About 100 years ago, Albert Einstein proposed theories of relativity that transformed physics. About 50 years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) properties that transformed genetics. Neuroscientists are now searching for a universal theory of brain systems and processes that could perhaps be represented by an equation, such as Einstein's e=mc2, or a simple model like DNA's double helix.

The problem is that our brain is a complex time space movement system that carries out many different functions as it remembers the past, responds to the present, and predicts the future-and not only about things and events that are here, but also over there. And for good measure, it can also imagine the currently unimaginable-and simultaneously regulate such survival functions as respiration and circulation. Busy, busy, busy.

Although each human brain is unique, all have common characteristics. We've carefully observed each other for many millennia, and so can often predict the behavior that results from another person's decisions. Further, dramatic advances in neuroimaging technology can now provide increased credible information on the underlying neurobiology of such decisions. So perhaps it's not out of the range of possibility that someone could eventually represent our awesomely complex brain with an eloquently simple equation or model.