A group of Japanese neuroscientists is trying to peer into the mind — literally. They have devised a way to turn the brain’s opaque gray matter into a glassy, see-through substance that could help neuroscientists map the brain’s underlying architecture, the “connectome.”

The chemical solution — patented under the name Scale — could help neuroscientists map the brain’s underlying architecture, though that goal is still a distant one.

Currently, to see brain tissue under a microscope, neuroscientists have to slice it into slivers about the thickness of a human hair, so that light can pass through. To analyze an entire mouse brain this way,  the organ needs to be divided into roughly a hundred slices, each of which must be passed under a microscope for a snapshot of its cells.