Everything we do to your brain,
explained.
The science, the privacy guarantees, what's free, what costs money, and where to get a scan if you don't have one. All in one page.
5 steps. ~5 minutes.
Enter your email. We send you a magic link. No passwords.
Prenuvo, Ezra, hospital MRI — anything DICOM zipped. Up to 5 GB.
Skull-strip → pial mesh → real cortical thickness → Mota K → score.
3-view render of your actual brain + a public share link.
The short version, for the curious.
Skull strip. ANTsPyNet U-Net (deep learning) trained on T1 brain MRIs. Reliable on whole-body scans where simpler heuristics fail at the foramen magnum.
Pial surface mesh. Marching-cubes on the skull-stripped volume. Typically 1–2 million vertices. Watertight, ready to print.
Cortical thickness. Pial → white-matter nearest-neighbor distance via KD-tree. Real adult range 2–3 mm. We use real measured thickness, not a V/A_t shell proxy.
Mota K. Cortical scaling parameter A_t · T^(1/2) / ICV^(5/6). From Mota & Herculano-Houzel 2015. Higher K = wrinklier brain for its size.
For the deep nerds: the full WRINKLY SCORE derivation is in research/wrinkly_score.md on our GitHub.
What this is (and isn't).
Is this, like, medical?
No. It is vibes and geometry. We do not diagnose anything. If something on your scan looks concerning, please talk to a doctor — a real one, not us.
What counts as "wrinkly"?
High cortical surface area + thick cortex relative to brain volume. More folds in less space = higher score. The exact formula is the sigmoid 1000 / (1 + e^(7.5 − 3K)) where K is Mota's cortical scaling parameter.
What MRI types work?
T1-weighted structural MRIs. Prenuvo whole-body, Ezra, and standard hospital MRIs all produce a usable T1 series. iPhone photos of your head, regrettably, do not.
What happens to your scan.
What happens to my scan after processing?
By default, the raw zip is deleted from our storage immediately after the pipeline finishes. Only the derived metrics + STL file persist (those are what your dashboard and share link use).
What's the "help us improve the algorithm" opt-in?
If you check that box at upload, instead of deleting your raw zip we move it to a private dev-corpus bucket only the founder can read. We use it as test data when iterating on the pipeline. We never share or sell it. You can change your mind later — email us.
Can I delete my scan later?
Yes. Email hello@officiallybigbrained.com with your scan ID. Manual for MVP; one-click delete is on the roadmap.
How the number happens.
How is the Wrinkly Score calculated?
It's a sigmoid mapping of Mota's K_ICV onto a 0–1000 scale. K_ICV is computed from your real cortical surface area, real cortical thickness, and total intracranial volume. The full math + 9 iterations of derivation is in research/wrinkly_score.md on GitHub.
Why am I scoring lower / higher than I expected?
Surface area and cortical thickness are the dominant inputs. A bigger brain doesn't necessarily score higher — Mota K normalizes for total intracranial volume. What matters is how much wrinkle you've packed into your skull.
Can I retake my score?
Not in MVP — strictly one scan per email. Multi-scan re-uploads (with a higher-res new scan, or against a future improved algorithm) is on the wishlist for after MVP. Contact us if you have a specific reason.
Who sees what.
Can I be on the leaderboard anonymously?
Yes. You pick your display name during sign-up. Use your real name (we recommend it — the joke lands harder), a nickname, or just "anonymous." Whatever you pick is what shows on the leaderboard and on your public proof page.
Can I hide my score?
Yes. We can flip your share link to private — it returns 404 to anyone who tries to open it, and you drop off the leaderboard. Email us for now; a UI toggle lands in the friction-reduction pass.
Free vs paid.
What's free?
The Wrinkly Score, all metrics, the public share link, and the 3-view render of your brain. Forever.
What's paid?
The print-ready STL file. We generated it; if you want to print or display it, you pay a one-time fee. Coming soon — Stripe integration is queued.
Refund policy?
TBD — wires up with Stripe. We'll publish a clean policy when the paywall goes live.
Don't have an MRI?
I don't have an MRI. Where do I get one?
Prenuvo does whole-body MRIs that include a beautiful T1 brain volume. Use our referral and tell them we sent you: prenuvo.com/ref/4SNQV7.
Does an iPhone scan work?
No. We need actual MRI volume data — millions of voxels representing tissue density. iPhones photograph surfaces.
Detailed walkthrough?
A step-by-step guide for downloading your scan from Prenuvo, Ezra, and hospital portals is on our roadmap. For now: most providers have a portal where you can download the DICOM as a .zip.