The scientists sat huddled around what appeared to be a two-gallon carton of frozen yogurt. As the square container, fixed to a moving platform, inched toward a steel blade mounted level with its surface, the group held its collective breath. The blade peeled off the top layer, rolling it up in slow motion like a slice of pale prosciutto. 

Off came another layer, another, and another. And then there it was: a pink spot at first, now a smudge, now growing with every slice like spilled rosé on a cream carpet—a human brain. Not just any brain, either, but the one that had belonged to Henry Molaison, worldwide known as H.M., an amnesiac who collaborated on hundreds of studies of memory and died last year at 82….

…But Annese has something Yakovlev did not: advanced computer technology that tracks and digitally reproduces each slice. An entire brain produces some 2,500 slices, and the amount of information in each one, once microscopic detail is added, will fill about a terabyte of computer storage. Computers at University of California are now fitting all those pieces together for Molaison’s brain, to create what Annese calls a “Google Earthlike search engine,” the first entirely reconstructed, whole-brain atlas available to anyone who wants to log on.

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