The study under discussion today is an investigation into the mapping of the three-dimensional structure of the brain's neural pathways. For the past hundred years or more, scientists have thought of these pathways as separate connections—a little bit like electric cables, or, even more chaotically, like a bowl of spaghetti ... basically, separate strands that have no bearing on each other. These primitive models were little more than guesses, however, as the brain's inaccessibility meant its structural organization was something of a 'black box'. All this has changed dramatically with the advent of magnetic-resonance imaging, however, as it offers researchers much better access to the living brain. Using MRI technology, scientists have been able to scan the brain three-dimensionally and observe its activity in real time. What the scans have shown, fairly conclusively, is that the earlier models were incorrect. Rather than being randomly arranged like independent circuits, all of the brain's pathways are connected together in an extremely simple structure—more or less like a cube. The pathways extend in three perpendicular directions, and the ones running in the same direction are arranged in orderly, parallel rows. So, instead of being made up of independent pathways of 'spaghetti', the brain exhibits a high degree of connectedness; functioning as a single, coherent structure.