Almost 30 years ago, the celebrated British magazine Encounter published a cover story by Gordon Rattray Taylor entitled, "A New View of the Brain." Taylor's topic, the future of neuroscience, strayed a bit from the magazine's standard literary and political fare (the same issue ran articles by Friedrich Hayek, Paul Theroux, George Kennan, and an assessment of Claude Lévi-Strauss), but Taylor assured his readers that what he had to say was of real interest to anyone concerned with culture and the human condition. "It looks as if research on the brain may be the most dynamic area in biology during the next 30 years, just as molecular biology has been during the last 30... [C]ertainly great advances are imminent, and the social and ethical consequences will be dramatic." Taylor went on to speculate on "what would follow if we could raise intelligence or improve memory at will," and he addressed the growing philosophical concern that neuroscience implies that "man is simply an elaborate machine."

Maintaining a skepticism that would have served him well among today's digital evangelists, Taylor refrained from rash predictions about human engineering, artificial intelligence, or the dissolution of the self. Nonetheless, Taylor insisted on the connection between scientific insights and traditional humanistic concerns. In time, he wagered, knowledge of how our brains work could offer insight into why we do things the way we do, both as individuals and as a society, even if such inquiries had resulted in dramatic, even pernicious, failures in the past.

Nearly 30 years later, "A New View of the Brain" reads like a sober prophesy. At the end of our century, the science of the brain has opened up a new frontier of understanding about how our minds shape the self and the cultures we've built to house it. Neuroscience research into human behavior and experience is diverse and prone to unproven speculation, but even at this early stage, a handful of broad conclusions seem unavoidable. The first is the "swiss-army-knife" theory of the mind: that is, our growing knowledge of specialized functions in various regions of the brain, the component parts that make up our conscious -- and unconscious -- apprehension of the world. Though the bizarre disorders of aphasiacs have long hinted at the brain's modular wiring, modern computer imaging technology has exploded the old cliché about left- and right-brained people into an extraordinarily precise map of cognitive skills: loud and soft sounds are processed in different areas, while the simple activity of touching your thumb and forefinger activates several areas of the brain at once, scattered widely across both lobes. The meaning of spoken language is stitched together out of the two familiar lobes -- the left side parsing the grammar, and the right side measuring the emotional content of the speaker's intonation -- but simply thinking of a word lights up regions of the visual cortex, while suppressing neuronal charges in the speech regions. While general intelligence remains an essential, defining quality of the human mind, it is clear now that we come into the world with countless other cognitive tools, engineered by natural selection for more specific tasks.

A second headline might well read "WE'RE ALL GENIUSES!" If there is a unifying message behind the last decade of neuroscience and AI, it is that many of the tasks which appear to come so naturally to us -- observing motion, parsing speech, eavesdropping in a crowded room -- present some of the most computationally intensive tasks our brains perform. A three-year-old parsing the syntax of her mother's tongue or walking through a nursery solves more complicated problems in a minute than your average theoretical physicist solves in a year. (The difference, of course, is that we arrive in the world hard-wired to solve these problems, while the string theorists have to suffer through grad school.) Reconciling ourselves to this new understanding may mean altering our sense of what intelligence is in the first place: our conventional genuises are simply people who possess a better-than-average ability to do something that the brain is naturally very clumsy at, while every normal human on the planet performs astonishingly complex feats every waking second. Deep Blue may never lose another chess match to those pitiful Homo sapiens, but when it comes to, say, recognizing three-dimensional objects moving through space, we're all Kasparovs, and the computers haven't even learned checkers yet.

Explaining the mental gymnastics behind such menial tasks may not appear to offer any direct benefits -- you won't catch a baseball any better knowing how much processing power goes into analyzing trajectories and co-ordinating muscle movements -- but our new understanding of the mind's cognitive resources does open out onto a wider vista, because many of these same tasks seem closely related to the sorts of abilities which distinguish us from other animals -- language, social intelligence, self-awareness. Historically, many of the efforts to draw cultural or social conclusions from biology have been premature, or just plainly wrong-minded, but as science presses forward the collision between the two spheres seems increasingly unavoidable. From the neurological underpinnings of the fear of snakes, to how we perceive three dimensions, to how we imagine what others are thinking, our phenomenological world -- the world as we experience it -- is determined at some level by the "wiring" in our brains. Thus, as we learn more about that wiring, the important job will not be to figure out how to avoid the collision of humanism and science, but to figure out how the two might better collaborate. Or, at the very least, to encourage humanists to familiarize themselves with scientific developments, and vice versa for scientists.

In large part, this interdisciplinary ideal explains why you're reading this issue in a magazine like FEED. To avoid the collision between science and culture simply because the encounters of the past have been travesties would be cowardly. Our understanding of the human mind has already been transformed dramatically by the last 30 years of science, which means that any zone of cultural inquiry that grapples with the human condition must, at the very least, take stock of what the brain researchers are telling us. Debunking the sciences remains a fashionable sport for cultural critics, but three decades from now, we wager, those who resisted the lessons of the new brain will look like latter-day flat-earthers, thinkers who narrowed their field of vision at a moment when wondrous expansion was in the offing.

As its centerpiece, our special issue offers "My Favorite Lobe," which long-time FEED readers will recognize as a more graphical rendition of our venerable Document feature. We've asked eight of the world's experts in brain function to contribute a short essay on the region of the brain that most fascinates them, linking each piece to a visual overview of the mind's topography. Two other pieces specifically address the future of drugs and the mind: an interview with Listening To Prozac author Peter Kramer, and an essay by Data Smog author David Shenk, entitled "One Pill Makes You Smarter," about the promise and limitations of memory drugs. As part of our collaboration with Edge.org, we're excerpting John Brockman's interview with Steven Rose. And finally, Techgnosis author Erik Davis makes a case for the striking correlation between Zen Buddhism and the latest in brain science. We've also included a list of related reading on the web, including links to some of the most exciting and informative brain-related journalism and academic work online.

Steven Johnson is editor-in-chief of FEED and author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We Create And Communicate.

James Ryerson is associate editor of FEED and author of a recent academic monograph, Whetting the Edge: The Educational Jurisprudence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.