Understanding the brain – its structure, connections, functions and the genetic bases of these properties – remains the central riddle in biology if not science. A number of different strategies to attack this issue have focused on many aspects of the nervous system and have, at an ever-increasing pace, begun to home in on the core questions. In neuroscience, the details of the underlying mechanisms have become tractable in the past decade and a half. But, similar to understanding the relationship of atomic interactions to the weather that they must cause, taking detailed neural mechanisms back to the level of the functioning nervous system has been arduous. Nevertheless, there is great promise that in the not too distant future the problem will be solved. Seemingly complicated behaviors and strategies could be explained entirely from understanding the components, their connectivity, their functions and their cohorts.

This quest could be made easier by focus on a part of the brain that is both easily accessible and straightforward to study and that provides a “standard” context to position data of different sorts from different studies by different laboratories. Further, it would offer greater promise if it could be manipulated genetically, developmentally and behaviorally and was reasonably similar to many other brain regions so as to permit ready translation to them. In this volume, Kevin Fox (whom I have had the good fortune to know since he worked in St. Louis in the late 1980s and early 1990s) has elegantly and concisely summarized the major findings on a region of cortex that we have both studied.