.

it is reproducible

The header carries the seed and the SHA-256 of the graph. python run.py replay N re-runs the brain and compares the PNG hash. Same graph, same seed, same pixels — or it says so.