India, Oct. 5 -- In explaining the significance of the research that won this year's prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday, the Nobel Committee begins by quoting from a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend in 1932: "My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

The three laureates who share the Nobel, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, made discoveries that opened a new technique, called optogenetics, which helps scientists hunt for answers to the questions that puzzled Woolf and billions before her. How does a single organ, which weighs just over a kilogram, hold memories, form feelings, and c...