3D printing your brain doesn’t make you smarter, but it’s cool!

Posted By Arthur Cassaignau on Jul 1, 2013 | 1 comment

Since last week, a strange post has been seen on the image sharing platform imgur. Its user Intirb has posted a complete tutorial to 3D print your brain using a MRI scan of yours.

First things first, if you don’t have a MRI scan of your brain, Intirb recommends that you get in touch with the neuroscience department of your local university to know if they are looking for any volunteer in a research study. The help of Intirb comes once you have your MRI scan.

Intirb suggests to use a software called FreeSurfer to transform the brain scans into the grey matter surface of the brain within an STL file. He also warns us that the rendering of this process takes quite a long time (up to two days) and therefore suggest to use MeshLab to simplify your .STL file. 

He adds a few steps to give contrast to the file, but you can probably skip those steps and directly go on with 3D printing. He then 3D printed his own file on a Makerbot.

However, it remains unclear, if having your brain 3D printed makes you smarter. Let us know if you ever try it.