The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT was created at the start of this new century, with a mandate to use neuroscience to help people with brain disorders, and to ultimately benefit all of mankind by improving human communication and understanding.

This mandate is enormously important. Millions of people suffer from mental illnesses or neurodegenerative diseases that disrupt careers, ruin relationships, and destroy independence. One fourth of all hospital beds in the U.S. are occupied by people with mental illness, more than those with cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases. Millions suffer from Alzheimer's Disease, blindness, Parkinson's Disease, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, depression, addiction, learning disabilities, and many other diseases and disorders that all cry out for better treatments.

Unfortunately, our current understanding of these disorders is lacking, and the existing treatments and those in the pipeline for many disorders are woefully inadequate. We desperately need new ideas, new approaches, and new technologies.

How do we make that happen? We must pursue basic research in neuroscience that can be translated into potential therapies. But these problems are much larger than the scope of any individual researcher. We need the kind of collaboration among researchers working from different disciplines toward common goals that the McGovern Institute explicitly fosters.

We also need the powerful tools now available from genetics and molecular biology. However, no molecular approach by itself will give us an adequate account of the brain or mind. It's an enormous leap from genes and molecules to a person who has a distorted perception of reality, unrelenting bizarre thoughts, or a disintegrating memory.

To bridge that gap, we need to take a systems neuroscience approach. Systems neuroscience shows not just how individual neurons work, but how they work together with their neighbors to impact the brain functions involved in diseases and disorders, and in learning and cognition.

At the McGovern Institute, the brain functions we study fall within three broad themes: perception, cognition, and action. These functions form a sequence from when we first perceive a sensory input, recognize it, evaluate it emotionally, make a decision about it, and finally have a behavioral reaction to it, which might be movement or speech. We seek to understand how these basic functions underlie all normal brain activity and how they go awry in mental disorders, brain diseases, and disabilities.