I had a role in making it possible to visualize the working of the human brain while it is engaged in thought. The development of neuroimaging has made it possible to connect the abstract mental operations or computations studied by cognitive psychology with the brain areas studied by neuroscience and helped to establish cognitive neuroscience as a field within psychology. Here, I tell the history of how my role in visualizing the human brain came about.

Vernon Mountcastle was one of the pioneers of modern brain research. His work with animals showed that the basic functional unit of the brain was the cortical column. In 1978, I read a paper of his describing attention cells in the posterior part of the parietal cortex of alert monkeys. He suggested that these attention cells might be critically involved in orienting attention toward visual events. A Tuesday night meeting of our research group was assigned to read these papers. Our group had shown that reaction time to respond to a target was enhanced when a cue directed attention to the target location. We interpreted this to mean that attention had been oriented covertly to the location of the target, without any overt change in eye position or behavior. I asked the students whether the reaction time improvements were the results of the attention cells observed by Mountcastle. I thought that if the covert shifts of attention in humans could be connected with the monkey work, it might contribute to linking cognitive psychology to brain mechanisms. I don't think there was much enthusiasm for this idea at the time. After all, the slogan in cognitive psychology was that it was about software, and what did that have to do with the parts of the brain in which cells were found in the monkey?

In 1979, I met Oscar Marin, an outstanding behavioral neurologist, at a meeting in New York City. He was about to move to Portland, Oregon, to set up a clinical and research effort at Good Samaritan Hospital, and he invited me to set up a neuropsychology laboratory in conjunction with the hospital.