The RNA-seq data from these two human brains is described in this publication. In this paper, we performed a calibration experiment where we ran RNA-seq (~250 samples) and microarray data on the same samples and assigned quality scores for microarray probes based on their correlation with RNA-seq gene expression. This also allowed us to define more accurate measures of absolute expression levels for microarray probes. We performed a similar calibration using ~40 RNA-seq samples for our NIH Blueprint NHP Atlas in this publication.