Neuroscience is the new black, when it comes to fashion in scientific research.

"The gene was the central issue in biology in 20th century," Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel, neuroscientist at Columbia University said in an interview in Toronto recently. "The mind is the essential issue for biology in the 21st century."

"And certainly if you think of public health consequences, the diseases, pain, schizophrenia, depression, manic depressive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, God knows what, so many miseries of humankind come from psychiatric and neurological disorders," Kandel added.

Back in the 1960's, when Kandel began his Nobel prize winning work searching for the biological source of memory, neuroscience was a lonely field. "It didn't interest many biologists. Anatomy was considered boring, and electrophysiology was too technically complicated for most scientists to pay attention to," he said.

Richard Beninger is a behavioural neuroscientist at Queen's University, who recalls that as a student he studied the brain as a collection of parts. "You could see white matter and dark matter and lots of fine detail, right down to the neuron level, but it was all morphology, structure," he said.

"But all of that changed, once scientists began to understand the chemical pathways in the brain. The morphology is still there, but now we know what the transmitter systems are. So we have a whole new brain only in the last 40 years to work with," Beninger said.

Today's technology allows scientists to put living, breathing humans into an magnetic resonance imaging machine, tell them to think about something, and watch as the biological traces of thought appear and disappear in colorful bursts, measured by changes in blood oxygen levels. It means scientists can now explore the neural landscape in real time, and chart the cognitive forces that have shaped our species from our earliest days.

As they investigate this neural wonderland, scientists are probing the very essence of what makes us human. It's as though they are lifting the hood of humanity, and tinkering with the wiring to find how what makes us do what we do. And they are discovering that the secret to everything we do, think, or feel, is in that wiring, a constantly changing network of neuronal connections sculpted by evolution and fired by electrical and chemical interactions.

Dr. Kandel calls it the most complex organizational structure in the universe. "So we're far from understanding it completely, very far, but the beginning has been quite dramatic," he says.

"It's certainly extraordinary, our entire experience of life, all of our mental experiences, if they all result from the activity of chemistry in our brain, the activity of neurotransmitters and neurocircuits, it's amazing," Beninger said.

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