Show me any article about brain research, and I will pretty much read it on the spot. But this hasn't always been so. For one thing, society's attitude toward our brains has been fuzzy.

For most of my life, the brain was considered a mysterious entity, one that elicited a murmured respect, but was little understood. Then, when the first technology to take snapshots of the brain came about, you would hear such drivel as "You only use 10% of your brain," because only part of it lit up. Obviously, this was the misguided interpretation of scientific results as derived by non-scientists, yet it was enthusiastically delivered as an "amazing new scientific fact." It might also be stretched to argue absolute scientific confirmation that we were just being lazy, or - the real puzzler for me - that most of our brains was just sitting there doing nothing.

Even as a teenager, with no life science grounding whatsoever, this was an obvious wrong conclusion: Just because science couldn't measure something, it didn't mean it wasn't there. It simply meant we couldn't measure it.

My interest in the brain grew as the technology for studying brains grew, and, truth be told, as I began to appreciate the intricacies of human nature. Actually, I've never met a human who wasn't interested in human nature, especially the older they get and the more of life they see. The only thing that appears to distinguish one human from another on this topic is their opinion, as there are a panoply of explanations for everything.

Some people take a very rational approach, assigning motivations to basic human needs such as food, shelter and protection. Others raise the bar only slightly to money, possessions and power, while still others look to the trauma of early childhood or the imprint of a hard life, and still others to the divine,

Frankly, I find all of these insights fascinating, as they reveal as much about the observer as the observed. The fact that each of us looks through our own lens is never more telling than when we look at each another.

So I wonder what will happen, now that neuroscience and genetics and everything in between have started racing at full gallop.

It's next to impossible these days to pick up a newspaper and not learn something dramatic. The usual includes such fare as they now think that some set of genes predisposes you to depression or addiction or emotional intelligence. Or that early childhood experiences predispose you to depression or addiction or emotional intelligence. Or that this tiny pharmaceutical or that flood of hormone changes everything in the brain, and contributes to the usual suspects, as well.

But what fascinates me is not the latest conclusions. It's how they use the latest technology. With functional MRI's, investigators can look at the brain-in-action. Furthermore, they can record a single human over time as well as compare a group of humans to each other. This is unprecedented.

We're actually getting videos of brains in love, brains after trauma, brains on drugs, brains in the grip of depression, and brains deeply committed to another person. And the scientists are just getting started.

What will happen from here is what always happens: The technology will get better and better, and the scientists will ask more and better questions. And humans will go on just as they have been, each of us a perpetual student of human nature. I just wonder how we individually - and as a society - will take it all in.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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