From the founding of the Society for Neuroscience in 1969 through the 'Decade of the Brain', brain imaging, genetics and the BRAIN Initiative: how neuroscience became one of science's biggest fields.
History of Neuroscience
Beginner
The Birth of Modern Neuroscience
The Editors
July 24, 2026
2 min read
In plain English
After the 1960s, scientists who studied the brain from many angles started working together under one name: neuroscience. New tools — brain scanners, genetics, computers — made the field grow enormously, with huge government projects launched in the 2010s.
Beginner level: No background needed. Everyday language, everyday examples — the place to start.
Concepts to know first
Go deeper next
For most of history, people studying the nervous system were anatomists, physiologists, psychologists or doctors, working in separate departments. In the second half of the 20th century, they became neuroscientists.
A new discipline
In 1962 the biophysicist Francis O. Schmitt founded the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to unite the disciplines. The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1969; its first meeting drew about 1,400 people. Today its annual conference draws tens of thousands. University departments, journals and degrees in neuroscience followed.
New tools
Each decade brought new ways to look. CT scanning arrived in the 1970s, followed by PET and MRI. In 1990 the Japanese physicist Seiji Ogawa described the BOLD signal, which made functional MRI possible — and from the early 1990s researchers could watch the living human brain at work without surgery or radiation. Meanwhile, molecular biology let scientists clone ion channels and receptors, and genetics linked genes to diseases such as Huntington's (1993).
The Decade of the Brain and beyond
In 1990 US President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the 1990s the Decade of the Brain, raising public awareness and funding. In 2013 two huge projects began: the US BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), focused on tools to record and map circuits, and the European Union's ten-year Human Brain Project, which aimed to simulate and model the brain and ended in 2023, leaving a research platform called EBRAINS. China, Japan, Korea, Canada and Australia launched their own programmes.
Where we are now
In the 2020s, neuroscience produced complete wiring diagrams of a fruit-fly brain, censuses of thousands of human brain cell types, brain-computer interfaces that let paralysed people type and speak, and the first drugs that slow Alzheimer's disease modestly. And yet many basic questions — how memories are stored, how consciousness arises — remain open.
Everyday examples & things to try
By the numbers
From 1,400 to tens of thousands
The Society for Neuroscience's first annual meeting in 1971 had about 1,400 attendees. Modern meetings routinely draw more than 20,000 — a measure of how fast the field has grown.
Key takeaways
- Neuroscience emerged as a unified field in the 1960s; the Society for Neuroscience began in 1969.
- MRI, PET and especially fMRI (from the early 1990s) opened the living human brain to study.
- Major projects since 2013 — the BRAIN Initiative, Human Brain Project and others — scaled up the field.
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