Social scientists and colleagues in the sciences and engineering at the University of California, Davis, are creating the Center for Mind and Brain, a new research effort on forefront of cognitive inquiry.

Their task is to answer those questions that have been posed about the mind since Plato first asked more than 2,000 years ago, "How is it that one can learn so much with so little experience?"

Potential uses for such research range from helping neurosurgeons spare language centers when operating on brains, assisting people to better cope with language impairments like dyslexia and aphasia, helping engineers design better computers, and allowing educators to develop better techniques for teaching children to acquire language or to compensate for various learning issues.

"Human cognition is tremendously complex but poorly understood," said center director George "Ron" Mangun, a professor of psychology. "It all arises from the human brain, which, despite impressive advances in the neurosciences, remains largely uncharted territory. Unraveling the nature of the human mind is truly our greatest challenge."

UC Davis has a head start in building this center, one of the campus's interdisciplinary priorities, thanks to existing faculty with its tradition of excellence and collaboration, Mangun said.

He pointed to the Center for Neuroscience that will be working closely with the Center for Mind and Brain. "We ask many complementary questions: We'll just be getting at answers from different directions and cooperating on the task," he said.

In addition, the center faculty will collaborate with researchers from the primate center and medical school, including the Institute for Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, which studies disorders such as autism.

The faculty members will also work closely with the new Research Imaging Center at UC Davis Medical Center. The center has one magnetic resonance imaging machine that can be used for scanning brains, and a second is being purchased.

Edward Jones, director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, said the exponential growth in neurosciences on campus creates a framework that can support key initiatives such as the Center for Mind and Brain.

The new center will draw its faculty positions from the social and biological sciences, agricultural and environmental sciences, and engineering.

Among Mangun's supporters is Leo Chalupa, chair of neurobiology, physiology and behavior in the UC Davis Division of Biological Sciences. Chalupa, in fact, recruited Mangun and his wife, psycholinguist Tamara Swaab, back to the West Coast this fall.

"With the Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis will be ahead of the curve," Chalupa said. "We have the chance to be pathfinders in what is going to be a new intellectual discipline that combines the cognitive sciences with philosophy, linguistics, psychology and more."

This is a particularly auspicious time for an interdisciplinary group of researchers that include social scientists to be delving deeper into mind/body questions, Chalupa pointed out. With the arsenal of tools developed in neuroscience research -- computational methods and human brain scans, for instance -- the new center will be able to foster research that asks the big questions about the mind.

In 1992, Mangun, a cognitive neuroscientist, was one of the founding faculty members of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience under the leadership of its first director, Michael Gazzaniga. Swaab joined the UC Davis psychology faculty in 1998 from the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

In 1998 Mangun and Swaab left for Duke University where they were asked to found the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. There Swaab continued her studies of the cognitive and neural architectures of normal language comprehension, and Mangun built on his research program in attention and awareness.

As director of the Duke center, Mangun was given six other faculty positions and within four years grew the center to 85 people, including research assistants, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students in addition to first-rate ladder-rank scientists. He said it is one of Duke's premier programs and one of the highest-profile cognitive neuroscience faculty groups in the world.

Now, Mangun and Swaab are back in Davis, ready to create an original center that doesn't have a well-traveled map. The mandate is to hire another eight-10 faculty members and build a program of world renown. The mission includes the development of research and training programs, seminar series, courses, and funding from private and public sources.

Already workers are building 10 labs and other office space in 16,000 square feet off-campus on Second Street in the Mace Ranch Corp. facility in Davis.

For Mangun, the first real challenge will be to coordinate among the various colleges and divisions a multiyear recruitment of faculty members with world-class potential. The campus will be looking for scholars who are both intrigued with and trained for a cross-disciplinary approach to tackling the hardest unsolved problems of the human mind.

"Recruitment is actually fun," Mangun said. "The hard part will be to rise to the challenge to discover the secrets of the mind."