The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition (LBC) was founded over 30 years ago by Leslie Ungerleider, Jim Haxby, and myself. That makes it the second longest-lasting laboratory in the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, eclipsed only by the non-human primate laboratory, the Laboratory of Neuropsychology, that was founded in 1977.
Leslie, Jim, and I had known each other since the early 1980s when we were postdoctoral fellows (known at that time as “Staff Fellows”). Jim was in the NIA (National Institute on Aging), I was in the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, and Leslie was in NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health). Jim and I were both trained as neuropsychologists and were working on the neuropsychological and functional brain imaging characteristics of patients with Alzheimer's disease using fluorodeoxyglucose PET (Haxby & Rapoport, 1986; Martin et al., 1986), while Leslie...