As I write, a century has just turned and with it the “Decade of the Brain” has come to a close. Baptized by Congressional fiat and endorsed by Presidential Proclamation in 1990, the brain's decade has more than lived up to its advance billing. Neuroscientific research, propelled by a host of new developments in neuroimaging, molecular biology, genetics, psychopharmacology, and cognitive science has transformed not only neurology but psychology and psychiatry as well. Hybrid disciplines like cognitive neuroscience, psychobiology, behavioral neurology, and neuropsychology have emerged or become newly prominent as the study of the mind has steadily converged with the study of the brain. Brain science has been “fundamentally changed” and, with it, the science of the mind has entered a “new era.”

I am quoting from an ambitious essay, “Neurology and Psychiatry: Closing the Great Divide,” published as the lead-off piece in the first issue of Neurology for the year 2000. Though forward-looking – one might even say millennial – in character, the essay begins with a backward glance to none other than Gall, said to have begun the “scientific study of the brain and its relationship to complex behaviors” in the early nineteenth century. For the authors, two neurologists and a psychiatrist based at the Harvard Medical School, Gall's fundamental intuition that “all mental processes are ultimately biological” has been borne out, and the “historic debates about mind versus brain, nurture versus nature, and functional versus organic” have now run their course.