reticular theory

In the late 1860s, scientists believed they were on the verge of uncovering the brain’s biggest secret.They already knew the brain controlled the body through electrical impulses.The question was, how did these signals travel through the body without changing or degrading?It seemed that perfectly transmitting these impulses would require them to travel uninterrupted along some kind of tissue.This idea, called reticular theory,imagined the nervous system as a massive web of tissue that physically connected every nerve cell in the body.