Keynote Speaker: Dr. Alexandra Golby Department of Neurosurgery, Harvard Medical School, USA Neurosurgical insights into brain organization Neurosurgeons have unique opportunities to study the human brain. Since the inception of neurosurgery as a discipline, neurosurgeons have made observations regarding the effects of focal lesions and of their interventions on behavior in their patients. Surgery under local anesthesia with the patient performing tasks and reporting during surgery is a clinically useful technique which has also revealed numerous phenomena of interest to the neuroscientist. Invasive recording from the brain in patients with epilepsy, likewise, has provided the opportunity to probe the brain basis of cognitive functions such as memory, face processing, and musical abilities. Correlations between such invasively obtained findings in a relatively small number of patients undergoing specialized procedures and newer non-invasive techniques such as functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and transcranial magnetic stimulation promise to potentially help bridge the gap between the lesion studies and the rapidly growing body of functional neuroimaging research.