The intricacies and mysteries of the human brain have become a little more accessible, thanks to a group of neuroscientists.

According to the New York Times, researchers from Germany and Canada have created the most detailed map of the human brain known to exist to date. The model is a 3-D reconstruction and is 50 times more detailed than previous efforts.

BigBrain, as the model is being called, will soon be available to researchers and scientists everywhere, said lead author Kartin Amuntos of the Institute of Neuroscience in Jülich, Germany. The report on the project is available in the current issue of Science.

The project is specific to the human brain and was based on that of a 65-year-old woman. The woman's brain was preserved in paraffin after she died and then was sliced into 7,400 sections before being photographed at a microscopic level just larger than viewing the brain's individual cells.

The model will allow the organization of neurons - with never-before-seen precision - to be studied.

"The quality of those maps is analogous to what cartographers of the Earth offered as their best versions back in the seventeenth century," David Van Essen, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who was not involved in the study, told the journal Nature.

As well as the full report being available in the journal Science, the data will be entirely available online. At a resolution of 20 micrometers, the model is 50 times clearer than the usual one-millimeter resolution of brain scans.

"This completely changes the game in terms of our ability to discriminate very fine structural and physiological properties of the human brain," said study co-author Alan Evans, a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Canada, at a press conference on June 19.

Sean Hill, executive director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility in Stockholm, told Nature this kind of data will require more and more resources and attention, but should "increase in frequency."

According to Amunts, the team is already mapping "brain number two."