The most highly connected node, which Sporns dubbed the core, is located at the back of the head, in parts of the brain known as the posterior medial and parietal cerebral cortex. The node lies on the shortest path between many different parts of the neural network. "It's highly connected amongst itself, but also highly central with respect to the rest of the brain," says Sporns. "Network studies in other fields, from the Internet to protein interaction networks, suggest that these kinds of highly connected nodes tend to be very important for determining what the network does as a whole."

Previous functional brain-imaging studies have also highlighted this region: it's one of the most metabolically active parts of the brain, particularly when people are cognitively at rest, meaning that they are awake and alert but not engaging in any particular task. "People refer to this as the resting state, daydreaming, or self-referential processing," says Sporns. As part of the new study, Sporns and his colleagues also used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain. They found that it correlated with the level of white-matter connectivity in the individual subjects.

The researchers want to use the imaging technique to look at clinical conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer's disease, all of which have been linked to disturbances in brain architecture. "We would like to know where the disturbances are and whether we can understand something about the clinical condition based on the connectivity," says Sporns.

However, scientists will likely need to improve the technique before they can use it to study patients. Getting enough detail to make the maps requires longer scanning times than are typical in clinical settings. "Right now, this probably isn't practical to look at large populations of patients," says Marco Catani, a clinical neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers are already trying to refine their approach, generating new methods to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data they collect. They consider their new map just the first of many drafts. "We're not yet at the level where we can sequence the brain with the same kind of precision with which we could sequence the genome," says Wedeen. "Only when we see the organs of the brain--a few hundred areas of gray matter with distinct functions, and the connections between them--will we have an image of the brain that is comparable to what we expect the structure to be."