Cephalonauts One: A deep fMRI dataset for decoding naturalistic speech in the human brain

Finally, a scaling analysis shows that decoding performance improves continuously with the amount of training data per subject. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 5 October 2026. Cephalonauts One is a whole-brain 3 Tesla (3T) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset recorded while subjects listened to audio podcasts. Three healthy subjects underwent multiple scanning sessions, each consisting of five 15-minute runs, while listening to podcasts in their native language. With 30 hours of fMRI data per subject, the current release is the deepest available fMRI dataset using naturalistic speech stimuli. The dataset pairs brain activity with the corresponding podcast audio, transcript annotations, and derived stimulus embeddings. Furthermore, we introduce a brain decoding benchmark formulated as audio segment retrieval: given fMRI activity from a held-out session, the decoder must identify the corresponding time-aligned podcast audio segment among candidate segments. We provide standardized splits, evaluation metrics, and baseline decoders for this task.

Why it counts

Finally, a scaling analysis shows that decoding performance improves continuously with the amount of training data per subject.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

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