Who has seen the mind? Neither you nor I - nor any of the legions of neuroscientists bent on opening the secrets of that invisible force, as powerful and erratic as the wind.

The experts are definitely getting closer: the last few decades have produced an explosion of new techniques for probing the blobby, unprepossessing brain in search of the thinking, feeling, suffering, scheming mind.

But the field remains technologically complicated, out of reach for the average nonscientist, and still defined by research so basic that the human connection, the usual "hook" by which abstruse science captures general interest, is often missing.