These images look like the world’s messiest painter’s palettes, but they’re actually maps of brains. The weird shape results from flattening the convoluted surface of the brain onto two dimensions, just as we distort our globe to fit on a flat map. And the colours? The colours show how different categories—whether people, or animals, or moving objects—are represented across different parts of the brain.

As a very rough guide, green tends to correspond to humans, yellow to other animals, turquoises to communication, dark blue to buildings, pink and purple to vehicles and landscapes, red to movement, and so on. These are maps of information, more detailed and comprehensive than anything that has come before. They show the where of what.

For decades,