Ron Mangun is back from Duke University to work at UC Davis on the last frontier: the human mind.

Mangun is creating the Center for Mind and Brain, an ambitious plan to put UC Davis social scientists and their colleagues in the sciences and engineering at the 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?"

"Human cognition is tremendously complex but poorly understood," Mangun says. "It all arises from the human brain, which, despite impressive advances in the neurosciences, remains largely uncharted territory. Unravelling the nature of the human mind is truly our greatest challenge."

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

He points 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," Mangun says.

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 campuswide 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, says the exponential growth in neurosciences on campus creates a framework that can support key initiatives such as the Center for Mind and Brain. In fact, the new center is the brainchild of collaborating faculty from the Center for Neuroscience and Division of Social Sciences.

The new center will draw of 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 Division of Biological Sciences. Chalupa, in fact, recruited Mangun and his wife, psycholinguist Tamara Swaab, back to the West Coast this fall.

"With the mind and brain center, UC Davis will be ahead of the curve," Chalupa says. "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 includes social scientists to be delving deeper into mind/body questions, Chalupa points 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.

Crossing academic boundaries

And it is a time when faculty members are transcending traditional intellectual boundaries to get at answers.

"The power of the center will be that it allows people in these different disciplines to interact," Chalupa says.

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 Insitute for Psychologuistics 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 new 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 says 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.

The first challenge: recruitment

But 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 says. "The hard part will be to rise to the challenge to discover the secrets of the mind."

Mangun is already receiving help from UC Davis faculty members who have been ready to use new methods in their own scholarship. Since the center was begun this fall, more than a dozen faculty members have joined the center, including psychology professor Andrew Yonelinas, the center's associate director.

Another is Almerindo Ojeda, a linguistics professor on campus since 1987, who has been waiting for the center to begin for years.

"We need to start asking questions about the mental faculties such as language, memory and vision from the point of view of their material bases in the brain," he says.

Language as a window to the mind

Positing that language offers us the best window into the mind, Ojeda has begun to design a series of simple experiments that would employ MRI machines to map where and how language is used inside the brain.

Working with such hardware would be a departure for him. Up until now, Ojeda, who researches the meanings of nouns across many languages, has used research tools such as theoretical tracts, grammar books, dictionaries and interviews.

Social scientists will be able to work with their scientific and engineering colleagues to solve a variety of medical, educational and physical issues, Ojeda says. These include helping neurosurgeons spare language centers when operating on brains and helping people to better cope with language impairments like dyslexia and aphasia. He also believes that learning more about the brain will help engineers design better computers. Educators will also be able to develop better techniques for children to acquire language or compensate for various learning issues.

But more importantly, Ojeda says, scholars will finally be able to tackle the ultimate mind/ body question his daughter Alejandra has been pondering in her freshman philosophy class at UC Davis, thanks to Plato: "How is it that one can learn so much with so little experience?"

Ojeda says, "When we understand how children can learn language just from listening to it, we will have understood what language really is, and this might get us closer to understanding what makes us human."