A summary of technologies covered in this Special Section. The section is arranged in a “top-down” fashion, from whole-brain analyses down to analyses of genetic products and data mining. The topics range from techniques examining whole-brain activity in awake subjects (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]), to strategies to assess gene expression (e.g., quantitative trait loci [QTL] mapping), down to the use of bioinformatics to analyze the large amounts of data gathered with these technologies.