Forty years ago, American anthropologist Doctor Ralph Selecki explored the caves at Shanidar where he unearthed an image of ancient man that profoundly changed the way we saw our ancestors. The professor discovered a skull - a Neanderthal skull. Strangely, it was covered with microscopic pollen from the flowers of thistle, groundsel, spiraea and hollyhock, among others. The same pollen dust covered the rest of the weathered skeleton, suggesting that his family and friends had deliberately gathered the flowers and laid them in bunches on the dead body. These mourners left behind the earliest known signs of man's awareness of death. Based on Doctor Selecki's findings, Neanderthals seemed to possess what we have come to call a mind.

The human brain appeared on earth some five million years ago. It took just a few million more to fully mature, a mere blink on the geological time scale. Structurally, anatomically, the human brain has not changed much in about two hundred thousand years. It is the same brain used by the first Homo sapiens to walk the planet. But what has evolved is the mind. And it is this inner universe that has so mystified and beguiled us. The mind, together with the brain, forms the most complex system known to man. At the dawn of the 21st Century, we are slowly crossing the borders of this last frontier, so that we may understand better who we are why we create and invent, why our fears haunt us, our thoughts liberate us, where we prove our free will, our sense of self and express our inner voice. New mind-imaging techniques are giving researchers a tool for mapping the mind. Never before could we look this closely inside the living brain.