The painting, newly arrived and still unframed, leans on a countertop in Ron Mangun's office. It shows Rodin's famed sculpture, "The Thinker," reflected in a mirror - watching himself think.

That same focus on the brain in action, what happens inside our skulls as we learn, listen, strive or fail, lies at the heart of the University of California, Davis' accelerating effort to become a landmark site for brain science.

The university's "Center for Mind and Brain," an interdisciplinary research and training group, is gearing up for its grand opening next month.

Mangun, the center's director, is aggressively recruiting, with three young scientists already lined up to start in July, including one who has made international headlines with a study of how the brain perceives music.

The university's Imaging Research Center is scheduled to more than double its capabilities in August, with the arrival of a powerful magnetic scanner that will let researchers peer into smaller structures and harder-to-penetrate areas of the brain.

The combined efforts have made UC Davis "a very promising spot for important development of cognitive neuroscience," said Daniel Schacter, chair of Harvard University's psychology department. "There's a lot of good people there. It's really moved up and become much more visible."

Those involved hope that as they unravel some of the puzzles about how people think, the payoffs could be enormous.

Mangun's voice goes dreamy and he lets out an almost exultant "ahhh" when he thinks about where a deeper knowledge of the brain could someday lead.

"The keys to paradise," he says. "Everything."

The most obvious applications could come in better treatments for what ails the human mind, from the sad stripping-away of function that comes with Alzheimer's disease to the frustrating roadblocks thrown up for children with learning disorders.

There is far more. Some marketers are tapping brain research to help them sell. Educators think it might help them teach. Defense lawyers have used it to help explain their clients to juries.

Ultimately, everything that humans have built on the earth, all that's good and all that's terrible, emerges from the mind, Mangun believes.

"Why we love, hate and create, and how the machinery of the mind gives rise to our character and our culture ... there isn't anything more important," he said. "It's all between our ears, all in the biology of the brain."

One of the key spots for the ongoing investigation will be the Center for Mind and Brain, housed in one wing of a leased Davis office building just off Interstate 80, northeast of the campus.

With many of its labs still shells and most of its professors yet to arrive, the center is full of blond wood, bare spaces and optimism. Down one set of hallways, Mangun envisions walls covered with pictures of Winnie the Pooh and floors strewn with toys for children who will be undergoing testing.

An open room awaits the shared electroencephalographs for measuring brain waves. Another will hold the transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, used to temporarily disrupt or enhance the activity of selected brain cells.

Already nearly complete - except for the high-grade espresso machine - is the gathering spot Mangun calls the "Cognitive Café," an in-house coffee bar where he encourages staffers and researchers to gather each morning to share ideas.

About 15 miles away in Sacramento lies the second critical factor in the university's growing presence in neuroscience, the Imaging Research Center.

Created from what was once a diagnostic outbuilding of the UC Davis Medical Center, the imaging center houses the equipment that has transformed study of the human brain.

It is functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, that lets researchers monitor the brain while a person is thinking. The powerful magnet detects blood changes that show, by inference, where more nerve cells are firing, opening the door to insights about what happens when we see or hear, when we're confused or hurt, when we fear consequences or are offered rewards.

Dr. Cameron Carter, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist who directs the imaging center, uses fMRI in his own investigations of schizophrenia, attention and how different systems within the brain interact.

Carter was senior author of a paper published in February in the journal "Science" that probed what happens in our minds when we begin getting something wrong.

To explore that, researchers gave people a classic psychological test called the Stroop task, something guaranteed to leave anyone who tries it feeling briefly mentally tongue-tied.

Subjects are shown words, all of them the names of colors. The ink those words are written in is also colored, and the colors often don't match.

Your mission, if you were taking a Stroop test, would be to tell researchers what color ink you're seeing, not what word you're reading. If the word "red" were written in blue ink, the right answer would be "blue."

In the experiment, done largely before Carter came to UC Davis in October, researchers looked at mental activity in two areas toward the front of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex, while people took the Stroop test. They were trying to show that one brain system recruits the other to help with this kind of conflict.

It's important to know exactly what makes us sit up and pay more attention to the kind of problem the Stroop task poses, said Carter, because that understanding could ultimately help people whose ability to pay attention has gone awry.

Among them are those with schizophrenia.

"The difficulties people have with memory and attention tend to be the most disabling aspect" of schizophrenia, the doctor said. As he has looked for ways to address that, "it became clear to me we didn't understand the mechanisms well enough in healthy subjects to ask the right questions."

Asking those questions will be part of the work that Carter plans to continue at UC Davis, along with running the imaging center and arranging for the arrival of its new, more powerful fMRI scanner in late summer.

The two machines are critical to attracting scientists to the campus, said Mangun.

"The imaging center is providing a tool that almost every member of the faculty will be using," he said. "If you don't have one, you lose faculty."

Silvia Bunge, an assistant professor at the Center for Mind and Brain since 2003, is using the fMRI to examine whether different areas of the brain are involved when reactions become deeply ingrained compared to when they're freshly learned.

Petr Janata, who will come on board in July, will use the machine in his studies of what happens when music makes us want to move, and Jennifer Beer, arriving the same month, will examine what goes on when we make social slip-ups.

Beer's specialty, social personality neuroscience, illustrates just how explosively brain science is growing. Three years ago when she was doing graduate work, she said, she was told it was too risky to combine neuroscience and her field of psychology.

"I would go to neuroscience conferences and people would ask me why I was there," she said. "Now, I'm giving talks at these conferences" and helping organize special sessions on social neuroscience.

As UC Davis delves more deeply into the brain, its newer efforts are expected to intertwine with established campus institutions. Among them are the medical school, the MIND Institute, which is looking for cures for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, and the Center for Neuroscience, which examines molecular, cellular and genetic aspects of the brain as well as cognitive ones.

The combination will cement Davis on the national scene, said Michael Posner, an emeritus professor at the University of Oregon who is considered a pioneer in neuroimaging.

"They're bound to be a major center," he said.