Despite the advances of modern medicine, the wrinkled, twisted expanse of the human noodle has been mostly an uncharted frontier, with sparse territories and regions staked off so far. In the past, scientists have merely cordoned off sections based on a single type of brain feature, such as cell structures, brain topography, or identified functions. But now, in a comprehensive analysis of 210 healthy brains published Wednesday in Nature, researchers have merged such data sets and drawn an inclusive map of the mind's provinces.

The newly inked atlas, hatched from the National Institutes of Health’s Human Connectome Project, more than doubles the identified realms of the human brain’s outer shell, the cerebral cortex. This is the dominant part of the human brain, responsible for our minds’ higher functions, such as language, consciousness, information processing, and problem solving. The map depicts 360 cortex areas or 180 symmetrical, paired regions in each hemisphere, of which 83 were known and 97 are new.

While the new map is still a first draft, to be adjusted and honed with more research, the study's authors are hopeful that the cerebral sketch may quicken the pace toward understanding how the mind’s hardware works. Plus, it may provide a guide for neurosurgeons’ scalpels and more detail for researchers examining how the primate brain has evolved.

Led by neuroscientists David Van Essen and Matthew Glasser of Washington University in St. Louis, the study required high-resolution images of healthy adult participants’ brains. The researchers collected snapshots of brain cell organization and connections, activity during various mental activities, and levels of neuron insulator, the fatty sheaths of myelin that improve signaling. The researchers then trained a machine-learning algorithm to trace the borders of brain regions.

Once done, the program could quickly detect 96.6 percent of the regions in new brains. However, the regions’ areas varied from person to person, which could be fodder for studying the underpinnings of differences between mental abilities and disease risks.

Nature, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/nature18933 (About DOIs).