A century can be understood in terms of the inventions it produces, the crimes it has committed, the arts is achieved. In this text, Lauren Slater proposes that we examine the salient themes and conflicts of the 20th century by looking at the great neurological and psychological experiments that dominated the terrain from the early 1900s through to the very edge of the next millennium. Great experiments include Harlow's wire monkeys, Moniz's lobotomy, Skinner's pecking pigeons, Migram's shock machine, Kandel's sea slugs and the light they cast on the molecular workings of memory. Each chapter, devoted to a different experiment, is told as a complex story of motive and ambition within which is ensconced a scientific analysis of just what the data means for the moral, dignified selves and societies we struggle to create.