Apr 02, 2014 02:27 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

In a new study, scientists say they have developed the most detailed diagram of a mammalian brain to date.

According to Reuters, the researchers revealed the "connctome" diagram in a study published in the journal Nature. The brain map intricately details the serpentine neuron connections formed by circuits.

"Understanding how the brain is wired is among the most crucial steps to understanding how the brain encodes information," lead researcher Hongkui Zeng, Senior Director of Research Science at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a press release. "The Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas is a standardized, quantitative, and comprehensive resource that will stimulate exciting investigations around the entire neuroscience community, and from which we have already gleaned unprecedented details into how structures are connected inside the brain."

Washington University neuroscientist David Van Essen told NBC News the work "is truly a landmark study."

"Connectome" is simply another word for a wiring diagram that shows how all the brain's gray matter, or neurons, connect to one another through axons, or white matter. These connections create personality traits, intelligence, reactions, behavior and so much more.

Such a diagram could display how someone processes the feel of silk all the way to exploring how certain circuits fail and cause conditions like Alzheimer's.

"The data for the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas was collected in a way that's never been done before," Zeng said in the release. "Standardizing the data generation process allowed us to create a 3D common reference space, meaning we could put the data from all of our thousands of experiments next to each other and compare them all in a highly quantitative way at the same time."

The ultimate goal for Zeng's team is to develop a "microscale" connectome that can show each and every neuron synapse connection as the one released Wednesday only shows long range and local connections.

"Who you are-all your thoughts and actions your entire life-is based on connections between neurons," Salk Institute neurobiology professor Ed Callaway said in the release. "So if we want to understand any of these processes or how they go wrong in disease, we have to understand how those circuits function. Without an atlas, we couldn't hope to gain that understanding."

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