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Hello, in the mid 19th century a doctor had a patient who had suffered a stroke.

The patient was unable to speak, say for one word, the word was tan, which became his name.

When tan died, the doctor discovered damage to the left side of his

brain and concluded that the ability to speak was housed there. That's how neuroscience used

to work by examining the dead or investigating any of the damaged, but now things have changed.

Imaging machines and other technologies enable us to see the active brain in everyday life

to observe the activation of its cells and the mass firing of its neuron batteries.

But what picture of the brain has emerged?

How has our understanding of it changed?

And what are the implications for understanding that most mysterious and significant of all phenomena the human mind.

With me to discuss neuroscience at David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London,

Jem Calvin, Professor of Applied Neuroimaging at Warwick Manufacturing Group University of Warwick,

and Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at the University of Leeds.

Martin Conway, can you just say what is neuroscience and what its principal aim is?

That's a bit of a big question, but neuroscience really is a kind of confederation of different disciplines centered around an ambition to create

theories which extend from the neuronal and neurobiological level right up to the cognitive and

cultural levels in understanding the human mind.

And I think it's really been stimulated massively by innovations in imaging,

neuroimaging, as it's called.

And as you mentioned, our ability to put people in scanners,

...