Tags: faq dataset sharing

Where can I find open access MEG/EEG data?

Feel free to hit the edit button at the bottom of this page to add links to other open access datasets.

The FieldTrip tutorials include a lot of smaller tutorial datasets that are available for download. These datasets are detailed in this frequently asked question. Other MEG/EEG data analysis toolboxes like SPM, MNE, EEGLAB and BrainStorm also share tutorial datasets.

On the Donders Repository, OpenNeuro, DataDryad and on Zenodo you can find many publicly accessible EEG, MEG and fMRI datasets.

On DataCite, Google Dataset Search, and Mendeley Dataset Search you can search for data hosted in publicly accessible repositories.

Other MEG datasets

The Human Connectome Project contains MEG data from close to 100 subjects, which were scanned on the 248-channel 4D/BTi MEG system at SLU, St Louis. The MEG data includes resting-state and three different experimental tasks, and anatomical, functional (1200 subjects, resting and task) and associated behavioral and demographic data is available. See also doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.056 and doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.04.046.

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience released raw data from the Cam-CAN cohort, including MEG, MRI and cognitive data from approximately 650 males and females uniformly distributed from 18 to 88 years of age. The MEG data (in FIF format) include 3 runs of 1) rest, 2) a sensorimotor task, and 3) a passive sensory task (with separate visual and auditory stimuli).

The Open MEG Archive (OMEGA) is a collaborative effort by the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre and the Université de Montréal. It consists of a open repository with MEG data. This continuously expanding repository also contains anatomical MRI volumes, demographic and questionnaire information, and eventually will feature other forms of electrophysiological data (e.g., EEG, field, and cell recordings). See also doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.04.028

The Kymata Atlas also shares datasets with electromagnetic measurements of the human cortex done at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of Cambridge University. The shared data comprises (averaged) EEG and MEG sensor data, and current density reconstructions. The participants are healthy human adults listening to the radio and/or watching films.

Wakeman and Henson have shared A multi-subject, multi-modal human neuroimaging dataset that includes raw MEG and EEG data from 16 subjects. This data also forms the basis for the SPM documentation.

The Mother Of Unification Studies (MOUS) dataset contains MEG and fMRI data acquired from 204 healthy human subjects during rest and while they performed a language task. During the language task they processed linguistic utterances that either consisted of normal or scrambled sentences. Half of the subjects were reading the stimuli, the other half listened to the stimuli. The resting state measurements consisted of 5 minutes eyes-open for the MEG and 7 minutes eyes-closed for fMRI. The neuroimaging data, as well as the information about the experimental events are shared according to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) format.

Other EEG datasets

The FieldTrip made easy paper includes high-density EEG data from 29 healthy human participants, recorded in an auditory steady state responses (ASSR) paradigm. The data collection contains not only all data, but also the analysis scripts to reproduce the results presented in the paper.

From the lab of Steve Luck and Emily Kappenman you can download the ERP CORE, a freely available online resource consisting of optimized paradigms, experiment control scripts, example data from 40 participants, data processing pipelines and analysis scripts, and a broad set of results for 7 different ERP components obtained from 6 different ERP paradigms: N170 (Face Perception Paradigm), MMN (Passive Auditory Oddball Paradigm), N2pc (Simple Visual Search Paradigm), N400 (Word Pair Judgement Paradigm), P3b (Active Visual Oddball Paradigm), LRP and ERN (Flankers Paradigm).

The BNCI Horizon 2020 consortium hosts a repository of datasets from brain-computer interface (BCI) and decoding experiments available for free download. The datasets include EEG, fNIRS, and ECoG data collected mainly by the consortium partners in several European countries.

The National Sleep Research Resource website links to a large collection of sleep EEG datasets.

The Child Mind Institute provides both raw and preprocessed EEG data in the Multimodal Resource for Studying Information Processing in the Developing Brain (MIPDB) dataset. This includes data from subject in different age ranges from 9 years up to 44 years. The Child Mind Institute also shares EEG data from more than 600 subjects in the Healthy Brain Network (HBN) databank.

The Max Planck Institut in Leipzig shares the LEMON Mind-Brain-Body Dataset which includes data from 228 healthy participants comprising a young (N=154, range 20–35 years) and an elderly group (N=74, range 59–77 years). During a two-day assessment, participants completed 3T MRI and a 62-channel EEG experiment at rest.

The Brainclinics Foundation TDBRAIN clinical lifespan database contains resting-state, raw EEG-data complemented with relevant clinical and demographic data of a heterogeneous collection of 1274 psychiatric patients (5–89 years) collected between 2001 to 2021. Clinical, demographic-, personality- and day of measurement data are also included in the database.

On Physionet you can find a list of clinical and cognitive EEG datasets, plus also various other ExG and physiological datasets. They are especially useful when developing and/or testing new data analysis methods.

On the BNCI Horizon 2020 project page you can find more than 25 well-documented datasets for BCI research.

The Nencki-Symfonia EEG/ERP dataset that is described in detail in this article consists of high-density EEG obtained at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology from a sample of 42 healthy young adults during three cognitive tasks: (1) an extended Multi-Source Interference Task with control, Simon, Flanker, and multi-source interference trials; (2) a oddball task with a frequent standard, rare target, and a rare distractor stimuli; (3) a control, simple reaction task; and additionally (4) a resting-state protocol.

The Brain Signals website has a list of references to shared EEG data sets.

Arno Delorme maintains a list of Open EEG datasets.

Brad Voytek maintains a list of Open Datasets in Human Electrophysiology.

NeuroTechX maintains a list of Open EEG datasets.

Other IEEG datasets

Kahana and Rizutto have released ECoG data from 251 subjects collected during Phase I and II of the Restoring Active Memory (RAM) project. The dataset includes information from 700 sessions, and for every patient, intracranial recording files from 100 to 200 electrode channels, neuro-anatomical information indicating the location of each electrode, precise records of patient behavior and the experimental design documents.

Other LFP and spike datasets

A collection of intracranial animal datasets is shared on the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience data sharing website.

The DANDI Archive of the BRAIN Initiative contains shared cellular neurophysiology data.